Damn...
I was hoping for another Passport to Pimlico!
A Somerset pub is gearing up to secede from the UK next month. The rum do is, surprisingly, nothing to do with Brexit. It's also unrelated to a long, hot summer that has battered UK pubs with an influx of wasps and concerns that depleting CO2 supplies would hurt the flow of lager in the island nation. Rather, the Cross Keys …
We are the pastry of the working naan. We believe that the government has an important sausace roll in the life of the country and that it is important to have a general confection free of bake news.
We wish to give the opposition party a bloody good choux-ing and to totally batter them at the next confection. The cream will rise to the top.
W eclair about you, the voters of this great country slice, so vote for us and dough not be tempted by the false promises of those other bastards.
Our policies are to have our cake and eat it, to slice taxes and have jam tomorrow.
Pudding the people first!
Which is a major life goal ticked off :)
I think I am still technically barred from this fine establishment. In my defence it was the other members of my old rugby team that caused most of the damage.
Anyway if I pop round at the weekend can I expect support from the foreign office... actually what am I saying.....
In the old South Africa, the Rotarians or Round Tablers in a Cape Town suburb had a similar fund-raising idea, and the Republic of Hout Bay came into being. This was made easier by the fact that, as Hout Bay is on the opposite side of Table Mountain to the city, there were (and maybe still are) only three roads into and out of the suburb. So they had "road blocks" at which you could but a "passport" that would make you a citizen.
Rumour had it at the time that people were successfully using these "passports" on trips away from South Africa, at a time when South African passports were regarded extremely dubiously, claiming that the Republic of Hout Bay was a breakaway dissident state.
For many years a (extremely) small settlement in NZ has had an annual election of President - IIRC the Republic of Whangamomana came into to being when the residents of said settlement and surrounding area objected to the government's imposition of summer time on the country.
I was present at the election of one president who was tragically killed during his term of office while participating in a wild pig hunt - just why a toy poodle (the president) wanted to go pig hunting is one of those mysteries that may never be solved.
"Are you sure the wild boar wasn't just a scapegoat?"
It's possible - given that the permanent population of Whangamomana is most accurately expressed by the well recognised mathematical term "bugger all", a cover-up would not be too difficult to arrange.
This is the sort of place it is - at the Republic Day celebrations I attended one of the major attractions was a bloke with a ute full of dead possums, with which he entertained the crowd by giving demonstrations on how to skin said possums - for $5 he would teach you or your kids how to do the skinning. I'm guessing he needed to skin them anyway and though he may as well try and make a few bucks extra along the way.
Note for the rest of the world: In NZ possums are a pest species and once you have caught one your only legal options are to kill it or have someone else kill it for you - the case is slightly different in Australia, where they seem to be keen on protecting and encouraging the smelly things.
I used to love the annual declaration of independence by the traders of Walcott Street in Bath.
Proudly carrying my passport, I would get wonderfully pissed on fantastic ale at the Bell's open-air bar, listening to bands and, later on in the day, watching people suck balloons until they walked into walls laughing.
That was when the Hat and Feather was a real (if disreputable) music pub instead of a wine bar/restaurant.
I'm getting old...