Pride of Place

Having been an unwilling observer of the Great British Public for over eight years now I have come to the unmistakable conclusion that they are suffering from an intense lack of national pride.

Before I can expound on that somewhat sweeping generalization, a few points of clarification are in order. First, by “national pride” I am in no way referring to the rabid and, seemingly, inbuilt fear and mistrust of all foreigners which, over the eons, has imprinted itself on the lizard-brain components of native born inhabitants of this island. Xenophobia, as any Scott, Welshman or Pole will attest, is, for the English, both a way of life and a national treasure.

Near as I can figure, this hatred of The Other by the English toward, well, everyone really, comes not from a belief that their land of rolling hills and pebbly beaches is the finest to be found. Rather, the English fear that the great unwashed supposedly massing at the boarders are actually able to do everything, from running a metro system to fitting bathrooms and fucking, better than they do.

Thanks to the flying busses of Ryan Air and SleazyJet, the English rank and file have been able to venture outside the drab confines of their cloud-shrouded cocoon and witness first-hand that trains continue to run when it snows, that the phrase “having a drink” is indeed singular and that deep-fat-fried is not a food group.

These reluctant tourists return home and perform a uniquely English bit of rationalizing. “Sure,” they say to themselves, “the food, climate, healthcare, education, mass transit, postal system government and overall way of life is better in [fill in the country of your choice] but those damn [fill in race or nationality of your choice] want to come over here and take our jobs, and sponge off the NHS!” Nowhere else have I heard people acknowledge that the very infrastructure of the nation is rotten and then, without stopping to breathe or think, complain about all the hordes of moochers trying to get in.

When I first heard this I assumed that the immigrants were being blamed for the crumbling motorways and byzantine bureaucracy (and there certainly is an element of that) but what they were really saying, without seemingly understanding the contradiction, was that England is crap but the rest of the world still wants to live there anyway. Yeah, it’s a toilet but just look at all those poor fuckers standing outside waiting to take a dump.

The English, more than most, know how to hold a grudge. The Germans are hated for starting two world wars, the Spanish for sending two Armadas and the French for being French. In southern Spain and France the English have been exacting a type of revenge by buying all the habitable coastal property and walling themselves into gated compounds. Learning the native language is simply out of the question, jacket potato stands are easy to find and the local supermarket stocks Marmite and Walkers crisps.

The English are not looking for a home down south so that they can rub elbows with a bunch of foreigners- they want a Blackpool with better weather. New Yorkers have Florida and the English have Spain. It’s not much of an advertisement for a place if, as soon as the inhabitants have saved enough money, they flee.

I happened to glance at a British newspaper recently (a very rare occurrence indeed) and my eyes locked onto one particular sentence: “England: it’s all a bit rubbish and that’s OK.” I’m not pulling this quote out of context; the entire article paid homage to English mediocrity. Somewhere along the line it has become perfectly acceptable for this entire society to accept failure as an acceptable option. They expect Australia to beat them at cricket, the Americans to dictate their foreign policy, their children to be fat, fish and chips eating lumps, their health service to leave them for dead, their government to tax them to starvation and the Royal Mail to steal their post.

It is a telling sign of the state of the nation’s self-worth that when it came time to give a nickname to the spectator’s hill above The All England Tennis Club (home to the Wimbledon championships) they named it after Tim Henman, who never even made it to the finals.

For the English, any overt display of national pride not specificity directed toward athleticism is preceded as distasteful. Along side this is a deep despair that although they used to be the world’s biggest swinging dick, they now are lucky if Sudan returns their calls. Mix these two attitudes and you get a people locked into a gilt riddled self-abuse spiral, which can’t but fuel a seemingly genetic predisposition toward alcohol abuse and poor dental hygiene.

To be fair, the English are only a few generations removed from their salad days of Nazi stomping, wave ruling, little brown people exploiting, global dominance. Even Hitler knew he couldn’t fuck with the Royal Navy and it took someone who was for all intents and purposes the living embodiment of divine perseverance to drive the British out of India.

The good old days ended about the time the HMS Sheffield was sent to the bottom by an Argentinean fired, French made, Exocet missile. Only years later did it come to light how close a third-world banana republic came to doing what the combined might of the French and Spanish fleets could never do: rout the English navy on the high seas. Maggie and her team hunkered down in Number 10 knew they would face a public political castration if the Falklands were lost. The Tories would be driven out of Parliament like diseased animals and Nelson’s Column would collapse in shame.

The question remains: did the dissolution of old Empire lead to the utter collapse of English society and pride? Probably. Of course the people who were once ruled by the crown aren’t fairing very well either. Let’s take a little look at the ex-imperial score sheet shall we?

Zimbabwe: fucked
Somalia: fucked
Uganda: fucked
Nigeria: fucked
Palestine: fucked
Iraq: fucked
Pakistan: fucked
India: mostly fucked
Northern Ireland: only just getting unfucked
South Africa: fucked for years by white apartheid rule and now fucked by black democratic rule
China: taking over the world

Not the kind of marks you’d want to bring home to mum and dad.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: England isn’t all rubbish. In fact, once you leave the cities, step out of your car and take a look around, you’ll find that England is indeed that Green and Pleasant Land of Blake and Wordsworth.

Unlike America, England cannot be discovered from behind the tinted windows of a bus and they don’t put car parks in front of the best picture spots. England must be walked to, on and over. The forests might be gone but the grass is there, the rocks, the lakes, the 500-year-old villages, all survive as if they were sealed in a bottle. Yes, every inch has been trod on before but in a way that’s what makes the place so amazing: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Romans, Vikings, French, all walked this way before. They all did their fair share of raping and pillaging but in the end the land shaped them, not the other way around.

Put down the pint, snuff out the fag and stand on a cliff along the edge of the Orkneys. You might see that pride of place comes from the beauty of the land and not from your local football club. Remember that empires won and lost are military and political constructions based on outmoded nationalistic ideals and that every family is from someplace else if you go back far enough. If all else fails, remember that Cary Grant was British, how cool is that?