God for Harry...

Saint George’s day and Shakespeare’s birthday - very nearly makes you proud to be English.

Of course the England that I think we all associate with both our patron saint and our greatest literary figure has all but disappeared.

Soon there will be no village fetes (you won’t be able to afford the insurance), maypole dancing (health and safety issues), country pubs (it’ll cost too much to drive there and when you get there the pub will have closed due to lack of custom from the locals because there aren’t any - only second homers – and even if it was open you couldn’t have a pint without running the risk of being caught on camera, so what would be the point anyway?), The Women’s institute will be full of men (otherwise it’s sexist), and even village idiots won’t be idiots (they will be people in the rural micro community with further learning opportunities).

Oh Well, at least we still have the works of the bard – whoever he (or she) was.

Anyway, look at these three. Not sure who they are meant to be, but guess where I found them? Where do you think? Salisbury plain… The Welsh Mountains… the peat bogs of Ireland... Easter Island?... Nope!

I found them on the M6 at a motorway services tucked away behind a rubbish bin and a disabled parking space. Yes, really.

Magnificent aren’t they. Very quirky. Typically, wonderfully, eccentrically English. I wonder if they simply appeared one night, waking with a yawn, pushing straight up through the damp earth to bathe in the moonlight and decided to stay above ground for a while. Or perhaps they were three white- vanned builders who, stopping for a cup of tea and a fry up, annoyed some little old lady by parking in the disabled space she was about to draw into. Do you think that it might have come as a bit of a surprise to them when she turned out to be a little old witch?

Or maybe they are the witches, the three witches from Shakespeare’s Scottish play - ‘With the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes…’

Anyway, happy birthday Will and as your chum Henry V once said… ‘The game's afoot. Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!