Today Is...Saint George's Day

Around the 4th Century in Libya, a town was being terrorised by a dragon and the villagers would feed it sheep to appease it but gradually they ran out of sheep so the King devised a lottery system to feed it the local children instead.
One day his own daughter was chosen and as she was being led out to the lake a Turkish knight named George happened to ride past and offered to slay the dragon if the people converted to Christianity. They all did, the dragon was slayed and the English decided to call him a Saint and dedicated the 23rd April to celebrating him.
Critics may point out that saving the girl in exchange for a mass conversion wasn't very generous and a better man would have saved the girl and killed the dragon for nothing but let's not be picky.
As well as England, St George is also the patron saint of Portugal, Venice, Beirut, Malta, Ethiopia, Georgia, the Palestinian territories, Cyprus, Serbia and Lithuania but besides that we still claim him as our own and each year some berk appears on TV wearing a suit of armour and bangs on Patriotically about what England means, which it turns out is very little.
Unlike the Irish with St Patrick, the Welsh with St David or even the Scots with St Andrew, St Georges Day passes with hardly a flicker of recognition or interest from one of the countries that he is the patron Saint of and we seem perfectly fine with that and we would probably have had him up for cruelty to animals if he tried that killing dragons bit these days.
Outside of a sporting event, the English Flag of Saint George is not flown from hardly anything outside of Royal Palaces and i would wager that hardly anyone under 16 knows all the words to the National Anthem.
Big shows of flag waving xenophobia and boasting about this island where we live is just not the English way, we are much more comfortable playing down our achievements and cracking jokes about our failings then puffing out our chests.
Not that we are embarrassed, throughout history the English have made some important and vital contributions to all areas of human existence which we should rightly be proud of, we just don't trumpet it from the rooftops.
I like that attribute in our English genes that shy's away from boasting about our achievements and anyone who does are mocked, handed a cup of tea and told to pull themselves together.