Maybe I'm too cynical, I've been told as much before. Anyway. I've never agreed that it is foolish to be proud of your country when you can't choose where you were born, but at the same time I feel it is right to question, and one should never be blindly patriotic. I think Emma once said it better than I can, that you love your country like you love your mum, even when she gets drunk at parties and embarrasses you and you're a little bit ashamed of her. It's a bit like that.
This should by no means taken as wholly inclusive or really anything other than my own meandering experience -- but having been blessed with the opportunity of living abroad, I still like to wheel out the old adage "what can you know of England, when England is all you know?". I consider this something of a work in progress -- trying to include everything I can think of without being too brief or going on too long. Following on from last entry
Red postboxes. Sometimes finding ones with "GR" on them, or if you're very lucky "VR" and being a little bit excited about it. Red London buses, big red double-decker buses -- sometimes still with the bit at the back where you can just jump on. Wanting to cry when remembering July 7 and the bus with the roof ripped off. No bins in central London. Coded warnings. The Tube. Standing on a packed train of commuters that no matter the weather outside is always far too hot. Standing cramped and pushed together, and smiling a little at how absurd it is your head is in some businessman's armpit and yet nobody makes eye-contact or even acknowledge you're there. Until the next stop, when even more push their way on. Tony Blair trying to make conversation with commuters as a PR stunt and being roundly ignored. The man with the megaphone who seems omnipotent in London. Every gig, he's there, shouting through his loud hailer about Jesus and hell and the wages of sin. Standing in Oxford Street and shouting. Crowds of people always in a hurry to get to somewhere other than where they are, pushing past you, bumping into each other with their bags of shopping, and not even noticing. Tramps sleeping in doorways as it begins to get dark. Buskers on the underground -- back before it became a corporate sponsored thing. Men with tattered cardboard signs. Zebra crossings. Giving a wave to the drivers when they stop. Muttering obscenities at the ones who don't. Pelican crossings, Toucan Crossings, Puffin crossings. The red man and green man. Push the button and it says WAIT. The green cross code. The green cross code man who I seem to remember everyone I know being scared of. Stranger Danger, and never really being sure what a stranger looked like. The friendly local policeman who would come to the school and show educational videos.. Educational short films on TV about not playing Frisbee near power stations, or something like that. Four television channels for years, and then one day Five. A man that came round to re tune your TV so it could get the exciting fifth channel that nobody ever watches. Satellite dishes. What do you call the box on the back of a satellite dish? A council house. Back when council houses existed. Pebble dashed rows of terraced houses, and hearing the footsteps or the TV of the person in the house next door. Waiting all year for six weeks off school in the summer and making plans and not doing anything. School uniforms and worse, school uniform shops. Shops with signs declaring excitedly "Back to school!" even in the first week of the holidays. Trips to the Natural History Museum to see the dinosaurs. Still feeling like a child when you go, and still wanting to go only for the dinosaurs -- even being surprised there is more there. Trips to Tower Bridge. Castles. Real castles, and they're not made out plastic. Mottle and keep castles. Castles with drawbridges. Norman castles. Some that are just ruined piles of stones. Some with elaborate mazes and staff that dress up and talk in character. Real pubs. Not city centre council estate pubs with glasses thrown and men drinking pints of wife-beater. But real pubs. Pubs with oak beams and open fires and histories going back hundreds of years. Sitting in a corner and talking and drinking and laughing and thinking how there's nowhere else in the whole world that would ever feel quite the same as this. Pubs with old men sitting in the corner smoking. Pubs with the landlord's dog running around and begging for food. Pub food consisting of little more than egg and chips. Time at 11pm. At least it used to be. Local pubs for local people. Everyone stops talking and stares at you as you walk in. Pubs in Wales where they refuse to admit they can speak English. The English countryside. The countryside alliance, fighting the ban on hunting with dogs, and acting like fox hunting is a civil rights issue. Bleak hills and moors and marshes with driving rain and howling wind and mud. Predicting the weather by if the cows are sitting or standing. Trains crossing on bridges with passengers staring blankly out or reading their book. Public transport where if you can ever help it you avoid sitting next to someone. Sitting on the train between stations with occasional announcements from the driver about signals or problems. Ticket windows at train stations, where they look up your destination in a book. Old brick railway stations with the year on the front in different colour brick, now partially obscured by the soot from traffic fumes. Hackney carriages and black cabs that are almost never black any more. Sitting in the back with no seat-belt on and falling over when the driver turns. Roundabouts and a feeling of Russian roulette. Flyovers. Mini-roundabouts. Traffic calming. Speed bumps. Speed cameras -- traffic safety cameras. Traffic wardens, back when they still existed, and parking on double yellow lines. Skips outside of houses always full of seemingly random junk -- broken bicycles, rusted pogo sticks. Mattresses. Dustbin men who used to come into your garden to pick up the bin, back before you had to leave it by the road. Forgetting bin day and running down the road in your slippers chasing them with a waste paper bin. Black wheelie bins, and later wheelie bin cleaning vans. Recycling boxes and paper sacks. Letters to the editor. Recycling collection schedules. Information sheets on what goes in what bin with lists of exceptions.
Tree-lined streets and still years and years after you left school, still looking out for conkers. Still looking up at the branches for what you might be able to reach, or knock down with a stick. Do kids still play with conkers? Soak them in vinegar and polish them and drill a hole in them for the string to go. And acorns, too, which were just boring and sycamore seeds that twirl like a helicopter when you let them go. Or at least sometimes they do. Piles of leaves in the gutter of the road, and kicking them up and making a mess when you're feeling childish. The snails that suddenly appear on footpaths at night after a little bit of rain, and maybe it's just you, but taking the time to move certain snails out of danger. The occasional sighting of a fox in the city, or in your garden. Where have all the sparrows gone? Hanging up coconuts to attract wild birds, and hanging up in the winter feeders filled with nuts. What were the bird feeders we made at school? Something made of lard and nuts. Suddenly not so sure that birds should be eating lard... Spider webs in the autumn when the bushes are bare, and that certain time of year when there seems to be spiders everywhere indoors. Being irrationally scared of spiders even though they can't hurt you.
The Houses of Parliament. Buckingham Palace -- American tourists with cameras and baseball caps stressing the third syllable. And complaining about the weather. Nelson's Column. The stone lions. The fountains and groups of European students. The Millennium Dome and a history of a colossal waste of money. The London Eye, and trying to be Paris. The North. It's grim up there. How "The North" shifts depending on where you are. Friendly Northerners, and tight Southerners. Trams in the cities. and rain. The constant rain. Realising the rain is why The Lake District has lakes. Standing at the bus stop in the rain and laughing when a traffic cone floats off down the road. Bus shelters with seats that are too small to sit on comfortably and tip up when you get up. Small brick shelters with badly spelled graffiti and phone numbers in black pen. Dank bus stations where you can't smoke indoors but there's nothing to protect you from the bus exhaust fumes. Bus drivers who sit on the bus but wont open the doors early, however cold it is waiting outside. Sitting on the front on the top deck of a bus and pretending you're the driver, and still doing it now. Missing your stop on the bus because you didn't press the bell in time, or because the driver was in a bad mood and just didn't feel like stopping. Buses that will see you running to catch them and stop even though they have left the stop or aren't yet at the bus stop. Other buses that just ignore you. Buses that run once every few hours, and even then sometimes just don't turn up at all, and leave you standing at a random bus stop for hours.
Complaining about our weather. It's too hot. It's too cold. "The Great British Summer" where it rains the whole year. The smell of summer barbecues because you don't know when you might get another nice day. Pub beer gardens packed with people drinking lager and enjoying the nice weather while it lasts. One day of rain and cynical comments like "that's it for the summer then, a whole week of sun" before the weather changes. Weathermen on TV and watching the forecast even if you're not sure if you believe it. Isobars and little black arrows and pictures of sun and rain clouds. Everyone remembering the hurricane in the late 1980s and the weather forecaster reassuring a caller that there wouldn't be one. A changing climate, the summers getting hotter and longer. The seaside. Rock with "Southend" printed through it. Beaches of stones and cigarette butts and freezing water. Takeaway vans parked along the seafront selling doughnuts. Walking along the seafront in the cold and the wind. Lines of cars heading to the coast on nice days. Deckchairs on the beach. Beaches with imported soft yellow sand from the Caribbean. But the water is still cold, all year. Seafront arcades with the machines that push the pennies off ledges, or cranes that will fail to deliver the soft toy. Funfairs with roller coasters and ghost trains. Waltzers that gave you whiplash. Candy floss on sticks, candyfloss in bags and getting it all over your hands. Collecting shells and stones on the beach, and sometimes finding a fossil.
Sometimes finding old bullet casings on the beach. The old stone lookout posts in fields in case the Germans had made it to England. Reminders of the past that increasingly fewer people lived through. Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands war. conflict. the Gulf war. wars that are fought abroad.
Traditional Sunday Lunch. Or is it Dinner? The English civil war was fought over whether the meal eaten at midday was called lunch or dinner. Yorkshire puddings. Yorkshire puddings in the North that are so big the entire roast dinner is contained inside it. Roast potatoes. Now freezers in supermarkets filled with ready made alternatives and feeling just a little bit cheated. Pubs serving Sunday lunch, and occasionally finding a good one, As good as home. Drinking too much over lunch and sleeping the whole thing off on a Sunday afternoon. Saturday afternoons when all there was on TV was football. My Dad with the settee moved in front of the TV and a big pint mug of beer. Playing football in the park and hating it. Shouts of keep your eye on the ball and you standing in a field watching the sun set and wishing you could just go play on the swings instead. Parks when they still had swings and slides and roundabouts and other things that you could kill yourself on. Back before they even had spongy surfaces. Then later, trying to buy beer from the corner shop and taking it to the park to drink. The inexplicable finding of pornographic magazines in strange places. Trendies with their white jeans and silver puffa jackets, where did they go? The townies with their tracksuit trousers and their pitbulls drinking bottles of cider. Eventually giving way to the chav, with their burberry and their gold. Chavs, trendies, townies, always the ones hanging around in the town centre at night and keeping everyone away.
The cringe-worthy "Cool Britannia" of the 90s. Britpop and Oasis and Blur and parties in Downing Street with Tony Blair trying to cool. The 1980s. Margaret Thatcher. Recession and inflation and unemployment. Privatisation -- "new money for old rope" or "selling off the family silver" -- BSE. Mad Cow Disease. Receiving a letter in the post from the National Blood Service saying "You remember that blood transfusion you had in the 80s? Well there's a chance you could have been given infected blood and you might now have a degenerative brain disease. But it's impossible to tell. So please, don't be donating blood again." all because of money. They ground up the dead and diseased sheep and fed them to the cows. Then they ground up the dead cows and fed them to other cows. Then they made those cows into hamburgers and sold them. Foot and Mouth Disease and why the farm behind my house stopped having animals for a little while. The smell of the bonfires of the animals. Wondering if the farmers were burning their fields early. The end of the summer with the combine harvesters and haystacks and burning the stubble. The Harvest Festival with people donating tins of food they don't want. The clocks go back and it's dark at 5pm. Halloween and the increasingly Americanised obnoxious children asking for trick or treat. Or the occasional sweet children in their costumes with parents watching from down the drive and thinking it's not really so bad as they're so grateful for their handfuls of penny sweets. Guy Fawkes Night and the plot to blow up the houses of Parliament. Pretending that we celebrate not the failure but instead the thought, the effort, at least he tried. Fireworks and burning an effigy. Organised firework displays as fireworks become bigger, louder, more expensive. Keep your pets indoors on November 5. Public service announcements about not playing with fireworks or picking up the wrong end of a sparkler. Sparklers. Waving them around and writing your name in the cold night air. Checking for hibernating hedgehogs underneath the bonfire. And the scorched grass that takes all year to recover, if at all.
Being English as separate to being British. Not Scottish, not Welsh, not Northern Irish. The shocking number of people in England who don't know the difference between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Just the same celebrating St Patrick's Day -- the typically English excuse to get pissed -- but not really knowing when St George's Day is. St George's Day becoming a vehicle, a tool, for those with an axe to grind. Political Correctness gone mad and nationalistic opinion columns in the red top newspapers. Resentment of asylum seekers and refugees and immigrants and economic migrants. Councils choosing not to celebrate St George's Day since most of the constituency is Eastern European, and the people stirring up hatred and resentment. The British National Party, with election victories in the North. Enoch Powell and the repatriation charter. Grown men who paint their faces with the George Cross for sporting events. England consistently failing to win the World Cup since 1966. The hope with Wimbledon each year -- even though nobody really likes Tim Henman -- and not being altogether surprised when we're out of the tournament in record time. Sporting events cancelled because of the rain. Cricket matches that seem to last for weeks. White vans with red tape stuck on their roofs to make a flag. "Cut out and stick in your window" flags from the tabloids. Celebrity gossip and birds with their tits out on the front. Everything dumbed down, stripped down, sensationalised and reduced to the lowest common denominator. Right wing newspapers with the vitriol and their campaigns and "stop this menace". Discussions in Parliament about things they've never seen, or songs they've never heard, from a story they didn't read but someone told them about.
Local radio stations that wherever you are in the country always sound the same. The same slack jawed vacuous listeners who call in and request the new song by Will Young, in between advertising jingles for double glazing. BBC radio stations with the same news repeated all day, and the same songs from the playlist played every show. And while we're at it, BBC television with now who-knows how many channels on sky and digital and freeview with BBC news and BBC parliament and BBC consumer information. The old Reithian ethics of to educate, inform and entertain, but no longer necessarily in that order or even in equal quantities. The television licence fee and the detector vans that know if you're watching TV without a licence. Points of view where Angry from Manchester writes to complain about all the repeats on TV.
The working week. The whole rat race and the streams of people in grey and black suits as they walk and drive and cycle to the station every day, for 40 hours a week. Sitting in their luxury car traffic jams and listening to the great British bands like the Beatles and the Stones and the Kinks and the Who and the Jam and not seeing the irony in "I hope I die before I get old".
Modern shopping centres where everything is exactly the same but in a slightly different order. The cloning of modern high streets -- or the death of the high street as everything moves out of town to shopping centres and retail parks and leisure parks. The same cinemas and clubs and bars and bowling alleys -- the American themed diners and the Australian themed steakhouses and the Italian restaurants. Leaving the towns with just Chinese takeaways, Indian takeaways above a shoe shop. Feeling sad when the windows are smashed and graffiti sprayed on the walls. I said nobody goes into the town at night these days.
And that's sort of it. Like I said, it's a work in progress so I must make a permanent link to this as I expect it to be constantly updated and changed.
