Diary – 18 April 2008

Last week several people — well, two to be exact — asked me if I was looking forward to St George’s Day. One of them was a road-sweeper. Apparently it falls this year on 23 April, although in 1861 its date appears to be two days earlier. I know this because I looked it up in the Book of Days. I keep thinking how confusing it would be if one came back from the dead and tried to look things up in newspapers. I visited Liverpool two days later, the road-sweeper’s query still in my head, and inquired of a girl loitering beside the paper stall at Lime Street Station what she thought of St George. She said, ‘He’s a goner, isn’t he?’, and turned away. She was using slang, of course, which is a term meaning secret language. I only learnt that interesting piece of information because someone divulged it on the wireless the other morning.