This a line in the song, “There’ll Always Be An England.” This was a tune that the Youth Orchestra played in its very first concert. We had planned to repeat that concert at the beginning of May to celebrate our 20th anniversary, which has now been postponed. However, we had decided to replace that particular song with one of our favourites (nursery rhyme themed) because the song felt too jingoistic. It’s a shame, really because there is a lot to like about this song, as an anthem. It has a nice melody, some fanfare like triplets and some lyrics that I can get behind.
I like a song to make me think and a well placed question can make you do that.
Our school has always been fantastic at topic based teaching. To be fair, we have some excellent teachers who could deliver the most brilliant lessons if you had only given them the telephone book to work with and that innate creativity is probably why topics work so well for us. In lockdown we have continued this approach, setting a topic a week and giving parents lots of ideas and resources to choose from. Last week, to coincide with the 75th anniversary of VE Day the topic was Brilliant Britain and even though I’m not a child who is meant to be doing the homework, it did get me thinking about what makes our country great and, bizarrely the flag.
When I was a child, I had an encyclopaedia type book with lots of pictures in and I became obsessed with the flags of the world. I learnt them all off by heart and started to look for patterns in them. For example I can still remember that Lebanon, Cyprus and Canada were the only ones to have plants on them (Eritrea had been annexed by Ethiopia at the time and Macau was part of China, so weren’t in my book). It was an obsession that lasted several years. When I was in school there were a few topics that seemed to come up in more than one year. Obviously, there was World War 2 (our national obsession) but also Tudors, dinosaurs and heraldry. Heraldry seems an odd choice but I expect it was an easy topic, as it enabled teachers to get us to learn long words like chevron and rampant and hook us by appealing to a seven year olds ego and allowing them to design their own flag. We spent time making the flags of England, Ireland and Scotland and put them together to make the union flag. I was always impressed with how clever this was but felt very sorry for Wales.
Learning about heraldry made me realise that colours were important, as I had always suspected. I had a bit of a thing about Countries with black on their flag leaning towards violent dictatorships.
Red, white and blue, what does it mean to you?
The flag. Why did we choose those colours? Traditionally, white is for peace and harmony, blue for determination and good fortune and red is for power and war. I’ve always wondered why we didn’t have green in our flag. Green is a symbol of agricultural influence, prosperity and fertility. In the song it says, ‘There’ll always be and England, while there’s a country lane.’ Many of us have been exploring those lanes in lockdown and noticed just how much green there is. It’s not just true for England. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland probably have even more green. I think it’s time we changed our flag. Even the government have realised how important agriculture is in our Country and now that we can’t pay people from other Countries tiny amounts of money to harvest our crops they are having to ask all furloughed workers to consider doing this back-breaking work for little reward. They have set up a website https://pickforbritain.org.uk/, where I expect everyone who voted for Brexit is logging on to do their bit. Wars now don’t involve bloodshed and no matter how fondly we reminisce about them it might be time to drop the blood red from the flag and go green instead.
Blue, white and green. I can’t think of an appropriate rhyme at the moment but that’s only because I’ve been too busy with my green preparations.
The local council delivered our pink recycling sacks but instead of being in easy to store rolls they were in a big package, too big for any drawer or cupboard and not in anyway that you could pull one off without undoing the whole pile.
“I’m not very impressed with how they’ve delivered our recycling sacks,” said my friend on our, now permitted, socially distanced exercise walk. “I preferred rolls.”
I agreed and when I got home decided that it needed fixing.
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| Fixed it |
Apparently, I have too much time on my hands (as many of us do now), which is further evidenced by this very long rambling blog, just to show you a picture of my drawer. I’m sure you can agree, though, it is a thing of beauty.
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