Welcome To England! Part 1

So you’re wanting to learn all about England, eh? I bet you’re a little overwhelmed by all the different things which our nation has to offer, friend! Don’t worry, Wilftonville will give you the lowdown on what things are.

1:

What Is This Building?

This building is called a library.

What is it for?

A very popular activity in England is called ‘reading’. The main crux of this activity is looking at words written on paper and comprehending them. Through this act of comprehending words, Englanders learn new facts which were previously a mystery to them. As a general rule though, they check the back of the book first to see if it will tell them the truth, or if it will lie to them. A book filled with lies is called ‘fictional’. People like reading both lies and truths equally, and a library is the place they go to if they want to do so. Think of a library as being like one of those factory warehouses filled with food products. Instead of having row upon row of packaged beers and pastries, a library instead has row upon row of books stacked beside each other.

How Should I Use A Library?

Very quietly. Many people who read have sensitive bodies (this is a scientific fact), and will hear any noise committed in a library. So when you enter, take off your hat if you are wearing one and walk on tip-toe around the building. If you see a brightly coloured book you like, slowly take it off the shelf and sit down at a table. If you can find a table nobody else is sat at – sit there. Never sit at a table which is occupied by someone else, because this is an act of illegal aggression on your part. Open the book and read it at your leisure.

What If I Don’t Finish Reading?

You have to take your book to the counter and pay an extravagant fee. This is why everyone in a library looks so intense. If they do not finish comprehending their lies then they will have to pay for their weakness. In a situation where you are caught not finishing your story, you will have to have a photo taken of yourself which will be put on a “membership card”. You pay for this, and then are allowed to borrow the book for a small amount of time. Again though – if you do not finish your lies in time, the library-keepers will look for you and charge you more money for your mistake.

This Library-Keeper Threw Me Out!

That's because he is The Doctor. You accidentally walked into the Library Of The Dead. You should be grateful for his actions.

Globally Loved Sports Britain Does Not Care About

Sumo
The National Sport Of: Japan

My immediate thought is of Asians in fat suits running at each other and then falling over, because my mind has been utterly tainted by hours of watching Takeshi’s Castle repeats on TV. And whilst the utterly cruel Jap version of ‘It’s A Knockout’ may have a rubbish closing round and is dubbed by the unfunny Craig Charles, it manages to knock ten spots off the sport is sometimes likes to emulate. Where the appeal lies in sumo is a mystery matched only by that of people who sunbathe (what’s up with that? Where’s the fun?) or the strange disappearance of Snoopy from our TV screens. The sport doesn’t appear to have much technical merit and there’s seemingly little skill involved, and yet it has managed to become seen as a dignified and sophisticated sport. In short, it appears to have reached a level of admiration which the technicalities of the event don’t match up to. Of course, maybe when I do some more of that fabled Wilftonville “research” the sport will change my mind, but as it stands at the moment sumo wrestling seems even less worthy than clock solitaire.


What Is It?

Focusing on professional sumo, the sport is an insanely controlled and regimented way of life for many Japanese men. There’s a lot of money available, but at the same time the average life expectancy of the average sumo wrestler appears to be in the low 60s. In other words, it is the male equivalent of forced prostitution, given what I know of American romantic comedies. Sumo is contested between two different fighters, who wear nothing apart from a gigantic napkin round their waists to hide their jewels when they enter the arena. Said arena has a small stage in the centre where the bouts take place, and the idea is that the two wrestlers enter this circular stage and fight. They are only allowed to push each other, though (no kicking to the face, although that would be infinitely more amusing), and whichever of them pushes their opponent out of the circle or to the floor first is declared the winner. It’s that simple.

And most of Japanese society is based upon the spiritual purity afforded by sumo wrestling. For comparison, imagine if Britain or America respectively centred their cultural and social lifestyle on boxing and WWE wrestling. Oh, and also the Japanese religion, Shinto, is somehow connected to it as well. Although the sound of an overweight Jesus with boxing gloves, crown of thorns and lycra shorts does sound like a surefire crowd-pleaser, something tells me the western world would never accept it. Just to clarify: sumo wrestling is sort of religious. And you thought those little Jewish hats were silly!

But if we could get away from ridiculing religions (stop pushing me into slander, readers!) I’d like to have a little deeper look into sumo. Because heck – this blog is unlikely to ever cover this ‘sport’ again, so we may as well say everything we want to now, while we still have the opportunity. Sumo wrestling is possibly one of the strangest sports ever, in that the main activity itself is straightforward, but the lifestyle appears to be batshit crazy. For a start, all sumo wrestlers are a part of a stable, who look after them. When they are young they train up in the stable with their fellow wannabe sumo wrestlers, and it appears they are used as mini-slaves by the stable-owners. The Sumo Association also have a strict set of rules for their players which must be obeyed – Wikipedia (as ever, the main source for Wilftonville’s research. And, uh, the only) says that among other things, sumo wrestlers aren’t allowed to drive cars because once a sumo wrestler crashed his car and… well, died. So now no sumo wrestlers can drive. Don’t forget that this is one of the only sports in the world apart from darts which encourages participants to be fat and unhealthy, too! The main drink for a training sumo wrestler is alcohol. Why? Well… because.


Why Doesn’t Britain Care?

The first reason Britain doesn’t give two shakes of a pimp cane about probably has something to do with the aforementioned batshit craziness of the lifestyle, although a greater reason is probably the health-conscious nature of society. Fat children are shunned and the papers cry openly about the loss of exercise and fitness in the future generations. Sumo simply wouldn’t be accepted as a valid excuse for kids to eat as much as they want. The second reason is that Britain is a completely open society – too open, at times – and if sumo wrestling became massively popular it wouldn’t be too long until the women would start demanding to take part, too. Who on earth would want to see that? The idea of two fat British women wrestling each other while wearing tank-tops is physically and morally wrong, although knowing the general readership of this blog you probably all just got aroused. For shame, internet hordes.

One last point. It’d be really, really mean to force the geeky kids to take part in sumo wrestling in PE! Sumo wrestling gives a sense of worth to fat kids and those who are tall or well-built. In other words: the sporty kids. They already hold a monopoly on all the real sports – imagine their glee if they were put in a ring with a small asthmatic kid and told to throw them out. Personally, nothing fills me with hatred more than the glee of a successful person. Sumo wrestling should never become a part of British society.

Globally Loved Sports Britain Does Not Care About

Boules
The National Sport Of: France

You’re laughing already, aren’t you? It’s unavoidable. The word ‘boules’ is intrinsically funny (it sounds like balls!), and when you add this to the fact that the word ‘France’ was also mentioned… well, you’re guaranteed some hilarity with this article, for sure! And that’s almost a guarantee! Well, actually, that is a guarantee, due to the use of the word ‘guaranteed’ in ‘guaranteed some hilarity’. I’ve put myself into a box, here, with no way out apart from success. Oh dear.


What Is It?

Boules is a sport which perfectly sums up the French attitude to everything. For a start, the game is based upon a central premise that keeps the players far away from where the action is. This then means that they are safe from any accidents occurring during play, and also gives them a head start in case they need to retreat at any point. It rewards the player who isn’t very strong, and who uses a limp wrist for maximum effect, and is one of the only sports where wearing a beret does not hinder one’s ability to play in any form.

Boules is a one on one game which leaves neither player feeling particularly satisfied afterwards, which I’m informed is another French trait, and is taken in turns. The first player throws a small white ball a short way into the distance, and the two then take turns attempting to throw several other balls at it. The player who gets their balls closest to the little white one is the winner. There aren’t many jokes about boules which don’t resort to classic double-entendre, but we’ll try to keep out of that particular area, for the sake of the children. When playing you can take one of several different route: you can wait until the last throw to knock everyone else out of the way and earn the victory, or you can try to form a protective barrier over a number of throws so that nobody can dislodge your balls. From the white. Ahem. This is one of the few games where a player can leave halfway through to buy some more toasted bread and choc au pains, and return without any serious long-term effect on your score.


Why Doesn’t Britain Care?

The obvious answer lies in the location of the game: France. Britain and France are eager enemies, ever since Britain repeatedly saved France from being invaded/ruling the World back in the good old days. If you don’t believe that Britain and France really hate each other, look no further than the 2012 Olympics. What other reason could Britain have for wanting them, other than to make France fail in their quest to win them? It is an honest hatred that the countries have for each other. And for the French to expect us – the bold and brave heroes of humanity – to sit down in the dust and throw balls along the ground? What a madness! What a cheek they have!

But that’s not the real answer, although many would abstain from the game for precisely this reason. Boules has never been the most delicate of events, all things considered. There is no formal uniform, no break for lunch and tea (the nerve of these people!) and the winner is judged by the competitors themselves. There isn’t a referee with a measuring tape or ruler, coming along to rescue the day with a bold answer as to who has won. Oh no. It is the very model of savage gameplaying, with players forced to fend for themselves in the wild. This does not appeal to the British sensibility, which is why we invented our own game. A superior game.

Not for us; the hefty throwing and vulgar lack of rules. No, we find a long stretch of grass and roll the balls down it, and then at the end of each round we have a referee judge using measuring apparatus the range of each ball from the white one, so that a winner can be decided impartially. And whenever either player gets tired, they are permitted to take a rest, during which they can go off for an ice-cream or perhaps even a spot of hot tea. It is civilised, it is British, and it is far better than anything the French have to offer us.

We call this game… bowls.

Globally Loved Sports Britain Does Not Care About

Ice Hockey
The National Sport Of: Canada

Oh, cruel alphabetical order, which forces me to put the three biggest sporting nations (that aren’t in Britain) as the first three entries in this series. Cruel alphabetical order, indeed! First America, then Australia, and now Canada. By the time we’ve reached the end of the list, there won’t be any interesting countries left (Although having said that… Zimbabwe is last, right? No, wait, ‘crimes to humanity’ isn’t a sport, silly me. Forget I said anything.) In Canada, they play lacrosse a lot, but that barely qualifies as a sport at all. Only people in Enid Blyton novels ever play lacrosse. No, we’re going to focus on that other sport associated with Canada instead: Ice Hockey.


What Is It?

Remember that game that everyone used to have to play during P.E. lessons? Hockey? Yeah, well it’s that but done on ice. Because of this added challenge, all the players are kitted out not only with the traditional hockey sticks and shin-pads, but with almost-complete body armour that covers them up like mini-Juggernauts on a mission of vengeance. Not only is this helpful because ice-skating is difficult and tends to make you fall over every ten seconds, but also because the game appears to be only semi-based on the sport it takes it’s name from. Although we have two teams here competing against each other to score goals by hitting a solid, heavy, bricklike object into the rival goal (the goalkeepers are particularly shielded with their armour because of this, which begs the question – why not use a softer puck/brick?), the typical fan does not appear to have any interest in this aspect of the game. Instead, the biggest cheers are gained for the routine sight of players beating each other up, at carefully-staged intervals. In this respect, ice-hockey most resembles wrestling on ice.

I’m not lying. Breaking my long-standing policy regarding Wilftonville, I actually did research for this article. Research that included watching videos of ice hockey on Youtube. And nothing else. Once a game, without fail, one of the players will do something to annoy a member of the other team (or, on the most fun occasions, a teammate), and this will start a fight. As the two players are on ice, this fight usually takes the form of a couple of wild flaps followed by one or both players falling over. Not joking, this is actually one of the main reasons many people bother watching the sport at all. And I’m also not joking about the fights being largely made-up by the players, either – sometimes the players even go so far as to plan the fights before each match, and there is an unspoken code of rules for how the fights should all progress. It really is as choreographed as anything the WWE have ever put out, although with far less baby oil involved (one should hope). In movies, the fight always ends with one player being thrown through the glass, but I found this video much funnier:



Six players on each team, as you’d expect, and the goal-keeper is allowed to use their hands to block the brick... if they want to lose said hands. Matches are split into three 20-minute sections, and women are allowed to play (if they want to) for some bizarre reason. I’ve never met a female who plays ice-hockey, and I don’t think I’d ever want to. It’s fairly typical, and as most Brits know how hockey works out, there’s not much need to describe the game any further.


Why Doesn’t Britain Care?

Did you know there is a version of this which is called “Pond Hockey”? Not that this has anything to do with anything, mind. I just thought that was a funny name for a sport and had nowhere else to write about it. Anyway.

Y’know why we play sports? Because we don’t have an Empire anymore. Well that’s a lie, we have Gibraltar and the Falklands to hand – but this is hardly the army which will terrorise our foes, is it? We’re not even sure that the Falklands like us, for crying out loud! (Nobody has ever visited. We do know that they’re somewhere near Argentina, but it seems like too much of a hassle to try and get involved with them at this stage.) In light of not having an Empire anymore – blame those damned French if you’re going to blame anyone – we have turned our attention to sport instead. Rugby? A chance to beat up those Italians once a year. Cricket? Well, that was set up so we could beat those convicts in Australia, but they’ve recently started winning all the time so we don’t like it anymore. The common point in most sports that Britain enjoys is that they are loosely based on beating up the people we hold a grudge against. Being British as we are, however, this means we hold a grudge against everyone, including each other. This was why snooker was invented – to satiate out need to defeat those closest to us without resorting to physical violence.

The Canadians, however, aren’t a race we’re familiar with. We have vague recollections of them helping us burn parts of America (good times, man…), and they seem to accept that The Queen is the True Saviour of Mankind, but aside from that… nah. We don’t really care. We’ve got Germans to belittle in Athletics, after all. And the fact remains that ice hockey appears to have been designed by drunk people. Have you ever tried watching it? You can’t see the damn puck! Hasn’t anyone else noticed this, or is it just me? The players run all round the arena, skating like the professionals they are, but I’ll be damned if I ever have any idea where the puck is. In rugby, the ball is gigantic, brown, and oval-shaped – who wouldn’t notice that? Ice Hockey is ridiculous. Not to mention, it’s not exactly the kind of sport which lends itself to spur-of-the-moment play. Grab a tin can and put down two jumpers, you can have a rudimentary game of football almost anywhere (not in a nuclear reactor. Dear Lord, don’t do this in a nuclear reactor.) If you want to play ice hockey, on the other hand… well, do you have a frozen lake handy? Not practical, mate. Not happening.

Oh, also - if we ever want to see a decent fight, all we need do is stand outside the pub after closing time. Or go anywhere in Ireland.

Why I Don’t Trust The Jews

A lot of Americans recently believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim, and that because of this he shouldn’t be allowed to become the awesome new President of the USA (or as we call it in Europe, ‘Disneyland’). This Islamophobia is not something that the Americans alone are guilty of, though – Britain seems to be obsessed with it. At least, the papers are. Every day the worthless newspapers spread panic about how the Muslims are going to take over all our jobs because;

A: They are ASYLUM SEEKERS. Agh! Asylum seekers!
B: They are trying to destroy the very fabric of British society which first enticed them to migrate over here
C: (They do the jobs better than British workers do)

Option C is not one you’ll see the papers mention very often. We’re not too bad though, overall, just as long as you don’t visit Bradford. Ever. In the Middle-East, I’m led to believe that apparently the Muslims are getting into wars with each other and other religions! That’s quite extreme indeed. It seems that The Muslims are not appreciated properly by the World. I sympathise with you, Muslim community.

At the same time the Christians are under attack from that Dawkins feller. He doesn’t think that people should base their lives around the writing of one book, and if you read his ‘The God Delusion’, available at many good book stores, he will advise you on how best to live your life away from the glare of religion. Mostly, he is not happy with Catholics. And why should he be? Those people have been going away once a week to those sinister-looking church buildings for years and years now. They’ve got something in mind, heed my words, and for centuries now they’ve been planning it for two or so hours a week. Also, they don’t like abortions – what kind of weirdo doesn’t love a good abortion?

But I’m not here to talk about the faults of Catholics and Muslims and Atheists. I’m here to talk about the real issues. I always have been, in a way. It’s just that you’ve never understood before what my posts about ‘X-Men’ and ‘How To Get Famous Women To Sleep With You’ were really about. They’re allegorical! I think that the main problem with society today is that it is doing too much worrying about Catholics and Muslims, and not enough worrying about Jews.

For one thing, did you know that all female Jews are surgically modified when they reach a certain age? The process is called a Bat-Mitzvah, and during it the girls are given a pair of wings to use, and an inbuilt sonar system. With these powers the girls then are able to fly around at night, drinking the blood of cows and peasants. Why isn’t the media reporting this?

It doesn’t end there. One thing that’s been bothering me for quite some time are the hats that Jews wear. These hats are sanctioned whenever they go into their place of worship, and you will not see a Jew in a synagogue without one. Nobody else seems to realise that these hats are resistant to telepathic intrusion, which means that the giant satellites the Government have in space are unable to read the minds of Jews once they start worshipping. There is a mental black spot above and around each Synagogue. What is it that the Jews see or think about in Synagogue that they need to keep secret from the rest of the World? Why isn’t the media reporting this?

And finally, the thing most Jews are known for: their fame. It’s long been known that Hollywood is run by Jews, gays, and Jewish gays (who have the most power of all), and that they use their power to influence the country. They have control over the entire population of California, for one thing (not the gays: they just suspiciously lost their ability to marry recently – another Jewish plot?), and their expansion is slowly taking over the rest of the two US coastlines. They have taken over the film industry, the TV industry, the music industry, and the media. Why isn’t the media repor- oh.

Jewish people must be stopped.

Globally Loved Sports Britain Does Not Care About

[Earlier this year I put a site tracker onto Wilftonville, just for a week, and I found out that a surprising majority of readers come from the Down Undah’ (is that how you write it?). So… this one’s for you, Australia!]

Australian Rules Football
The National Sport Of: Australia


What Is It?

Having previously slighted American Rules Football for being wimpy at best, I’ll have to stand down a little. Aussie Rules Football is based around the rules of rugby, just like American Football is - but in the case of the Australians the sport isn’t toned down (wussified) at all. If anything, they add an extra layer of unpredictable violence into proceedings. Australian Rules football may not be football, but it certainly is a sport only the Australians could ever have invented.

The rules are almost simple. Two teams of eighteen (seriously? Eighteen? That’s insane!) take to the field, and stand essentially wherever they want before kickoff starts. The ball – a rugby ball – is thrown into play, and the madness then begins. The ball can be passed by punching it or kicking it, which adds credence to my belief this game was designed to appeal to the inner convict present in every Australian, but not through throwing. That makes it quite different from rugby, then. Also, if a player decides to run with the ball then they have to bounce it on the ground every fifteen metres. No trouble, except this is an oval rugby ball and they play on terrain which is typically slightly less well maintained than Wembley. On top of all that, the players from the other team (don’t forget; there are eighteen of them gunning for you once you grab the ball) can get it back off you by tackling you. Aussie rules are just like British ones in that the players aren’t given any protective gear – except, lord hopes, a cup – so when a player gets tackled they’re going to feel it.

There are four posts on each side of the pitch, and if a player can kick the ball between the two most middle posts then the team gains six points. If the ball misses and goes between a middle and outer post, or if the kick completely spastics out and hits a post, only one point is scored. In that respect, Aussie rules thus rewards even the sloppiest of players. After eighty minutes of killing each other, spread over four twenty-minute sections, the players are called in and go off for a barbeque and lager. Fosters, mate.


Why Doesn’t Britain Care?

Everything about Aussie rules seems to suggest that Britain would love the sport, if they could only get past that first word of the name. “Australian”. Y’see, that’s the problem for us all. When it comes to sport, the last thing we want to see is a participating Australian. As far as any Brit is concerned, the national hobby of Australia is “beating Britain” (of course, we get the occasional upset – an Ashes win here, maybe a Rugby World Cup on home turf after a last minute drop goal C’MON Jonny Wilkinson or an Olympics Medal Table that surprised even us, but typically we tend to lose to those bastards). If we play cricket, then those dirty Aussies will undermine the entire point of us shipping them abroad in the first place by beating us. Likewise with most other sports – Australia have a naturally tendency to be just that little bit better than us Brits, and that really rubs us up the wrong way sometimes. Grr, and all that.

So the reason why we don’t play any Australian sports like that, nor care about any Australians who do? Because if we give them any attention at all, then they’ll almost certainly change the names for all their teams to stuff like “The Pom-Bashers” and “The Limey-Toppers”. And help us, we find it difficult enough as it is to win at sports we invented against them – how would we ever compete if we played a sport against them that they’ve had years of practise with?

Globally Loved Sports Britain Does Not Care About

After watching the British public make the quickest about-turn since the Krauts saw us advancing into the Rhineland in ’44 (sorry) whilst watching the 2008 Olympics, it struck me that Britain simply doesn’t care less about a lot of the sports you see other countries playing. We didn’t care less about the track-and-field in China until we realised that we weren’t failing for once, which brought us together as a nation in an attempt to write Christine Ohuruogu’s surname correctly on our Union Jack flags. We came round eventually to the whole idea of the World coming together to celebrate diversity and culture and sport – but only once we started winning.

There are so many other sports that could do with a bit of the same. Around the World, countries celebrate a variety of sports that nobody in Britain cares less about – most of the time, we have a reason, but in some cases it’s just snobbery that keeps us away from such activities. Snobbery, of course, being one of the things Britain is best at, alongside sarcasm, irony, humour, and making a decent fish and chips. We also have a handful of sports that we really love and accept – where would we be without Rugby, Football, Cricket, and Horse Riding – and some sports which we grudgingly accept for a few weeks until any British competitors are eliminated (tennis). Those aside though, we don’t really try much new stuff, which is probably for the best of the country: we don’t want to start playing sissy sports that give Prince Philip a heart-attack.

I have barely done any research about any of them, so most of the facts presented here are, as ever, probably incorrect, but here we will list several sports which millions of people follow fanatically. We don’t care about any of them.


American Football
The National Sport Of: America

What Is It?

American football is rugby, which has been spiced up with the addition of halftime shows and cheerleaders, and wussed up with the addition of extensive body armour for each competitor alongside rules which give the audience more scrums and less running for their money. Each team has to get the ball from one side of the field to the other without being tackled or ‘sacked’ by a member of the other team. You are allowed to kick or throw the ball to other players, and you score points each time you cross the line at the end of the other team’s end of the pitch. The game is split into four quarters, and lasts an hour overall.


Why Doesn’t Britain Care?

Nobody in Britain cares about either of these sports, because we already have variations of them for ourselves, thank you very much. In the case of American football, we already have two superior versions of the sport which we play at home anyway, those sports being rugby league and rugby union respectively. I can name for you right now, American Readers, why this sport bores us, and shall do so with immediate effect:

• American football is played in 10 yard sections, instead of being played as a free-for all race to the finish. If a player advances to the next section, the game apparently seems to restart at the beginning of that section, so you don’t get to see much movement over the course of a match.
• The players only play for fifteen minutes at a time, instead of the forty minutes halves that rugby players experience. As such, going to a game of American football appears to be more about good company and beer than it is about watching sport.
• If we want to have good company and beer whilst a sport nobody cares about goes on in the background, we’ll simply go to the pub and watch Italian football.

With rugby, nobody wears much protection at all, and when you couple this with the British weather, this makes for a much greater potential that horrific violence will soon occur. That’s why we watch the sport. Also, in America I believe that the football players are held to be the dim ones, who get into university because they are good at sport and not because they are clever. In Britain, the rugby players tend to be the posh, smart ones who go to the private schools – so we get to watch posh people get beaten up! We love that.

Another reason why Britain is never going to care for American football, despite everything it throws at us, is the fact that because it calls itself “football”, we’re not allowed on the internet to call our sport – the real sport, because we invented it first – football. Instead, on Wikipedia and around the internet, we’re forced to refer to it as ‘soccer’. Damn you! And just for that, we shall never watch your “super bowl”. It’s not petty to be annoyed about something if you’re on the side of Good, which Britain always has been.

Don't Get Too Patriotic

A little unsubtle, but it gets across a point which has become increasingly more sharp and... I dunno... pointy, as the years have gone by. This sharp and pointy point that I refer to is that there are no English tennis players left. And, with the oddly muscular exception of Andy Murray, there are no British players left. The four main tennis players in Britain are:

Andy Murray
Alex Bogdanovich
Anna Keothavong
Elena Baltacha

If you look at the surnames here… not a lot of Britishness there. That’s the problem with our tennis squad. Much like with our manual workers, we’ve hired out Eastern Europeans to do all the work for us. In a country which is obsessed with football, is there any space for us to have tennis players anymore? Every year the papers insist that we should have better tennis players – what are they doing to stimulate this? They don’t give a damn about tennis until Wimbledon comes round. So my point here is that kids should start playing tennis, even though it will make them unpopular.

Go for it!

God's Five Most Dick Moves (Part 5)

5: Halting The Tower Of Babel

Once upon a time, God got really annoyed with everyone on Earth, so he killed them. A master of genocide, God decided that a flood would be the best thing for the job, so he picked the one man he did like (Noah, in case you haven’t already guessed) and told him to build an ark, and fill it with all the animals on earth – but only two of each kind. With that built, God made it rain so much that everyone was drowned apart from the people on the ark (we presume that unicorns were left off the guest-list), and Noah was stranded out on his own for a while. Once the floods subsided and the world was probably strewn with the millions of animal corpses that had drowned along with the humans, he touched down and founded a new city, where new people would live.

From Noah’s family grew the foundations of a city, where everything would be nice again. But oh wait, we’ve been here before, and it never ends well. The people of Babylon, this new city, decided to unite together in the spirit of achievement and harmony, and create a tower so high it could ‘touch heaven’. It's fair to say that God did not like this idea.

So What Did God Do?

Well according to sources, it seems that he knocked it down with a big gust of wind. The Bible doesn’t specify this, but seeing how the Tower doesn’t exist anymore, it’s a fair guess that God pushed it over, likely crushing the hundreds of people who lived in the shadow of the thing. His reason for this was that he didn’t like the idea of humans building something just for the sake of showing off their ability to be good, when they should have been praising him instead. This seems a little petty, again, when you consider it. God created mankind in order to spread his glory across… a planet he created and populated himself (God must have self-doubt issues, it seems), but as soon as they show off their creativity and ability to create amazing works of art, he strikes it down. That’s hypocritical at best, and at worst... it's a dick move on his part.

God doesn’t stop with destroying the tower though. His first move in actuality was to scatter all the people who had worked on the tower across the globe, and in the process creating several different languages so nobody would be able to talk to each other anymore. This is the reason why, when you go on holiday to Bordeaux and ask someone for directions, you get a smirk and a “ah, you eez eeennglish, non?” in your face. God did that. In the process, he effectively created the concept of war, xenophobia, racism, all of that, because whereas before everyone was friendly with each other, now we had a whole host of different races and languages walking around, causing friction with each other.

Result:

The people of the World have to suffer war, racism, and - worst of all – The Eurovision Song Contest. What, never heard of a metaphor, God? Did you actually think the builders planned to touch Heaven with their tower? Heck, we STILL haven’t managed to build something that tall, even with computers and metals and alloys and stuff, so why did you think the ancient people would be able to? We think perhaps you had too much confidence in these folk, m’Lord…

How Green You Are: Pointing Out Things That Make My Country Better Than Yours

#1: Allotments

What is “Allotments”?

An allotment is a patch of land which is rented out to an individual or family so that they can do their gardening on it. Every weekend, there is a mass exodus of old men with dungarees and white beards to these areas, where they then spend hours upon end poking the soil with rakes and chatting to neighbours about how much they don’t love their wives anymore.

What’s The Point?

The point is that they provide men with somewhere to go once they’ve retired which isn’t a golf-course, as well as helping hundreds of work-executives to ease away all their stress by digging up a particularly elongated tree root (them things are a right bother). Without allotments, these men would have to talk to their wives, which for many should never be made an option. Wives are scary creatures, what with their words, and questions, and facial expressions... You’ll never understand a woman, but you could learn to understand the art of growing runner beans, which is why allotments are so popular. The things are dotted all across England, and could single-handedly provide enough food for one small African nation per year, if every allotment-owner chose to focus all their work on helping those who are less fortunate. However, these people are mostly retired, and so don't care about anything except the state of the NHS.
As allotments are all situated outside, they provide a great opportunity for people to complain about the weather, a traditional English past-time.

What Makes This So English?

If any other nation were bored at the weekend and wanted something to do, they’d doubtless go off to the park, or a museum; see a film or play some sport. Not in England. As our national sports are rugby (painful) and cricket (slow), going off to the allotment every weekend is the only real way in which they can relax. Yes, the English relax by doing work. Don’t try to think about it too long, you’ll get a migraine. Really, though, the belief is that most people only own an allotment so they can grow potatoes, and thus can mock the Irish by having something that Ireland doesn’t: a viable potato industry.

Go England!