Whistling a merry tune, Mr McShingle rode his bike into Blackpool,
but was dismayed to see a man draping the Union Jack around the Cenotaph.

‘Where’s all the other flags,’ he asked, ‘representing countries of the Commonwealth?

‘Not to mention the Irish, who used to be in it?’

‘Bugger off,’ the fellow responded, ‘you need a bath.’

‘I do,’ he agreed, ‘for I’m drenched with sweat,
after riding from battlefields in France and Belgium, by way of Holland,
Burma, Poland, and the frozen wastes of that former Soviet Union.’

With that he walked off, singing We Shall Overcome,
the iconic anthem of oppressed people, but the ghost of my heroic uncle,
who’d landed in France on D-Day, peered down.

‘Don’t talk about the war!’ He shouted.

‘Which one?’ Cried the leader of a passing seagull squadron, ‘There’s been so many.’

Then a column of British infantry marched by, singing ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary.’

A bird asked, ‘Where’s that then?’

‘In Ireland,’ his pal answered, ‘We flew from there but, confused by humpback
whales blowing huge spouts of water, fleeing Arctic wastes,
de-icing because of global warming, headed back over the northern Irish coast,
slamming into a church steeple. 

‘Then, our navigational antennae askew, we hit that new border in the Irish Sea.

‘Now we’ve been vilified as cross-border invaders from the EU.’

Brendan, the ghost of a Battle of Britain pilot from Éire, joined McShingle,
along with fellow spirits, Hank, a native of New Jersey in the USA, 
who’d flown with the wartime RAF Eagle Squadron.

Not forgetting Mohammed Singh from India, a former Royal Medical Corp nurse,
who’d won the Victoria Cross in Burma, together with Muscovite Mikhail, saying,
‘Don’t forget me, we’re not all followers of Putin.’

Gladys the gull asked, ‘Who is that old biker?’

Her older sister, Wendy the Big Wing, answered, ‘He’s the ghost of a hall porter,
from that hotel now mired in controversy.’

‘You know, the one where asylum seekers have been given refuge by a beneficent council;
but some of the locals are furious.

‘They feel it should just be for tourists.’

Meanwhile, Tariq from Afghanistan, who’d walked across Europe,
fleeing the murderous Taliban, had heard about Blackpool’s famous sea front,
and was about to enjoy a takeaway feast, while taking in the view.

Not the mountains of Cumbria to the north, with their jagged peaks and glens,
or soaring Snowdonia in the west, but a promenade teeming with scantily clad girls.

He’d never seen so much bare flesh - besides skimpy bikinis,
he glimpsed a young man in a mankini, showing a bare bum.

Suddenly, a seagull snatched his eagerly anticipated piece of battered plaice.

Mr McShingle rode by, offering his hand to the bemused Afghan,
saying, ‘Welcome to Blackpool, but watch out for those damned seagulls.’

‘Come, I’ll buy you a meal in the British Legion, that social club established for Britain’s armed forces.’

But the dumbfounded seeker of safety was confused when a bar man,
newly arrived from war-torn Ukraine, asked, ‘Would you like mushy peas?’

But his host reassured him, ‘It’s a Northern English delicacy that goes well with battered fish.’

Perched on a window, watching all this, were the gulls Gladioli and Wendy,
who were alarmed to see angry men walk down the street,
waving the flag of St George, an English saint who’d slayed
a dragon with his shield and lance.

Wendy the Big Wing said to her little sister, ‘I wouldn’t mind nicking his dinner, 
but the poor lad’s suffered enough.

‘Besides, I don’t like those mushy vegetables, they give me wind and drip out of my beak.’

Wendy laughed, ‘Maybe it’s time to give peas a chance!’