1. Apart from being
delicious, another reason
visitors to the UK (in fact, visitors to England, the other parts being
benighted as far as
beer goes) should head for the London Pride is that it is almost never bad. Beer varies so much from
pub to pub, and from beginning to end of
barrel, that you're taking your life (or at least your
taste buds) in your hands when you enter a strange pub, not knowing whether their beer is
nectar, or
vinegar and wood-shavings. But somehow London Pride is
consistently in top form almost all the time wherever you get it.
2. A beautiful, lilting, sentimental song, bordering on the mawkish, by Sir Noel Coward, quietly evoking the spirit and courage of Londoners in the face of the Blitz.
In our city darkened now, street and square and crescent,
We can feel our living past in our shadowed present,
Ghosts beside our starlit Thames who lived and loved and died
Keep throughout the ages London Pride.
chorus:
London Pride has been handed down to us.
London Pride is a flower that's free.
London Pride means our own dear town to us,
And our pride it for ever will be.
3. A hardy perennial plant, a variety of saxifrage, which clung tenaciously to bombsites and poked its small white flowers up.
Before writing this node I tried to find some words to "London Pride", but discovered that the plant London pride was not, as I had believed, a purple buddleia, but this Saxifraga x urbium. I must have been confusing it with pride of Madeira. There is a very striking big buddleia that swarms over ruined lots where nothing else can get purchase, but I now fear I have been calling it the wrong name all this time.
Another site suggested London pride was the pink Saxifraga umbrosa, and also known as St Patrick's cabbage, prattling Parnell, and prince's feather: lovely names all, but I think it's in a minority on that one.
In Jèrriais, the patois of Jersey, the S. x urbium is called d'l'ordgi d'gardîn.