Celebrate VE Day with Victory Gin!
Government says it's your duty, citizen.
We're not getting an extra bank holiday for the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, but we will get a couple of extra hours in the pub. The UK government has announced a short consultation to extend opening hours from 11pm to 1am for pubs on 8-9 May. They also moved the early May bank holiday (4 May) from Monday to the …
"Extending licensing hours will pave the way for commemorative events across the UK, so we can pay tribute to the courage and determination of the millions who fought for our freedom or supported the war effort at home."
Bollocks it will. A few hardened drinkers will get a couple of extra hours in the pub and call in sick the day after. A Public Holiday would have been appropriate. Or are the Government saving the declaring of public holidays so that we can remember Brexit Day in the future?
Your pubs close? We have a number of pubs (and clubs) that are open 24/7. A few others only close for a couple of hours for cleaning. It wouldn't be the first time I dropped in to a 24/7 pub after a night shift for a couple of drinks before heading home.
BTW May 8 2020 is a Friday those celebrating late into the night would have the whole weekend to recover so are unlikely to call in sick.
Don't the French have a big holiday to celebrate the peasants storming the palaces of the mighty and killing all the entitled inbred nobs that ran the place?
Could we do that ?
(have a holiday not storm westminister and behead a few old Etonians - that would be incitement to something or other)
"It was actually to get rid King of the wrong religion, There was no intention of getting rid of all entitled inbred nobs that ran the place."
And just to complete the explanation, it's not celebration of the attempt to blow up the HoP, it's a celebration of foiling the attempt and the capture and execution of Guy Fawkes.
"It was actually to get rid King of the wrong religion, There was no intention of getting rid of all entitled inbred nobs that ran the place."
They were planning to blow up the king during the state opening of Parliament, which would have potentially got rid of everyone in government (baring any MPs/peers who couldn't be bothered to be there).
Possibly they couldn't find a better opportunity to kill the king, but the choice of Parliament as a target implies they also wanted to get rid of the government as well.
I was stuck in a French town one Bastille Day: everything was closed except the local museum. So there I went.
There was a fascinating section on the German occupation during WW2. Gestapo identity cards, knives, pistols... Then there was the town map: the main square renamed to Adolf Hitler Platz, the main street to Adolf Hitler Strasse.
Later, when I told my German friends, they felt (light-heartedly) there were possibilities in that naming scheme.
You could always be "sitting in the pub getting shitfaced for a couple more hours" and thinking "that we might be better off using the opportunity to remember what the consequences of letting unscrupulous governments running unchecked have historically included"
And remember 'every day is VE Day on the History/Yesterday channel'
German forces surrendered 7 May 1945 ...
... but only as far as the Western allies were concerned. The Soviet, and now the Russian point of view is that the war between Germany and USSR continued until 59 minutes before midnight (Berlin local time) on the 8th of May, 1945. The capitulation, the full text of which can be seen at https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/zeitgeschichte/kapitulationserklaerung-das-papier-das-den-krieg-beendete-a-354696.html, was signed in Berlin-Karlshorst earlier on the same evening.
Given the present state of the western-russian relations, I doubt that Russians will be invited to participate in the VE celebrations (although Germans probably would - funny that), so their opininion matters very little.
Interestingly enough, although the capitulation document was in English, German, and Russian, the German version carried no legal power - so strictly speaking, generals von Friedeburg, Keitel, and Stumpff, who signed it on behalf of Germany, could have just as well signed a blank sheet of paper.
"so strictly speaking, generals von Friedeburg, Keitel, and Stumpff, who signed it on behalf of Germany, could have just as well signed a blank sheet of paper."
Considering the level of defeat they had just suffered, yes, they may as well have. The surrender conditions then being filled in afterwards. It would've probably made very little effective difference.
With local pubs closing at a rate of a dozen or so every week, I wonder how many pubs outside of city centres (which often can already stay open passed 11pm) will be around to take advantage of a couple of extra hours of opening time?
Having a pub crawl in the town where I grew up, now involves having to get taxis between pubs as they are so few and far between, you have sobered up by the time you walked to the next one.