Many of the British Army's infantry regiments will be merged or disbanded in 2004.

All the Scottish units will form part of the new "Royal Regiment of Scotland", those from the north-west of England will form a new "Queens, Lancashire and Borders" regiment.

There will be a new "Yorkshire Regiment", which will absorb the former Prince of Wales's own Yorkshire Regiment, the Green Howards and Duke of Wellington's Regiment. (I am open to cash offers on my old White Rose beret badge and "2 YORKS" shoulder slides, from the disbanded Yorkshire Volunteers.)

The regiments from Wales will merge into a "Royal Welsh". Many of the regiments from the Midlands will form a "Mercian" regiment. (Mercia was the Anglo-Saxon kingdom between Northumbria and Wessex. It later became a disputed borderland between Anglo-Saxon and Viking.) There was a short-lived Territorial Regiment named the "Mercian Regiment". Probably this new regiment will inherit their cap badge.

The regiments of the Queen's Division, recruited in the south and east, are unaffected. The Light Division, which recruits from the midlands and southwest will actually gain a battalion, from disbanded regiments in the southwest.

The old regimental titles and traditions will be retained in the battalion titles of the new regiments e.g. "3rd (Black Watch) Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland".

It is reasonably safe to predict that the battalions of the new or amalgamated regiments might accept their new hatbadges, but won't dispense with any other items of tribal display of their former allegiance, like hackles, lanyards, vegetables and other flora, and so on. Any formal or semi-formal British army occasion will look more than ever like a zoo. The new regiments will also inherit lots more regimental commemoration days on which to get blotto.