by Bijan Omrani, The Critic
He did much to form our culture, unlike the elusive St George
Come on, admit it. It gives you too much pleasure. It’s become the same every year. Springtime comes round and the days lengthen, and whilst you should be waiting joyfully for the first swallow of the season, the apple trees to spring into bud, the return of the call of the cuckoo, all you can do is sit with eyes glued to social media, desperate to catch before anyone else that great annual refrain not of the peewit nor the godwit, but the midwit: “Actually, St George was a Turkish Palestinian…”
The first of these cries this time round came not, one might have expected, from pop historian Otto English, but the Green Party peer Jenny Jones, who, perhaps hoping to get ahead of the dawn chorus, put out her own textbook tweet at 5.37 am on 23 April: “Happy St George’s Day! England’s national day, when we celebrate our patron saint, a Turkish officer in the Roman army who died in Palestine and never visited Britain. And, he didn’t kill a dragon.”
Oh how you army of internet twitchers all rejoiced with your GIFs of champagne corks popping and the dejected Bart Simpson being asked to “say the line again.” But the obsession isn’t healthy. If the main enjoyment of what should be a day of national celebration has become a formulaic slanging match over the complete absence of Turks from fourth-century Cappadocia, then something has gone very wrong.
The more terrible thing is that, despite their geographical and historical illiteracy, the midwits do have a bit of a point about St George.