Let the rain not stop us

We went to the Innocent Village Fete at Regents Park on Sunday.Although the whole thing shamelessly pushes the Innocent corporate image it still was a lovely day.
Lots of interesting music including the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, great food, surprisingly good poetry and of course the knitting tent.
Sunday was a very English summer day i.e loads of rain. But masses and masses of people were there. It was sort of "we're English and we have an umbrella and can therefore go anywhere and attempt anything even if we're a bit crap at it". It was enough for me to almost forgive England for being one of the many nations who have robbed the All Blacks of their entitlement to the Rugby World Cup-but let me not go there.
The poets were great but why oh why do middle class boys doing a poetry slam in Regents Park about Freud and Jung (oh my loves I kid you not) thing that putting on a bad imitation of a black ghetto accent is a good idea. Maybe when Cameron becomes PM young middle class men will feel OK about their roots again and will dust down their old school ties lovingly kept in the back of the wardrobe behind the carefully ripped jeans and scruffy but not too scruffy tee shirts.
Anyway back to umbrellas-I could not help but notice that most of us have incredibly battered cheap small umbrellas. Maybe we need to go back to big strong umbrellas-the type your child could inherit to regain national pride. Was the British Empire built on a Evening Standard freebie umbrella? Then I had the horrible thought-there are far to many people in London now to cope with big umbrellas-we would poke each others eyes out and there would be umbrella jams on Oxford Street. Depressing thought.