Thursday, 5 September 2019

Failing at the National Anthem


Today I attended my wife’s ‘Naturalisation Ceremony’ (sounds a little sinister doesn’t it). A very proud moment for our family. This magically turns her from an unnatural foreign devil into a nice natural English lady. All that she needed to do to affect this transformation was to swear allegiance to the monarch and then sing verses one and three of the national anthem.

I personally was not aware that the national anthem had a third verse and was at something of a disadvantage to everyone else there as I did not have a printed copy of the words. I was therefore forced to ‘busk it’ and come up with some legitimate sounding lyrics on the fly. This was the result:-

(to the tune of God Save Our Gracious Queen)

She has a lot of dogs

She cleans up after them

She’s good like that

She’s got a pile of dosh But she keeps her old socks

She likes collecting clocks

God Save the Queen!

 

I mumbled my way through this with a look of patriotic devotion fixed on my features and I don’t think that anyone noticed. One dude had his hand clasped over his heart and there was a military guy there who insisted on saluting through the whole thing which was different.

There were some speeches from dignitaries about british history and what it means to be English and then my wife was presented with a colour printed certificate and three baby jars of English jam and other preserves. This concludes the naturalisation and we were left to take some selfies in the nobby council chambers and then go home and eat our jam.

 

It does make me feel proud of our nation. I hope that my wife does not now stop wearing clothing that matches or have retroactive dentistry to make her teeth snaggley and weird. I have suggested that she now needs to viciously defend her position on brext (it doesn’t matter which position she takes. The important thing is to then have no empathy at all for anyone who takes the opposing view no matter how near you were to voting that way yourself before you opted to vote as you did).

 

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