ON Wednesday coming it is St Andrew’s Day so we at the West End Festival in Glasgow are making a small but we hope noticeable contribution by holding a torchlight parade in his honour this evening.
This is mostly the idea of the Scottish Government and their agency EventScotland which promotes a programme of events covering St Andrew’s Day to Burns Night via Hogmanay. I think it is overdue and should be widely supported.
Our idea is to have a community-based event that brings hundreds of people together to mark our Scottishness. I think we would like it to establish a precedent for something much bigger in years to come.
So far, hundreds of people have bought torches for tonight’s parade, and there’s still time for The Herald’s readers to join in, or simply spectate.
So who was St Andrew? He was an original apostle of Jesus, killed and buried in Greece, and his adoption as the patron saint of Scotland goes back hundreds of years but it’s not clear why and when he was adopted.
In a vision, St Rule was told to take Andrew’s bones “to the ends of the earth for safe-keeping.”
A shipwreck off Fife follows, and I’m sure, dear reader, you can fill in what happened next. The bones disappeared later, but his name endures in the university, the town and the golf and the cross of St Andrew, of course. Maybe they will never be found, or maybe they are under a car park somewhere.
Since 2006 St Andrew’s Day is a Bank Holiday in Scotland. This was news to me.
However, a bank holiday is not the same as a public holiday, when everything is closed except, ironically, the banks.
Scottish business leaders had resisted any extra holiday due to wasted productivity calculated at £400 million, so it’s a holiday – but not really a holiday.
The answer seems obvious. We are the only country in Europe apart from Switzerland to have a public holiday on January 2.
Most cities, such as London, are already open for business on January 1st, let alone the 2nd. Meanwhile, in sleepy old Alba, everything is shut, everyone is totally fed up, and yet we cling to this because people should apparently be allowed to drink too much and have an extra day to recover.
I’m sure I am not the first person to suggest that January 2 could be done away with as an out-of-date holiday, but hopefully someone can ask the First Minister if we can’t just swop January 2 for November 30.
This would have the added advantage of making it OK for people (even MSPs) to take the day off work and go shopping. This would benefit blokes who need to be told when to go shopping.
Thus a national celebration of our Scottishness, accompanied by organised Christmas shopping and increased productivity would be created at a stroke, and we can hold our Scottish heads high as we contemplate what it is to be a nation (again).
As a last word, the flag of St Andrew – the Saltire – needs some tidying up, not in its iconic design, but in its use. Official opportunities to fly the flag? Don’t get some people started.
As ever, the ordinary people of Scotland have taken the lead on this. Draped around the shoulders of boys and girls going to sporting internationals, many with their faces painted in blue and white, they have managed to depoliticise the Saltire.
Not so the SNP with the Yes stamped on the pro-independence blue and white flags. Many people can tolerate or even celebrate the first, but many cannot stomach the second. Poor St Andrew.
Let us therefore turn to culture and a national holiday and remind ourselves that we are, whatever the state of the world in 2016, a pretty decent country. It’s just unfortunate that we don’t seem to have a decent anthem to go with our flag, but that’s not news to anyone at rugby internationals who has to endure the false note at the end of Flower of Scotland.
But someone else can write about that.
Glasgow’s St Andrew’s Day Torchlight Parade is today at 6.30pm through the west end from Queen Margaret Drive to Kelvingrove. See westendfestival.co.uk for details.
Michael Dale is director of the West End Festival
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