For the Scots and the Welsh, the dark cloud of Covid 19 finally has a silver lining: they can legitimately tell the English to sod off. Boris Johnson, with a bit of help from a strand of genetic information in a protein coat, has single-handedly brought about the Sassenach exclusion that the Celtic nations have been dreaming about for seven hundred years.
The Scots never doubted that Westminster would be in an indecent rush to restart the economy and were thus able to steal Johnson’s feeble thunder days in advance by announcing that north of the tartan curtain there would be no change to lockdown. The sneakier Welsh took a leaf out of Johnson’s own book and prepared two speeches: one for if he did slacken the rules and the other for if he didn’t. But even the most optimistic Scot Nat could not have hoped that the PM would behave quite so much like a medieval monarch as he did by omitting to consult Edinburgh and Cardiff before unilaterally changing the laws of the land. If only Edwards I, II and III, instead of going to all the trouble of invading, had simply shot themselves in the foot like this pocket dictator, how much bother it would have saved Llewellyn and Bruce. For hell hath no fury like a Celtic nation scorned and Johnson’s new Stay Alert message gets the old Agincourt salute. In the heat of patriotic fervour, plans are made in Cardiff and Edinburgh to commemorate this high-point of national self-assertion by erecting bronze monuments to the coronavirus. Then it is pointed out, by one of the vanishingly small number of people in Britain still possessed of a sense of perspective, that Covid 19 is perhaps the exception to the adage that one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend. It may have been justifiable during all those long wars of independence to form alliances with dodgy foreigners, but the coronavirus is more treacherous than even the French. So the statues are quietly scrapped, but a fourth verse is written for Flower of Scotland about this latest snook cocked at English control, and deep in verdant valleys the bards dream up new odes about the natural superiority of Cymru.
Meanwhile both nations have gleefully assembled their entire police forces on their English borders, with a specially trained unit patrolling the fourth and seventh holes at the frontier-straddling Llanymynech Golf Club, armed to the teeth with mashie niblicks. The poor beleaguered Cornish are very envious.
© C P Jenkinson 21/05/2020
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