Hey Blog! This post is exploring two big events happening/just happened in the UK right now – St George’s Day and the upcoming coronation of His Majesty THE KING; which are up in the streets simultaneously in flags, bunting and other forms of plastic tat!
St George’s Day is a national holiday and commemorates the patron saint of England. He is also the patron saint of quite a few other countries, including one named after him – Georgia. There are multiple legends surrounding him, but the main one is of him slaying an evil dragon who was terrorising a local village. He also managed to rescue the damsel in distress, saving her from the dragon who wanted to eat her. Noticeably, the red-gold dragon Smaug, from The Hobbit, made a practice of stealing maidens and eating them when he had destroyed Dale and taken the Lonely Mountain (see my book review on The Hobbit for more on this amazing book); and Perseus, rider of Pegasus, the winged horse, rescued the princess Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus, perhaps inspiring the later tale of the popular saint.
In Scouts, we celebrate the day with a service in the district church and then a march through Belper, the town in which our Scout HQ is. I have attended the full march for only two years as it is only for Scouts, but it is one of the two special occasions in the year, the other being Remembrance Day, which is also attended by Cubs and Beavers, so I have been going to that longer. The band goes at the front, and the entire district of Scouts and Guides comes after. The line of people gets even longer as at the other church we pick up all the Brownies, Rainbows, Cubs and Beavers, and even Squirrels (four-year-olds in Scouting). These last caused some confusion, as I said “look out for the Squirrels,” and people thought I meant the animals! The march takes about three-quarters of an hour, and ends with an enormous crowd of people all packed together on one street. You get to see all the parents running along backwards trying to take pictures, which is very amusing. Mine don’t do that, which makes it a bit easier.
The service before was also very funny, as the person running it used to be a criminal investigator and had worked with the police on crime cases, so he got us to tell each other what we had for breakfast that morning (one of the kids in our troop shouted “pancakes” – we had had them that morning at Scout camp) and the other to be totally uninterested, then the other way round and the other to be as interested as possible. Then, we had to try to identify where something was hidden in a picture, and it proved to be very difficult. For example, count how many faces there are in a tree – there were eight, but finding them was incredibly hard. Then there was one where there were two people getting up close in a rose – the picture was small and I couldn’t have got it until it was shown! It seems the art of looking is a tricky thing…
The Scout Camp mentioned in the previous paragraph was a two-night Scout Camp, and was the plan for April to get another month done for my Dragon Award (see Bed in a Shed for more info). We did climbing (I and two other Scouts went down upside down, which I would have done twice, but we had no time left); whittling tent pegs (mine defiantly looked the best, but most of them were also functional); fire lighting, and archery, which I didn’t get to do as I had to be taken out to go to drama for an hour as I had a performance coming – the next blog post! I have done archery before, so it wasn’t too bad, and anyway, the camp was already fun! On Sunday morning the shop was opened, so I went and bought a Drum Hill woggle, and a site badge for my blanket. On the way back, we found what could possibly be a bullet blank, but couldn’t be sure. Sunday was a bit hectic, as we had to be picked up from camp in the morning, go home, get clean and get changed, and then go out to parade – all in a few hours!
Coming to the King, well, you can see in almost all shops that they are ready, with piles of flags, bunting, ribbons and much more, so we should have a very memorable coronation, and as it is the first for 70 years, it will be very important to a lot of people. The patriotic feeling in the country is high, and seeing as we have a different type of monarchy with a different place in the world than ever before, I think it will be very interesting to watch how it all unfolds!