Temperama

Big England No.25: By Me

My Big England series ended in the autumn without any contribution from me. I’m making it now because questions about national values and identity are riding high in public consciousness again. Much debate centres on a perceived need among politicians to redefine and assert an idea of “Britishness” embracing British citizens in all their diversity; a particularly big task given a recent survey showing that the numbers in Britain who see themselves as British before everything else is in decline.

I am part of that decline in that I, like many others, think of myself as English more than as British and have done so increasingly in recent years. Why is this? There are a few reasons and I’ve a feeling they are different from those of most who flew the flag of St George during last year’s World Cup. Much conspicuous English nationalism seems to be a defensive response to the impulses that drove Welsh and Scottish devolution. By contrast, my recent, conscious readiness to embrace Englishness is partly a reaction against the associations Britishness still has in my mind with crude chauvinism, Thatcherism and racist nationalism. This is not to say that some people’s “new” Englishness isn’t about those things too – it undoubtedly is. Yet, as one strand of World Cup fever showed, Englishness has also become newly available to ethnic minority groups and that makes it more attractive to me too.

Other reasons for my comfort with Englishness derive from my ongoing reconciliation with my past. Many would describe my background as quintessentially English: son of a self-employed skilled manual worker and a full-time housewife, born and respectably raised in a small rural town that owed its existence to coal mining. But by age eighteen I was glad to escape this variety of English culture, finding it parochial, narrow-minded and suffocating. That said, time and distance lend perspective. Where my elderly parents are concerned I’ve come to greatly admire their doughty self-reliance and if that is an element of Englishness I’d like to think I have inherited.

That said, the bulk of the Englishness I fancy I personify remains sharply at odds with the version of it I grew up with. I’ll never return to that England, emotionally or geographically. My Englishness arises from the strands of English culture that are impure, dissident, even delinquent: urban youth cultures that absorbed fashion sense and music from America and the Caribbean; humour that flows from self-deprecation, a disdain for snobbery, a keen sense of the absurd; that scepticism business; the whole irony thing.

The same spirit nourishes my most recent developments in my English identity. Living in a part of London where most of my neighbours don’t think of themselves as English or even British, my Englishness has become something that is ascribed to me as well as something that I ascribe to myself. The Turkish people in the chip shop tease me about being “English” because my kids don’t like chillies on their kebabs and so on. By “English” is meant, I think, “white British” or maybe just “white”. That isn’t quite the way I see it, but never mind. It’s the way that they see me that I enjoy – hopefully as broad-minded, friendly, interested in them and free from any inherent sense of greater entitlement or assumption of superiority deriving from my nationality. How right they are! And how English does that make me?

P.S. More by me on "Britishness" at Comment Is Free.

Big England No.24: By Amy Philip

I met Amy when I signed my first book deal with Headline Review. She was an editorial assistant, which meant her duties included inserting all my neurotic last minute corrections into my manuscripts and generally putting up with my being a big baby. This couldn't last, and soon she was doing something brainy and efficient at the Greater London Authority before becoming Assistant Director of the Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism (for which she helped compile this recent report.) Despite now being Terribly Important, Amy has remained extremely nice. Her mother is extremely nice too.

"I've always taken it for granted that I'm English without thinking too hard about it. I have the requisite dry sense of humour and cynicism,prefer tea to coffee, use the weather as a conversation-starter and queue patiently for public transport. When I'm visiting other countries I always feel a strange sense of pride in coming from the land of the Queen's English, free speech and Marks and Spencer knickers. And yet I've really struggled to come up with a personal take on this subject. I think it's because one of the things I like most about England is its ability to absorb and adapt to the un-English.

That's why I love living in North London. Where else could your weekend include the (slightly pretentious) choice of organic Venezuelan cornbread in Camden, sushi in Soho, earl grey and scones at Kenwood House or falafel in Golders Green? As for cultural references, I'm part of the generation whose attitudes to family, work and relationships are imported from America. For good or bad, even if you define yourself by rejecting them, Friends and Sex and the City have shaped the language of identity.

And I'm Jewish. This is more than just a statement of religious belief; it means I have a culture, a community and traditions; a sense of being part of something bigger than myself. All four of my grandparents were born in this country so our European origins are no longer part of my family identity, but I know that their parents came here because it was a safe place, a place of tolerance and freedom. They became English and their children were born English. But four generations later we're still Jewish too, and the two exist comfortably together.

It's often hard to define this sense of Englishness and Jewishness without reducing it to the superficial, like buying bagels on a Sunday or discussing Israeli politics round the family dinner table. It can also come over as inconsistency or hypocrisy. I find it difficult to explain to my friends why I don't feel comfortable going to the pub with them on Friday evenings, but don't go to synagogue either; or why I had no problem sharing a house with my lovely (but bacon-frying) Catholic flatmate, but insist that should I ever manage to claw my way onto the London property ladder my own home will be kosher. But in some ways I like it that Englishness challenges us to think about ourselves; it's a question not an answer.

Then there's dating. I want to be with someone Jewish. During my long period of singledom this lengthened the odds quite drastically of just meeting someone in a bar and caused me to resort to the parallel universe populated by semi-normal beings that is Jewish online dating. Low points included the economist who quoted Voltaire and the data analyst who showed me a picture of himself in Lederhosen at a stag weekend in Belgium, although those were minor setbacks compared to my friend's encounter with the shoe-seller from Kendal who writes after-dinner speeches and the tooth-modeller from Highgate with no sense of smell.

I think that, for all their problems, Americans have come up with a good way of talking about nationality. You can be Irish American, Italian American, African American or Chinese American and it's just what you are - the two halves don't have to be in conflict. I feel Jewish English. And that is the England I like best – the one that has room for all the different types of Englishness."

Big England No.23: By Sunny Hundal

He's everywhere, Sunny Hundal. He edits Pickled Politics and Asians In Media, does stuff at Barfi Culture, contributes articles to The Sharpener and, of course, to Comment Is Free. It's just about a miracle that he found time to write...

"I don’t know who said it first, but I’ve heard from many commentators that when you’re an immigrant, England first rejects you, then you reject England, and then you kiss and make up. Or something like that.

So Dave has asked me what England means to me. Or what do I like about it? To be honest I’m still trying to figure that out. I was born here but grew up in India and came back to England when I was thirteen. I’m an adaptive sort of person so I adapted. Or at least I was eased into it, since I lived in west London, which has more than its share of (what you could refer to as) British Asians. I have adapted way more than others who came to England in their teens. That is not to say I changed completely - when I go back to India on holiday people are surprised how quickly I adapt back. But anyway, I think I’m digressing.

What I really, really love about England is its liberalism. Liking a country for its political ideology - does that sound weird? Maybe it does but I think I’m pretty certain on this. I have grown up more liberal in thought than most of my peers and family, and England allows me to express those liberal ideas without being in the minority. It is liberating. Stuff like the food, people’s attitudes, the scenery, the smog, the fast life, the company of people – these are like side dishes. What excites me the most is freedom of thought and freedom of expression. I love the attitude that says: 'You’re annoyed? So fucking what?' I say that all the time.

The beer is ok too. At university I used to abhor pub culture. Now I sometimes like nothing more than sitting in a beer garden when the sun is shining and drinking a pint of Fosters. But all these are transitory emotions; they are not permanent. To have a continual peace of mind you need a healthy mind. And for me, England represents a place to exercise and develop that mind. This doesn’t make me a raging patriot. I used to get jingoistic about India but then grew out of it. Now I get defensive about England when some criticises it, and defensive when someone criticises India. You may think I’m straddling two countries at the same time but I know that right now this is the place I want to be.

Actually when I say 'this' I don’t even mean the rest of England. I mean London, the city that contains the world. Who needs to travel round it when you have it at your feet? OK, I exaggerate, but I’m sure you get my point. I love meeting people and love experiencing different culture, primarily because it takes my mind into interesting and delicious new places. I don’t know where else this mind will take me but right now it is quite happy with this interesting relationship it is developing with what they call England."

Big England No.22: By Iain Dale

His Diary is one of Britain's most popular blogs and as a founder of 18 Doughty Street TV Iain Dale needs little introduction to bloggers or others excited by the Internet's potential. Iain is an advocate of an English parliament for reasons he outlines here and below. He is also a Tory who lives in Tunbridge Wells, but that doesn't mean he's a bad person.

"England is so much more than just a nation. It is a country which is looked up to the world over, both because of its history and its present. It has given the world so much and the world owes it so much. Shakespeare, Dickens, Churchill, Newton, Brunel, I could go on. Alongside its British nation neighbours, England has been at the forefront of defending democracies against tyranny and sacrificed much along the way.

No matter where I have visited in the world I cannot really imagine calling anywhere else home. That feeling of anticipation as the plane circles over Heathrow is something many will identify with. England is unique. Its people continually surprise and amaze. Its countryside and land inspire awe. Its culture is imperious, its sporting achievement enviable. And it's mine.

But although England is a nation, it does not yet possess that symbol of nationhood, its own Parliament. Now that the devolution genie is out of the bottle the demands for the English to be given parity with the Scots will become increasingly vocal. It's not about adding vast extra layers of bureaucracy, it is a matter of fairness.

John Major was right to talk about warm beer and old maids cycling down country lanes. He could have talked about village cricket matches, the smell of freshly tossed hay or of a summer's barbeque, fish and chips or strawberries. Churchill once said that to be born an Englishman is to win the first prize in the lottery of life. As ever, he was right."

Big England No.21: by Sue George

"What do you look for in a bisexual blog?" asks the heading of Sue's most recent entry. Then it says: "I look for intellectual stimulation, a good laugh, and some pictures of hot bi babes. Oh when will I ever find what I am looking for?" I'm not sure if that's Sue answering her own question - partly with another one - or someone else doing it. Whatever, Bisexuality & Beyond is as interesting, informed and erudite as you'd expect from a true woman of letters. She's got a MySpace too.

"What does England mean to me? Trying to define that is like trying to stick down a cloud with drawing pins. It's just too hard, too ephemeral. As to what do I like about it? This too seems bizarrely hard for me to answer.

I am very English. Or so I am often told when I turn down spicy food. Or am backward in coming forward. Or border on the eccentric in my tastes and interests. (The fact that I'm actually half Welsh, that I grew up celebrating St David's day and thinking of Wales as part of my heritage, apparently matters not a jot.) So perhaps I am too English to understand what England means. After all, we define ourselves by what we're not, need some distance to understand our background. But this much I do know: England is the only place in the world I can live, where I feel at home, know what to expect. I have spent a lot of time in Paris: great food, nice clothes, lovely place for a weekend; and New York: eye-wateringly exciting but I felt like I was dropping off the ends of the earth.

Still: my England is a very particular one. Essentially, it's London. Much as I love the Lake District, or the Cotswolds, or Brighton, I am a Londoner, born and bred, feeling all the requisite pride on occasions like the 7/7 bombings. I suppose one of the difficulties I have in thinking about England is that it is constantly changing. It seems very different now to what it was when I was a child. Then, stiff upper lips reigned supreme - or at least they did in my family, where no one talked about the fact that my dad was dying until the day he died, and the day after that no one talked about the fact that he was dead. This was considered normal - no wonder my mother was depressed for years. I'm not sure that exists any more, and thank God for it.

But, anyway, like so many other people of my generation I fled from one sort of England - suburban, conventional, repressed - to another - bohemian, arty, radical, sexually free and joyfully multicultural. Maybe that sort of flight isn't so important any longer. After all, the whole thing about Little Britain's 'the only gay in the village' is that he isn't; that actually everyone is supportive and understanding.

It's easy, really easy, to think about what I don't like about England - from the Daily Sport 'newspaper' to the small-mindedness of 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells'. Don't believe for a moment those little Englanders don't exist any more. And, sometimes, the way that people simply accept their lot and don't fight back. But there are things I like about England, really like, and which I can't imagine existing elsewhere. Roast dinners, afternoon teas and full English breakfasts. The hymn/song Jerusalem, which never fails to move me - in a good way, even though I connect it with funerals. A love of the written word as well as a love of history, countryside and gardens. People being nice, and civil and with measured levels of optimism and enthusiasm. No mature adults wearing the same style jumper because everyone else is.

Yet, most of all, what I really like about England is being allowed to live as I want without people really being bothered one way or another. Or is that just London too?"

Big England No.20: by George Dove

In the service of anonymity, Temperama reader George declines to reveal anything about him or herself including what sex he or she is, what age, or where he or she lives, other than to describe it as "a kindly, if sullen, northern town." George discloses only a "love-hate relationship with football" and an intention to publish soon a "surreal, bitter-sweet, satirical online novel about sex, God and the beautiful game," apparently set in a northern town that is more sullen and less kindly than the one he or she lives in. Could be an interesting read.

"I like where I live even though, as they say, it's really shit. 'They' are right about that in many ways, but the fact that they say it and seem to love saying it, tells you a lot about how little is the England a lot of people round here live in, especially white people, and how they know about and resent the bigger one that is everywhere else. They call their home town chavvy and crappy and boring and shit yet they couldn't imagine living anywhere else. There's a mixture of reasons for this. Some of it's defensive, inverted pride. The attitude is that everyone else thinks we're shit and since they're right and we're stuck in it we might as well act like we think it's the most magnificent shit there is. Fear comes into it too. Many of the people are too scared to move away and because of that they have to cover up their fear with big shows of disdain for everywhere else in the country and possibly the world, though especially the town nearest to ours, of course.

It is amazing how much of this sort of thing still is, even with all the social and geographical mobility we're supposed to have these days. You might expect it from the usual instinctive conservatives, by which I mostly mean teenagers and old folk and the types who've had their horizons narrowed at birth, a bit like circumcision. But you get it from the local politicos in pubs and the ones who read books about history too. There's a touch of that Militant Tendency mentality which decrees that anyone who wants to talk about poetry or fair play for homosexuals or racism gets called 'middle class' and lumped in with the southern softies.

When you've travelled a bit, like I have, and seen something of the bigger English inner cities, you can't help finding this puffed-up parochialism a bit sad. Some of it's just posing, some of it's genuinely bad for the people who do it and the town as a whole. Those with the biggest gobs like to portray themselves as protectors of our proud local culture or whatever - "plain-spoken" and all that - but they're really a sort of self-appointed thought police. When you hear about a Little England mentality you tend to think of frightfully posh chaps with faces like misshapen tomatoes moaning on about foreigners in some rural corner of the Home Counties. But the nothern small town attitude I'm talking about is just as Little English in its own way.

Like a lot of towns in this part of the country we have a small population of Muslim Asians and, just like in bigger places like Bradford, they've tended to become concentrated in in one small corner of the town. With all that's gone on with Islamists lately in Britain and around the world, especially since 9/11 and 7/7 I can almost literally feel the barriers between the brown side of town and the white side - the Islamic and the Western as some see it - getting higher and townsfolk on both sides of them getting more nervous about crossing them. It's such a depressing thing. I want to stand on a soapbox on both sides of the divide and shout at them to relax, look outwards instead of inwards and get on with making the most of the freedoms and opportunities they have to learn about each other and lead happier and more interesting lives."

Big England No.19: by Yellow Duck

A male of his species, Yellow Duck resides in a watery habitat at the edge of a small forest in Leipzig. He has one duckling whose mother, Mrs Duck is, according to the "About" page of her husband's stylish blog, "studying to become a doctor of human medicine." Yellow is a frequent commenter on Temperama and it is a pleasure to publish this description of his fascinating relationship with Big England.

England: A Bird’s Eye View

"Harwich: watching white lights dot its quays early morning. The sky above as opaquely blue as the sea below. I can’t see the harbour or any other reference point. The fog of sleeplessness blurs the view from the ferry even more. Those lights make this new country appear as deceiving as a jack o’ lantern. It is there in front of you, but you can’t grasp it. Not yet. The question arises whether you will ever be able to get at its essence and you start feeling excited and weary.

My mother must have felt the same all those years ago. She had run away from a claustrophobic Calvinist village in the east of the Netherlands – and what nowadays would have been termed an 'arranged marriage' - to Swinging London. There she would go on to meet my father who must have felt the same apprehension coming off the plane from Tehran, Iran. He had been packed off to England by his ambitious father to 'get an education' at an illustrious English university and 'make his parents proud'.

My parents went on to have a fairy-tale wedding in Isfahan, their first son (yes, me) and a cocooned middle-class life of ex-pats and ex-princes. Then came roadblocks, unrest and revolution and they fled. Destination: England. But they never got there the second time round. Being Iranian, and without a job offer or university place, my father could not get a residence permit. So they stayed in the Netherlands, settled down, got jobs, a second son and divorced. For a while after both let slip the words: ‘If only we could’ve got to England…’.

So if anybody asks what England means to me I can merely answer that it is part of the family story. It is not the main backdrop, it is more like an involuntary plot twist or a deus ex machina. Don’t know where to go or what to do next? Just reset the story in England, the place where it all began, a recurring point of arrival and departure.

I wrote a part of this on the plane between Leipzig and Stansted. My mother remarried an Englishman and they now have their home in a small market town in pleasantly sedate Norfolk. I left England about six years ago with the idea of returning, but instead met the love of my life, stayed in Germany and had a child. Chances are that we’ll be going to England with a view to settling there in the future for the sheer light-footed reason because we can. My younger brother now lives in Rotterdam, a harbour city, but is intent on going back to London, an even greater world city, somewhat disconnected from the country it’s the capital of. My father – who set up a factory on the outskirts of Tehran a couple of years ago – travels back and forth between Iran and Western Europe every two months. Whenever he can he pops by to see some old friends in London.

It’s not as if any of us feels homesick for England. But it has become a home of sorts, even if there have been times where we – not having been born here, grown up here or shared in the shared experiences and paraphernalia that are commonly described as Englishness - felt rather detached from the place. It is just that England is there. As a matter of habit. I like the place: for its quaint little towns and villages with their crooked little houses, the chaotic city traffic and lack of motorways, but also for its Marmite and trifle, the stale smell of the inside of an English pub (it’s different elsewhere – really), watching Premier League matches (the German Bundesliga in comparison put my love of the beautiful game in a cryogenic container) and, finally, the English language itself.

Ultimately that’s why I keep returning. That’s why I prefer thinking in English. That’s why I love hearing and speaking English: because of the sheer abundance of words with all their shades of meaning, scintillating sounds, accents and dialects. English has a knack of co-opting words from elsewhere and making them sound as natural ingredients of the language. That’s probably why it’s the main language our family speaks and tells its stories in. I have grown attached to and fond of words such as helix and piffle, lackadaisical and cityscape, strutting and topsy-turvy. Now is there any way these words could be put into one meaningful sentence? Knowing the place, they probably could.

Big England No.17: by Tom Freeman

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."

Big England No.16: by George Orwell

You may have heard of this fella before.

"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognises the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilisation it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.

Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation and nation are founded on real differences of outlook. Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country. Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler’s June purge, for instance, could not have happened in England. And, as western peoples go, the English are very highly differentiated. There is a sort of back-handed admission of this in the dislike which nearly all foreigners feel for our national way of life. Few Europeans can endure living in England, and even Americans often feel more at home in Europe.

When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning—all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?"

From England, Your England, 1941.

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.