Saturday, September 27, 2008 10:37 AM
This is so wrong!
My mother has devoted much of her retirement to ruthlessly tracking down anyone who had the temerity to be a direct blood line ancestor of myself and my brother, and disappointingly it appears I am a pure-bred Englishpenguin for at least a couple of centuries back. Not even a smidgen of Celticness, let alone any proper foreigners.
Nevertheless, as a globalized 24/7 interculturally attuned urbane metropolitanite I am keenly aware of the various sensibilities associated with Englishness, and as such instantly cringed upon witnessing this sign last night:
Attached to the entrance of a bar in trendy, urbane and sophisticated Oimachi. (I wouldn't tell you the name even if I could remember it, because the music theme seemed to be "the cheesiest hits of the 70s, 80s and 90s" and despite a collective best effort to introduce amnesia through beer consumption, I can distinctly recall hearing - in no particular order - titles from Take That, Abba, Kylie Minogue and possibly "Lady In Red" by Chris De Burgh, though that might just have been the result of hallucinations).
(For those of you not au fait with the blocky characters on the left, adjacent to "England" is written the name of a beer which when transcribed back into Latin letters reads "ginesu").
The Babbages came from N France around 1570 so it appears. They escaped from the Battle of Calais and came to Devon, 2 to the south and 2 to the North - apparently.
Then there's the strange George McClelland; who knows which Celtic tribe he came from? Irish or Scottish?
And anyway, you might even be a Viking.....
So there....