Bloody marvellous Britain

Moments of patriotism in this cynical old land are rare there days, but I appear languishing rather pleasantly in the middle of one.

Big up GB, it’s a pretty good place to be.

Take the weather for a start. When the sun shines, there’s no better place than here and wow wee have we had a lot of it of late (Trying to ignore Jo’s slightly sinister theory that the good weather is actually due to the fact that the earth has been knocked off it’s axis by the Japan earthquake and we are perhaps hurtling towards the sun as I write...?).

The NHS. The smallest Dahl and I have both needed to visit A&E over the past couple of weeks and I marvelled at how brilliantly fair the whole idea of it is. Also how incredibly patient the staff are with the assortment of odd bods who seem to wander in with nothing much else to do. Big respect.

Next, the royal wedding, naturally. Splendid for opportunity to legitimately drink champagne at 11am on a Friday morning, loose yourself in a full on princess fantasy (I stopped short of watching with my own wedding dress on however), let your kids micro-scoot in the middle of a road for the afternoon of street party shenanigans a la 1970 and remind yourself that even with bags of cash at your disposal you can still turn up to a wedding looking like the pantomime entertainment (see Beatrice and Eugenie).

Finally (and what started me thinking about why I heart GB) how about Hyde Park’s Speakers Corner? It’s the condensed example of how free we are, how lucky we live in a land where we are largely uncensored, where free speech is the right of every person who is lucky enough to live here.