APRIL 29th: INGRATITUDE DAY
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On Ingratitude Day, the town celebrates its bad manners by reversing all the usual niceties. On Ingratitude Day, one friend might greet another with a new hairdo by saying, ‘I see you’ve persuaded a flea-infested badger to live on your head. I wonder how he puts up with the smell?’
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In response, the other person might say, ‘Why don’t you shut your trap, you wrinkly old pus bucket.’ A variety of ingratitude-related events are held throughout the day. There’s an Insult Tournament where prizes are awarded for the longest, most appropriate and most imaginative insults. The Most Irritating Toddler and Ugly Baby competitions are always hugely popular. At the accompanying home and garden exhibition, prizes are awarded for the Blandest Cake and Most Unappealing Bunch of Parsnips.
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The centrepiece of the day’s events is the parade, when bands, floats, local teams and so forth make their way through the streets, throwing clods of dirt at people and carrying beautifully decorated signs saying things like: ‘I hope you have a miserable Ingratitude Day, you shower of whingeing snot-gobblers.’
People line the parade route hissing and shouting things like, ‘You’re rubbish!’ or ‘Call that a float?’ or ‘Come back next year when you’ve learned to play!’ All in all, it helps the people of Blunt get a lot of negativity out of their systems and the following day everything goes back to normal, and people who had called each other diseased dogs’ bottoms and pimply sludge faces the day before greet each other warmly as they go about their daily business.
Probably the best time to visit Blunt is for the annual Ingratitude Day celebrations. Ingratitude Day on April 29th is one of the biggest holidays in Blunt’s calendar. It celebrates the famous incident, in 1163, when King Norman the Norman visited Blunt and was so pleased with the industry of its citizens that he presented the town with a boot made of solid gold. On his way home, however, he realised that no-one had said ‘Thanks,’ so he returned to Blunt with the intention of taking the golden boot back.
The town, however, refused to give it back, and so the king laid siege. That year, there had been a record beetroot harvest and the storehouses were full. After three weeks of trying to starve the town, Norman grew bored and gave up. He left without his golden boot.
