Big England No.15: by Marie Phillips

She's thirty years-old, half French, born and bred in London and has a novel, "Gods Behaving Badly", currently being read by publishers. Her blog, Struggling Author, is all fun and witty wisdom. And she chose the sofa. A woman of all the talents, obviously.

What is English to me?

Well, there’s a certain type of shortish rectangular middle aged woman with short stiff hair waved and dyed yellow (not blonde but a yellow never seen in nature) wearing unflattering tapered trousers and some kind of blouse or a shapeless t-shirt walking down the street slowly in English beach towns pretending it’s not raining, on her way home to her husband who looks like a sunburnt potato and wears supermarket jeans - that’s English to me.

Or a well-to-do couple in an English country house, the woman older now but again with the stiff hair (grey, or sometimes dyed a really nasty shade of black) with pearl earrings and overstuffed sofas and things made of china everywhere, and their husbands who pour you a tea and your boyfriend a scotch without asking, and wear a tie even when they’re alone at home, and the conversation is all about the weather and gardening and David Cameron being a bad thing for the Tories - that’s English to me.

And that weird phenomenon where people in council flats with no income at all somehow have a television of a size last seen being used to monitor space shuttles in Houston and drive cars that could overtake Formula One and wear clothes that cost more than the car and the TV put together just because they have the right person’s name written on them, and jewellery that represents the entire yearly mining output of a medium-sized African nation; whereas people who own half of Hampshire and live in houses that make Buckingham Palace look like a chicken run have furniture that collapses when you sit on it and bathrooms that haven’t been redone since the invention of running water, and when you try to draw the curtains pieces of them come off in your hands, and they don’t have a DVD player or even know what one is, and when it rains you have to run around putting saucepans under the holes in the roof - that’s totally English to me.

I’m a snob, really, aren’t I? I see Englishness wherever there is a difference between me and somebody else that can’t be explained by their having a family background which originated somewhere other than this part of this island. And that’s nothing to do with nationality, it’s just class. People in their thirties who live in flats in inexpensive but fashionable areas of London and read the Guardian and have trendy jobs in the media, who listen to Arctic Monkeys on their iPods and spend their weekends playing football with their friends from university before going to gastropubs in the evening and then watching a DVD of The Sopranos (rented from an internet DVD club) while drinking mid-range red wine before bed - well that’s not what I call very English. That’s just normal.

I am ashamed of myself.

Comments

[Roldy]

In their thirties?

Marie I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that was your twenties.

You'll be knocked up and welcomed to nappy valley in no time at all.

Then we can go to Crouch End for lunch and compare strollers in the park.

[china blue]

Great piece - I hadn't noticed a lot of those things, but I definitely see them now.

Oh, and I think it was definitely their thirties. All us twentysomethings listen to Sway on our Zens.

[Roldy]

Sway on our Zens? You're having us on!

I want to sway on my zens.

Marie? Why aren't we swaying on our zens?