16 January 2006 Blog Home : January 2006 : Permalink
I note that Bishop Hill: Jelly-bellied flag flapper and Liberal England: Rudyard Kipling answers Gordon Brown and Tim Worstall and Crooked Timber » » A flag in every garden and Langford Home Page (Pardon?) have finally caught up with a suggestion that The Englishman have been making for eighteen months. Had I not been out enjoying myself this weekend instead of gluing myself to the computer I would have joined in earlier.
Gordon Brown is a Jelly-bellied Flag-flapper.
And so he worked towards his peroration - which, by the way, he used later with overwhelming success at a meeting of electors - while they sat, flushed and uneasy, in sour disgust. After many many words, he reached for the cloth-wrapped stick and thrust one hand in his bosom. This - this was the concrete symbol of their land - worthy of all honour and reverence! Let no boy look on this flag who did not purpose to worthily add to its imperishable lustre. He shook it before them - a large calico Union Jack, staring in all three colours, and waited for the thunder of applause that should crown his effort.
They looked in silence. They had certainly seen the thing before - down at the coastguard station, or through a telescope, half-mast high when a brig went ashore on Braunton sands; above the roof of the Golf Club, and in Keyte's window, where a certain kind of striped sweetmeat bore it in paper on each box. But the College never displayed it; it was no part of the scheme of their lives; the Head had never alluded to it; their fathers had not declared it unto them. It was a matter shut up, sacred and apart. What, in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved that horror before their eves? Happy thought! Perhaps he was drunk.
From The Flag of their Country - from Stalky & Co. - Rudyard Kipling
Unfortunately for Englnd the flag Brown prefers to flap looks like the one on the right above.