Today, tomorrow, and the day after that, here in Brussels, in Ireland, and in various other locations (including America and Australia, probably not in Pakistan, but you never know), people will be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.

What a GREAT opportunity to expound on the history of St. Patrick’s Day.

St. Patrick was a Welshman called Patrick. He lived in Aberystwyth between 1864 and 1899.

He had a brother, Jonathan, and one day the two of them decided to go and steal some sheep.

Crime never pays, and the brothers got caught, both with two sheep under their arm. The town judge sentenced them both to be branded with the letters “ST” on their foreheads, so that everybody they met would know that they were “Sheep Thieves”.

Jonathan couldn’t live with the shame, so he moved house. But in his new town and/or village, the villagers were sure that ST meant “sheep thief” and he couldn’t settle. The same thing happened in the next town, and the town after that. Jonathan spent the rest of his life a wanderer, begging for scraps and smelling of wee.

His brother Patrick decided to devote his life to good causes, however, and set about putting right all the wrongs he had perpetrated, rather like “My Name is Earl”.

He moved to Ireland, opened their first low-cost airline, which proved to be a raging success, and entertained the leprechauns with incredible feats of drinking. The Irish are inherently Catholic, so they didn’t see ST to be a sign of a Sheep Thief, as they would in Wales, but rather the sign of a SAINT.

St. Patrick died a wealthy man with a slight alcohol problem. His children now run the airline and campaign against drink-driving. St. Patrick’s day is the one day that Ireland forgets the evils of booze and celebrates with a right knees up.

And there’s the story of St. Patrick.

Anybody for a Guinness?