The End of Civilisation as we know it - almost !
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/derbyshire/7266666.stm
The Shrovetide match in Ashbourne may seem to most people yet another example of the eccentricity of English rural life.
The trouble is that my missus's family all come from Ashbourne and they take it VERY seriously ( by comparison WWII was a minor niggle ).
They are all die hard 'Downies'. She was on the phone ( I kid you not ) for three hours last night about this. At one stage when I left the house she was on the phone to her cousin Janice and they were still going on about how they were 'robbed' when I got back from Tesco. Then her cousin Dez phoned and it started all over again.
Reminds me of a passage in Anthony Beevor'Berlin. Downfall 1945. Although the book deals mainly with the events on the Eastern Front and experiences of soldiers and civilians, he does occasionally refer to the Western Allied advance. The passage I mean is about the attitude in the British Army compared to that in Candian and US regiments.
To keep is as short as reasonbly possible, I've removed some sentences. Bold is added by me.
Idealistic Americans and Canadians felt that they had a duty to rescue the old world ... French regular officers in particular were focused on revenge for the humiliations of 1940 ... In the British Army ... a newly arrived officer might believe that he had come to take part in 'a life and death struggle for democracy and the freedom of the world', but found instead that the war was 'treaded more as an incident in regimental history against a reasonably sporting opponent'. Nothing ... could have been further from the Russian view.