Teach Them to Fly Underwater

Ravens have hatched at the Tower of London for the first time in thirty years; and on St George's Day to boot. Omens and portents can be slippery little buggers, as those great Englishmen Oedipus and Macbeth could both testify to their cost; and this happy event is no exception. To begin with, the parents are named Huginn and Muninn, after two unnaturally well-travelled servants of a foreign god whose migrant worshippers were noted for their unpleasant ways with hard-working British families. Then, while tradition undoubtedly predicts ill fortune for Tower and Kingdom alike should the ravens leave, it is by no means clear that the arrival of more ravens is anything to crow about. The last time it happened, after all, was on the eve of John Major's accession to Downing Street, whence followed a period of stagnation, corruption, xenophobia and petty nastiness which was comparable to the Kingdom's present glories in much the same way as the 1990 attack on Iraq was comparable to the 2003 adventure: the later version was bigger, stupider, more murderous and wore a grin of fatuous triumph rather than a frown of sanctimonious constipation, but the basic outlines remained recognisably fraternal. Today the Tower is famous as a place where people waited to have their heads chopped off at the whim of hereditary monarchs, and as the site of a double infanticide supposedly carried out on the orders of a Machiavellian hunchback; the Kingdom is divided on such fairly basic questions as the century it is living in and which bit of continental shelf it is sitting on; so the nation's citizens of nowhere and other traitors might arguably be justified in pondering whether the Tower and the Kingdom are really worth the ravens' efforts in propping up.