At his personal blog Freemania Tom Freeman introduces himself thus: "1977 vintage, British, lacking in class. Tendencies towards cynicism and naivety. Intermittently GSOH. Fan of beer, cats, comedy, cake, politics, philosophy, sunshine and stuff. Bit of a lefty [insert bunch of words ending in ‘-ist’]. I hate writing things like this..." So let me elaborate. Tom's blog offers consistently astute commentary on UK domestic politics, culture and media stupidity, ranging in tone from this concise critique of Compass to some of the most penetrating limericks about the "New" Labour condition ever written. He also Fisks Centrally. Can you help but love him?
"What does England mean to me? I don’t think the essence of the land, or of the folk who live here, can be defined, but the mere asking shows part of the answer. If you try to codify Englishness, you’ll fall flat on your face – but in a very English way. And the passers-by will chuckle, in a very English way. We may find it hard to explain, but we know – knowingly – how to live it.Mostly, we just get on with it; intermittently, we like to agonise about what we’re meant to be doing and whether we’re doing it right. The self-confidence and the self-consciousness together keep us from falling into either cultural dissolution or bigoted nationalism. Some of us go too far either way; sometimes a lot of us do. We can be defeatist and insecure, greedy and arrogant.
But at our best, we’re wryly cocky. We insist on our sporting prowess, but are never surprised by our failure. We revel in our fading dreams of greatness, even as we identify with a film of King Arthur chasing a fool’s errand through mud and pompous farce. We relish both beating the French to the 2012 Olympics and moaning that the building work won’t be done on time. Our monument to our finest hour is Dad’s Army.
If irony and self-deprecation are national traits, then our patriotism can’t be shrill and uncritical. I love my country (even when its faults disgust me), but, Englishly, I don’t really go for public displays of affection, or solemn claims to superiority.
I’m not sure Chesterton had it quite right with his “we are the people of England”. We’re not so much the ‘people’ of a ‘nation’ (a bit too ideological) as, more casually, the folk of a land. We can be an odd bunch, and you might not like us when we’re angry, but we generally mean well.
Scotland and Wales have a lot in common with England (and I’d hate to see us parted – happily, our joint custody of the British state, that curious mix of administrative contraption and imperial theme park, seems to suit us well enough). But one difference is that the Scots and the Welsh each are more explicitly a people with a nation. The less formal English sense of identity probably comes of having long been the dominant partner.
In the past, we reshaped a lot of the world. Now the world comes to us, and we change in turn, as we always have. We have enough eccentricities among ourselves to welcome some more. We mustn’t homogenise idiosyncrasy, nor build identities against each other. It’s a free country – but please drive carefully.
Maybe I’m projecting my own character onto the whole country; I’d not be the first. But it must be at least as likely that England has made me in its image – its own peculiar, half-self-reflected image – and so I feel at home here.
We’re England – and we know we are. Pretty much."
Comments