Today is Saint Patrick’s day, and ever since I was a little creature, no larger that you are now (and probably a great deal smaller) growing up in Zambia, I have had a massive, unearned sense of entitlement about Saint Patrick’s day.

We lived in what was then a small town in the African bush (and which is now quite a bit bigger). Every year, on Saint Patrick’s day, the Irish nuns in the nearby mission baked a cake especially for me, based on no more than my name.

We weren’t Catholic. We weren’t even Irish. (My father was a teacher and he was working at the local secondary school, which I believe ran a British curriculum at that time.) I don’t think we ever went to church there, but where we were, the nuns weren’t exactly spoiled for choice in the availability of Patricks.

Anyway, each year, this wonderful cake would turn up and I would feel special.

Wind forward until I was nine years old and back in Britain and the first Saint Patrick’s Day came along. You know what I got? That’s right. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Here I was, still being a Patrick, and nobody thought that was special. Nobody baked me a cake.

There should be a special lesson here, an important moral message to pass on to you, dear readers, but there isn’t. I’m still bitter. It’s Saint Patrick’s Day again. Where’s my cake?!?

The image is a photo of Saint Patrick from the stained glass window from Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland, CA. Original photo by Simon Carrasco on Flickr via Wikipedia, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence.