Avast, ye land-lubbers! Don't be hangin' the jib there - let's splice the mainbrace! Fill yer cup with grog, and join me in a shanty, for this day be the finest day in all the year - arrrr, that's right, it be time for scurvy folk across all the seven seas to talk like a pirate once again!
Or at least it was, when I started work on this post on 19th September - International Talk Like A Pirate Day. But that's already a whole month ago, so the day is but a distant memory I'm afraid. But never ye mind - you can talk like a pirate on whatever day you want to really - and perhaps should be encouraged to, much in the same way that pancakes shouldn't be restricted just to Pancake Day - they're far too tasty for that. But it's nice to be reminded, and join with others to do so once a year, at the very least.
We can do better than just talk like pirates though - dressing and drinking like them are actively encouraged on 19th September too. If ever there was a time to get out the bandanas and stripy shirts from the back of the cupboard, and pour yourself a tot or two of rum, this is it. As for eating like pirates though, maybe not so much. In the golden age of piracy, at a time when preserving food for long voyages was largely limited to drying and salting, even your average sailor in the navy could expect little more than weeks and months of hard, dry ships' biscuits and heavily salted or dried beef, with the lack of vitamins making scurvy and poor health a constant worry. The food aboard a pirate ship could well have made that seem like luxury. Sticking to rum was probably wise.
While this was a time well before the development of canning, my pirate-themed meal was, naturally, tin-based - with this 'Pirat' brand tin of fish that I had found in a Polish supermarket a while ago. Speaking not a single word of Polish, I had no real idea of what I was buying - I couldn't even be 100% sure it was a tin of fish, though the flat shape, as well as its position alongside other more obviously fishy specimens on the supermarket shelf, suggested that was the case, and I was keen to give it a go whatever.
