On the road to Damascus

We're having an expensive excellent lunch at The Malt Shovel with my mother and I was looking at Jan with my reading glasses perched on the end of my nose.
"You have a spurious look of intelligence," she said.
Given that we were celebrating my upcoming birthday I thought that, no matter how true, it was a rather cutting remark. But not being one to take offence too easily we chatted about others that share my birth date.
The thing that winds me up the most, that gets my goat, is having to 'share' it with Robbie Bloody Burns. A so called Scottish poet that writes unintelligible drivel, who nobody in England has ever studied (because it's rubbish) but which lots of English seem happy to celebrate with Scottish exiles wherever they are. The haggis, the piper, the toast, it's all total bollocks and has got nothing whatsoever to do with English people.
Anyway, apropos of nothing, my mother interrupted my rant by reminding anyone who would listen (which wasn't many) that it was also a celebration of the Conversion of St Paul. As my mother is rather elderly and I haven't had the heart to mention that I'd converted to atheism, I bit my tongue, avoided a rant, (I thought at that stage that she might be going to pay for lunch) but couldn't resist a "what's that got to do with anything," comment?
I'm not paranoid but it seems like the whole world is against me.