So this Irish student gets off the ferry in London with a little time to kill before check in at his hotel. So what does he do, of course he goes to the nearest pub. Couple of regulars there decide to have a little fun with the lad and spark up a conversation.
"Hey lad", says the one, "you're Irish, right".
"Sure I am", says the young man, "just over for the semester to attend classes."
"Oh", says the other of the locals, "all the better that you're an educated young man. I'll buy you a beer if you can help us settle a friendly argument. We were just discussing the lineage of St. Paddy. Would you know anything about that?"
"As a matter of fact, that is among my areas of study. Thanks very kindly for the beer. I'll be happy to help if I can, what is it you'd like to know?"
"Well, I heard that St. Paddy was a bastard. Is it true?"
"No", says the young man, biding his temper, determined to go about his day without any trouble, "His father, Calpornius, was a deacon and quite rightly married to his mother well enough ahead of his birth for propriety."
A little dissapointed, but not discouraged, the old boys press on as the barkeep delivers the round of beers. "Well I heard that he actually was quite properly English by birth. Is that true?"
The Irishman takes a long thoughtful pull on his beer, thinks about his scholarship, and replies calmly, even congenially "`Tis true, `tis true, as a matter of fact. St. Patrick was born in Wales and taken as a slave by an Irish chieftain. But after six years of service as a shepherd, seeing things from the other perspective and growing strong and wise on our good earth and native character upon his return back to England, he repented of that saying 'we deserved this fate because we had turned away from God; we neither kept his commandments nor obeyed our priests who used to warn us about our salvation' and made Ireland his home once again."
Impressed though they were with this young man's composure, not to mention his education, the more spirited of the two lost his bearing on the subtle insult, after he caught up with it and realized he'd been insulted. It was, after all, his home turf. Says he "Oh yeah? Well, for another round, I heard St. Paddy was a girly boy and a buggerer, wadaya say ta that?"
"This is for a round of beers, right? Among genglemen?", asks the lad.
"Of course, of course!" says the more temperate of the two Englishman.
"Well I can't accept, because I've already answered the question. Of course we've just established that St. Paddy was an Englishman."
The young man lost his schollarship, what with the arrest and ensuing debt and trouble, but wound up winning a Pulitzer after the war. Just like my dear old grandma used to say, if you haven't got anything nice to say, become a journalist.
