Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

I was just watching QI, a British comedy/quiz TV show that I highly recommend to anyone who loves trivia and believes that most commonly held “facts” are actually quite false indeed. Anyway, in this episode, they mentioned that cock-fighting was England’s national sport for over two thousand years, and that every town/village had its own fighting pit.

So much was this “sport” part of the national psyche that it gave us some elements of language which still survive today, such as:

• “cockpit”: where the fights actually took place

• “show a clean pair of heels”: some fights had weapons attached to the birds’ heels

• “game” (as in ‘I’m game for that’): related to game in the sense of birds in general, I assume

• “to pit someone against someone else”: again, the name of the ring being used

There are others which I’ve found during my brief searches online, including “crestfallen” (from the visual image of the crest on the bird’s head after the fight), and “cocky/cocksure” in general for the opposite.

The transcript of that episode of QI is online, and there’s a little more information about cock-fighting’s cultural impact on medieval England here.

As the title of the programme says, it’s all quite interesting.

Today’s St George’s Day, the patron saint of England. Unfortunately, and to the eternal dismay of Daily Mail readers, we English don’t really celebrate it all that much, and definitely not to the extent that the Irish/wannabe-Irish honour their national patron saint…

There’s a few pubs, usually the traditional kind, that like to get the flags and bunting out, but for the vast majority of us it simply passes by. It’s not that we don’t feel as proud of our country as others do theirs, it’s more a case of there being many other ways in which to show our pride.

As so often before in my writing, football seems to be the obvious candidate, with our fans famed worldwide for their love of the national team. Obviously, we’re also famed for our likelihood of causing trouble and drinking far too much whilst supporting the team, but the pride is there.

Equally, look at events such as the Proms, the Baftas, Wimbledon, anything to do with the Royal Family, and countless others: we’re very good at showing national pride, even if we don’t do it too much on the supposedly designated day of the year.

Admittedly, some of these could be said to be more British in nature than English, but English has pretty much become synonymous with Britain nowadays. This again is something bemoaned by the little Englanders as a lack of national pride in England itself.

For me, that’s no bad thing. I’m fiercely proud to be English, but I’m also proud of being British, and similarly I’m proud to be European too. Being English is obviously what I most identify with, and it’s what I would choose to be classified as if push came to shove, but I’ve no problem in being seen as either British or European, not that the two are mutually exclusive.

What I’m trying to say is that I think campaigns to resurrect English national pride on St George’s Day are pretty unnecessary. It’s very much possible (and probably should even be encouraged) to be proud of being English but not necessarily feeling the need to have a day set aside for celebrating our Englishness.