Why The Only Patriotic Approach Is To Ignore St George's Day Altogether

Ah it's here again. April the 23rd. The annual festival of angry commentators fulminating over a lack of English people running around getting drunk and venerating their Saint like what the Irish do. By 11 am Farage will have appeared on pretty much all the radio and TV outlets decreeing that under his watch, supersize flags will be flown from every town hall, a Bank Holiday will be declared and that everyone will be obliged to slay at least one dragon before tea.

Throughout the day news channels will try to fill out the tedium of election coverage by sending cub reporters to vicious pubs, full of tattooed angry men (who will mysteriously not be working) to get them to articulate what St George's Day means to them. Nobody will be able to do that, because I've never heard anyone eloquently express the logic of their blind patriotism. And drunk men in midday pubs are notoriously ineloquent. 

There'll be much twitter and Facebook talk by earnest liberals of how George was Turkish - or Greek and how he probably didn't even exist at all. A UKIP candidate will say something embarrassing, which will be reported gleefully in the Huffington Post. Somewhere in the Welsh hills Nick Griffin will think something bigoted. Other, well intentioned, pundits and politicians will try to sum up what it is to be English. And the whole thing will be, as it always is, a great big wet non-event. 

The good news is that all this is an absolute waste of time, because by far the most English thing to do is to ignore the whole tiresome borefest altogether. And here are 5 reasons why:

• The primary reason that St George's Day is not celebrated much, never has been and never should be is that England is a Protestant Country. And Protestants don't "DO" saints because we banned their adoration around the time we dissolved the monasteries and burned all the Catholics for being heretics. Suggesting that we be more continental is always to be welcomed but are the flag-bearers of St George really suggesting that we overthrow the Head of State and Defender of the Faith and bow once more to the might of Rome?

• Nobody believes in God anyway. Less than 20% of English people regularly attend church. If we don't believe in God why are we venerating a Saint that we didn't recognise even when we did?

• In the England of old, it just wasn't done to shout about how great your nation was. The traditional Englishman, regardless of class, was by definition understated, quietly patriotic, proud and most definitely not brash. Bragging about the superiority of your race was the sort of thing 'continentals' did. Usually with disastrous results. Bertolt Brecht (who was of course continental himself) correctly observed that "unhappy (is) the land in need of heroes." And that's quite true. 

• Which leads me neatly on to five:

• Why do we need this probably fictional Turkish bloke who probably never slayed so much as a chicken when we've got a superb line-up of real people who actually lived that are much more deserving of our adulation? What good is lame old St George when we have - well David Bowie. And The Beatles. And David Hockney. Or Churchill. Or Shakespeare. Or Darwin, Newton, Woolf, Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, Cary Grant, Michael Caine, Stevie Smith, Queen Elizabeth I, Elton John, JK Rowling, JM Turner, Giles Gilbert Scott, Lutyens, Elgar, Ray Winstone, Michael Powell, Alfred Hitchcock, Tilda Swinton, Judi Dench, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Bobby Moore, Fred Perry, Stirling Moss and - well The List goes on and on.

We English have much to be proud of. We have no need to wave the red and white flag out of the windows of our houses, or get drunk in Trafalgar Square. The former plays havoc with property prices and the latter we can and indeed do all the time anyway. That's one of the glorious things about being English. And gin. And a unified front on Noel Edmonds. But perhaps the greatest English tradition of all is to completely ignore our English traditions altogether. No stupid 'traditional dress' for us. No. We are just what we are. This happy breed. And that's good enough for me.