Saturday 1 August 2020

Yorkshire Day/Schweizer Bundesfeiertag Mubarak

There has suddenly been a flurry of hits on the very first post on this blog from 2012. I fully appreciate that the quality has diminished quite a lot since those days, and so presumably do the discerning readers who have restricted themselves to a single post from eight years ago. At that time I blogged fairly frequently about being a wargamer who didn't game. Why then, now I am in the same position of not gaming, am I not blogging about it? (The rhetorical questions were much better back then as well.) Rhetorical or not it's a good question, especially as Ilkley, which we must now learn to refer to as the hypocentre of wargaming in the lower Wharfe valley, has been suddenly locked down again, implying that there will be no quick return to the table. In the somewhat arbitrary nature of the way in which the UK government is behaving (which you will correctly interpret as a euphemism for 'it's a complete shitshow') the place where your bloggist blogs has not been affected beyond me having to wait another couple of weeks should I require either an intimate waxing or to go ten pin bowling. For the sizeable Muslim population in the areas which have been re-restricted it has been a much bigger issue because yesterday was Eid al-Adha (and a belated Eid Mubarak to them); it was a bit like telling most people on Christmas Eve that they couldn't have lunch with their relatives the following day.


A little piece of Switzerland in Yorkshire

I haven't seen any strong protests from those wishing to celebrate Yorkshire Day (which is today of course) by scoring a few strikes or by having a Brazilian, but no doubt the locals will be consoling themselves by telling anyone who will listen that the face masks are bigger in God's Own County than they are anywhere else. Eid, which means 'feast' in Arabic, also means 'oath' in German and today is also Swiss National Day celebrating (near enough) the day in 1291 when three cantons swore the oath of confederation. Sadly, when you look at it in detail, Swiss National Day turns out to be even more of a recent and contrived invention than Yorkshire Day is, on top of which Yorkshire is bigger. God, I'm starting to go native.


This mask is not from Yorkshire

So, to wrap up, here's Rossini via Yorkshire with some memorable music about a Swiss terrorist/freedom fighter:




1 comment:

  1. Don’t worry about going native. As they say in Hull, when in Rerm.

    ReplyDelete