Flip!

So it's Tuesday, which means it's time for the Crack'd Pot. But it's also Shrove Tuesday which, to non religious people, (IE Almost everyone I know) means it is Pancake day! I'll let you take that in a minute.

So Pancake day, possibly the greatest day of the year (except maybe talk like a pirate day). It's the day where we make pancakes. It's a plain and simple holiday, a real "Ronseal" Job:
"It's Pancake Day what do you do?"
"Make some Pancakes"

As opposed to:
"It's Christmas day! What do you do?"
"Christ some mass? I'm at a loss"

Really Pancake day is the least confusable day. Which is really pretty sweet, it involves no brain power at all. Which we like. So Happy Pancake day to you.

So, it's obvious that I have forgotten (or never knew) the real reason of Pancake Day, Shrove Tuesday, but apparently it marks the day before Ash Wednesday (which was the second choice in naming the hero of the Pokemon series) and is a time for Christians to repent and clear themselves of sin in preparation for Lent, the whole forty days, forty nights thing that gives fat people a chance to make up on their failed new years resolution of "put down the fork". Which makes some sense to me, this is how the religious people see it:

Flour, Eggs and Milk are the equivalent of our sins
So we use up all the Flour, Eggs and Milk to show repenting our sins.
This leaves us with no Flour, Eggs or Milk, showing we have no sins.

Or, how I see it:
Flour, Eggs and Milk are really hard to find in your cupboard.
We Buy Flour, Eggs and Milk to make pancakes in preparation for our forty days of giving stuff up.
We then have no Flour, Eggs and Milk. Which means fat women have no cake baking ingredients, so they can "put down the fork"

I'm just saying it's one of the religious celebrations which has REALLY lost it's meaning; sure Christmas is commercial as hell, but you still have the whole Jesus thing with pancake day it's lost all meaning and is just about making awesome food. Not that I'm complaining.
That's all I'm saying, that and it's a conspiracy to make fat chicks thin again.

But I'm not here to talk only about Pancakes; those delicious, cakey, pans. No, I want to talk about holidays in general. With Valentine's day just gone (which is just swell), Easter around the corner (an early one this year), Christmas was a month and a half ago, and bonfire night and Halloween shortly before that it's clear to see that winter is a season of holidays.

Now I remember in School the teachers telling us that this was because of the shorter days of winter, and people needing cheering up, which for once, I buy. I mean cases of S.A.D (yeah, awesome mnemonic) are vastly increased in winter, when there's less vitamin D coming from the sun, because the damn clouds cover it (Darn you clouds!). So people need celebrations like Christmas, Bonfire Night, and Valentine's day to make you feel happier (though some may argue Valentine's doesn't make everyone cheery).

But that leaves summer. Now most summers are lovely and warm with the sun out and shining and what not, but if you're English, and live in England, you will have noticed, the sun is not that happy to be out and about in the summer.
Which leads me to my point, why don't we have some sort of holiday celebration in summer? almost every month has one up until June, and then after September, but there is a lull halfway through the year.
Thinking about it, it's quite simple. Everyone is happier in the summer in general, the sun has more chance of coming out, (now it's starting to sound like a closet homosexual) and most people have time off.
And, I suppose we do have holidays in the summer, just not religious ones. For music lovers, there's Glastonbury, for Comedy Lovers there's the Edinburgh festival Fringe, for Art lovers there's the Festival itself, and for sports lovers.. well I'm sure there's some sort of championship. This leads me to believe that summer is actually a relatively new invention, and the creators of this season realised we didn't have that much going on in those three or four months, so gave us these new "modern" things.

So once again in "The Crack'd pot" the point has been alluded and all discussion nullified.
Happy Pancake day!

Joe Strange
Is pretty damn excited about the summer.