Anthem

I usually find the cartoons in the Guardian - strip or otherwise - rather tiresome, but I was amused by this one from last week - amused that someone had gone to the bother of cooking up some silly words which could more or less be sung to the tune of 'The Red Flag', the anthem par excellence for all good lefties.

Although I do have to confess that while I remembered the tune more or less correctly, I have become rather shaky on the words. Worse still, I had conflated the red flag with the internationale. Nor do I know what the panda skins are about, nor do I know who Harry Caine is. Perhaps for panda skins I needed to have read the previous few days' strips, but I don't suppose I will ever know now.

But I do know now, thanks to wikipedia, that the tune started life as a 16th century Silesian folk song. Then part of Germany but now part of Poland.