Living for Disco

Since when did St Patrick’s Day become an international festival?

According to the radio this morning, there will be a St Patrick’s day celebration on Saturday, in town. Throughout the week, listeners phone in if they hear something specific in the lyrics of a song, and they get given a gold coin. Then on Saturday, they can go and put the gold coin in a pot (as in ‘gold at the end of the rainbow) at the Gustav Voigts shopping centre. There will be green draught beer, Irish cuisine, and a man dressed up as a leprechaun. The morning DJ attempted to speak in an Irish accent all morning. He is a gigantic twat at the best of times, but this morning he surpassed himself. Every single Irish cliche you can think of came pouring out of his mouth in an accent so bad, I’m convinced I aged 10 years out of sheer embarassment.

My point is, though, that almost every single white Namibian here is of Dutch or German descent. This is why they have a beer festival every year, in which scary large-breasted women dress in pinafores and have a competition to see who can hold the most two-litre beer steins in their enormous teutonic hands. The record is 18. I have never seen anything so frightening.

I don’t understand their need to piggy back a day that celebrates the patron saint of a country over 7,000 miles away that has almost no relevance to the lives of anyone here. It would be just as stupid if they all started dressing up as Knights Templar and slashing papier macher dragons, or wearing leeks and daffodils in their hair.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Under African Skies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.