Mayday Mayday

Thanks to DG I learned that today was the 300th anniversary of the UK.

Instead of tricentennial parades, the occasion was marked in the capital of this nation by a number of unrelated and relatively underpopulated street marches. For instead of Morris dancers, here in London we have Hare Krishnas and trustafarian anarchists.

My employers used to have a blue cow stationed menacingly outside our former offices. However, prior to one of those annual glitches in the social order it was decided that there was a significant risk that it would be rustled by a passing anti-globalist. It was duly disappeared into a blue barn and has never since re-emerged. I like to think it had a kinder fate than the one in this picture.

Back in the 1970s when Labour Day was first added to the UK's calendar of public holidays, the headmaster of my school decided that none of his boys would be taking the day off on the workers' holiday. A fine gesture, but not one ultimately supported by the parents, as few of them worked for similarly stuck-up five hundred-year-old institutions. For two years we had to sit in the classroom whilst our relatives sat at home watching the snooker (?) before the old cold warrior finally relented.

Although I have known for several years that my father once dated Clement Atlee's daughter 'Flip' (the matter cropped up after a Xmas party I attended on HMS President, scene of one of their more memorable dates) it wasn't until last weekend that I learned that he used to go for dinner regularly at No10. Back in those days he too was a socialist, though Atlee himself was that much more ahead of him on the path to gentrification that he seriously objected to the venue of one of their other memorable dates: Speakers' Corner.