They tend to fall into three categories, too. In fact, the flags serve much the same purposes as they did in ancient armies: to act as a meeting point for those on the same side, to rally fallen troops, and to intimidate enemies. ![]() It means performers stepping out on the Pyramid Stage are met with a medieval thicket of banners and standards, below which is a battalion of wide-pupilled, grossly sunburnt infantrymen drinking warm red wine from plastic bladders and secretly just waiting for Elton John. They block views, and take up space, and puncture clouds, and flutter offensively, or something. But if I ever get bored, or feel a little dazed, I could always do some flag-gazing.Ī lot of festivals ban flags these days. The extra-curricular activities will be weird they always are, even when they aren’t. The music will be good it always is, even when it isn’t. It isn’t a prescription that could be taken seriously.Īll being well – and by that I mean ‘assuming I haven’t fallen into the long drops on Friday night’ – this time next week I will be waking up in a tent at Glastonbury Festival. Evelyn Waugh took this as the epigraph for his comic novel. ‘A drunk military man should order gallons and put out more flags in order to increase his military splendour,’ Lin Yutang quoted from an unnamed source in his English-language bestseller of 1937, The Importance of Living. I can’t say which words or I’ll be cancelled. Today, we have turned the use of the wrong words into flags to identify hated enemies. In those days Ginger was not yet hate speech and Spice was not yet a synthetic cannabinoid triggering psychotic episodes. In 1997, Geri Halliwell, Ginger Spice, used a Union Jack flag as the front of a dress, with a CND symbol on the back. In any case, there is no law against putting the national flag on mugs or knickers or tea towels. I don’t think they’d bother today.īritain’s flags are not the stuff of political rallies and militarism. Cambridge undergraduates came and took two down. The Rev Conrad Noel is said to have flown the red flag from the tower of Thaxted church in the 1920s, but in fact he displayed three flags inside the chancel: St George’s, the red flag and the Irish tricolour. ![]() St George’s flag flutters rurally from the towers of ancient English churches. They hang on the eaves of tea tents at agricultural shows, accompanied by a smell compounded of mouldy old tent, grass crushed into the mud and strong tea from a big, badly pouring pot. The Union flag is most popular as bunting in the form of little triangular flags, often defying vexillological rules. Like Orwell’s ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings’ they are characteristic fragments of the English scene. They don’t belong to Emily Thornberry’s imagined horrors of white-van men lurking in Medway towns. They are not emblems of violent colonialism but of peaceful amateurism. But some people have got it all wrong about the Union flag and St George’s flag. Union flags persisted on strings across Regent Street and elsewhere long after the Coronation.
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