Pancake Day! We served up pancakes today (Tesco's ready made) at the Community Cafe, with organic lemons to squeeze and sugar. Since neither Jane or I had a chance to eat one, we made our own in the evening. Naturally, mine tasted better than the bought ones!
Pancakes are traditionally eaten on Shrove Tuesday, the last Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, when the church's shriving bell would call you to come and be shriven of your sins. The Romans ate sweet pancakes and there is a recipe for them in a cookery book from 1439. With human's inevitable ability to make a show, pancake throwing or flipping must have originated almost at the same time with a later mention here:
"And every man and maide doe take their turne, And tosse their Pancakes up for feare they burne." (Pasquil's Palin, 1619).
But why simply toss a pancake when you can use it for a pancake race. In 1445 a woman of Olney in Buckinghamshire heard the shriving bell calling her to church ring while she was making pancakes and so ran to the church in her apron, still clutching her frying pan. Now the annual race of local housewives is famous world wide. There is a requirement to wear a hat or scarf and an apron, toss the pancake three times and for the winner to be kissed by the Bellringer. This is surely an event waiting for gender, sexual and religious emancipation.
Inevitably, any physical activity decays into football, much as radioactive compounds decay to lead. A number of towns have retained or revived the tradition of Shrove Tuesday or Mob Football. Another essay in itself.
UK News dominated by the Coroner's report on the Tunisian beach attack last year, criticising the deliberately delayed (cowardly) response by the security services. Brexit featured only in minor articles.
As the conservative harrumphing, disapproval, disdain and belittlement of John Major and his cautionary comments on the risks of Brexit faded, George Osborne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer argued to business leaders, that the UK could not rely on new trade deals beyond Europe after Brexit. Brexit without an EU deal would be "the biggest act of protectionism in British history". Boris Johnson responded that the UK could be "ever-more European and ever-more internationalist" at the same time.
But the world awaits with bated breath, President Trump's first address to Congress, on this Tuesday evening in the US, Wednesday for us in the UK.
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