St. George's day

That St. George fellow got about a bit.

For those of us who need to be reminded (and I am one) St. George’s day is this Friday, April 23rd. St. George is the patron saint of England, which is why you see people supporting England with a red cross painted across their faces and white clown make up on their cheeks and jaws – the red cross on a white background is the St. George’s flag. When I say supporting, I mean at soccer, rugby, tennis and oh! all the other sports we English invented and then taught the rest of the world. So they could beat us. After which, we had to go off and invent another sport. That’s the reason we invented so many. These days we’ve given up inventing new sports and just practice being good losers at the old ones. But I digress, let’s go back to St. George

I have yet to see dragons in England but perhaps they’re driving incognito up and down the M4 to go shopping in Newbury under a different name, something they couldn’t do when St. George was around, as the M4 hadn’t been invented yet. Supposedly he rescued a damsel in distress by killing a dragon but nobody knows quite where, so it could have been near Newbury. Quite a feat dragon killing, even for a Roman soldier successful enough to have become one the Empire’s most senior officials – a tribune.

My daughter told me that St. George is also the patron saint of where she now lives – Catalonia – where they make a big thing of it with pageants and days off school and gifts (flowers for the girls and books for the men according to tradition). Apparently half the people there are called “Geordie”, after St George rather than in honour of the annual vacation invasion from Newcastle - anyway it's spelt differently there - Jordi.

Rome, Catalonia and England would have been impressive enough but he is also the patron saint of the city of Beirut. Lebanon has over thirty churches named after him, not to mention a number of bays, villages and even a monastery.

Where else did he get to? Obviously, we’ll never know for sure, but he is also the patron saint of Georgia (that's where the name came from), Ethiopia, Lithuania, Aragon, Palestine (where he was born) and Russia as well as a string of cities including Moscow and Preston.

How did he visit them all? By foot and horse. While people are talking about beating the ash cloud with coaches, ferries and trains, no-one is yet planning a trip from Moscow to Preston by St. George’s favoured methods. Yes, he really got about a bit.