IT was announced this week that foreigners who want to gain British citizenship will soon have to take an examination and answer a list of 24 questions in order to gain a coveted UK passport. Looking at the sample questions, I was fairly horrified to realise I didn't know the answer to some of them. Could this mean I can be stripped of my nationality? For instance, I didn't know which two numbers I should ring to get the emergency services. Obviously one is 999 but what is the other? Nor was I entirely sure when 18 year olds got the vote or the order national saints' days fall in. Shame on me. (The answers are 112, 1969 and St David, St Patrick, St George and St Andrew). I felt better when I found out that an awful lot of other people didn't know the answers either. I don't really see the point of the whole thing anyway. After all, what really defines Britishness? Surely not the ability to answer a few general knowledge questions. The Daily Telegraph suggested an entirely different approach to the questions, such as asking: If you have a truly horrible meal in a restaurant would you (a) complain loudly; (b) ask to see the manager; or (c) say 'thanks for a lovely meal' and leave. The correct answer is, of course, c if you are truly British. My version would be: If you have to line up to get into a shop on sale day do you: (a) queue in an orderly fashion; or (b) barge to the front as soon as the door is open. Or, if you are in a railway carriage with five strangers do you (a) chat away happily and ask them all about themselves; or (b) totally ignore them to the point of pretending they aren't there. Or there's: If you are at a supermarket checkout and the time comes for you to pay do you (a) have your purse in your hand and your card ready to offer the cashier; or (b) do you wait until the last item is packed before delving into a deep and heavy handbag to find your purse and then spend five minute sorting through a whole batch of cards? I think we all know the answers and all of them point to being truly British. As does knowing why we call the day after Christmas Day Boxing Day. Nowhere else in the world do they have a Boxing Day. For most people the day after Christmas is a day to get rid of all the festive paper, take digestion easing tablets, finally get out to buy batteries for the children's toys so that they stop moaning than their action man is inactive and vowing never to eat so much again. Whereas we British have to do the whole thing over again but with leftovers. Finally, all foreigners should know that bonfire night isn't just an excuse to burn old rubber tyres and frighten next door's cat to death, but is a celebration of the foiling of one of the first ever terrorists plots to annihilate the government of the day. Everywhere we are reading about the threat of a flu pandemic. Some are scare stories, some are very scary stories. Others are potboilers, designed to keep things going, such as the one last week which stated that there may be no turkey for Christmas this year. Which probably frightened people more than the thought of a wordwide outbreak of a killer disease. What? Nowhere to put the Paxo stuffing, nothing to accompany the chipolatas and the bacon rolls? No frantic search on the aforementioned Boxing Day for a recipe to make six pounds of turkey leg meat palatable. It's not that the threat of bird flu shouldn't be taken seriously, of course it should, but causing mass panic isn't exactly helpful, especially as there's not a lot individuals can do except avoid kissing parrots. Sorry, that was a joke. I shouldn't joke I know, but if the worse comes to the worse you can always make me wear a t-shirt with an 'I told you so' logo on it. Poor old parrots are coming in for a bad press because the first case of bird flu has been traced to a parrot. Or may have been. There seems to be a bit of controversy as to whether it was the parrot or an Oriental chicken in the same quarantine place which is the culprit. Bad luck for the parrot, snatched away from its nice warm home in some far off jungle, airlifted to chilly old UK and ending up next to a foreign chick with a cold. Now I'm not fond of caged birds. I'm not actually fond of anything caged. True, we had the usual assortment of animals when the children were young; rabbits, guinea pigs and hamsters. At least they were supposed to be the children's pets but as anyone knows, once the long nagging session to get a rabbit or a guinea pig or a hamster is over and the first euphoria of getting their own way has faded and the animal in question has had its first bite (literally) then all responsibility is handed back to the parents, or, more likely, the female parent. Which is how come you find yourself crouching over a guinea pig in the middle of the night giving it the kiss of life or trying to persuade a reluctant hamster to come out of its nest so you can prove to your six-year-old that it's not dead but merely sleeping. So once the last hamster proved to be not sleeping but merely dead I vowed we would never have anything else in a cage. Birds would have been out anyway, the cats would merely have thought it was dinner in another sort of handy portable container and spent their lives trying to open the tin, so to speak. Not that the children didn't try. They were particularly taken with a parrot kept in a pub we used to visit, which always greeted them with a cheery hello and liked to be fed grapes. We always went home with echoes of 'can we have a?' in the back seat, with an emphatic 'no' from the front. Another pub we knew had a huge green parrot which had to be kept in the public bar because of its dreadful language. Customers who knew its habits, and encouraged them, would wait in eager anticipation until the ladies from the Salvation Army visited on a Saturday night just to see their reaction to the parrot's less-than charming greetings, which I couldn't possibly print here but will only say that 'get em off' was the least offensive. The two ladies probably collected more in that pub than most, because people happily handed over money just to prolong the visit and allow the parrot to to get into its full blue flow. One thing that does occur to me is that if some other poor parrot should fall victim to the chicken flu it is at least equipped to gain its owner's attention by saying: 'Excuse me old chap, I feel a trifle peaky today, do you think I might be going down with something?'
