Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Bugger Blighty, Let's Be Europeans
Sitting on a beach in Andalucia - the nice, non-Brit bit sans ink-splattered matriarchs beating and bawling at their children, sans lager-addled 'men' with ghetto-blasters, sans Chelsea shirts, sans pale, diseased bodies - I decided it's time to abandon what's left of our national identity and sink into the warm, civilised embrace of Europe. It was a working class resort and the beach was packed. Yet there was nothing more than a gentle murmur of voices and the cries of perfectly behaved children splashing in the glorious Atlantic breakers. These people had a sense of the public realm and their place in it. We don't. We have an idiot government presiding over a celeb-dazed population, all blindly pursuing their rights and the exaltation of their barely conscious selfhood. It was raining when we got home.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
What are you talking about, it's great here. While you are away we had the launch of another series of Big Brother, the consolidation of power by Gordon Brown, the England team bumped out of the cricket by rain and a Bishop complaining about binge-drinking. Hooray for us!
ReplyDeleteMind you, Ronaldo's leaving for Spain, which tips the balance between the countries a fair way back in our favour.
"I still love the British countryside, and I still love the fading glow of a British national temperament I could recognise when I was young, but I look around me, and I read the papers, and I witness the filth on the TV, and I see the scum flourish at Westminster, and I know that come the next general elections, the British electorate will vote for more of the same." Rob Dewar.
ReplyDeleteAnd do you know what, the Daily Mail reported the shocking news that students in Cambridge celebrated the end of exams by getting completely s**t-faced. Never happened in my day (or, I'm sure, in yours)....
ReplyDelete"We have an idiot government presiding over a celeb-dazed population"
ReplyDeleteAnd did you not notice the news stands in sophisticated euroland?
And where does Hola sorry Hello mag and the concept originate from?
Have you meet the Russians on holiday btw?
If it'd work i'd be all for it. Sadly, i think you'll find the dagos, wops, frogs, krauts, etc. don't think of themselves as 'European' first but as Spanish (etc.) first.
ReplyDeletei reckon the further your sense of identity extends from your immediate locale, the weirder you get. Maybe i'm wrong, i hardly know any foreigners.
We are all strangers in a strange land.
ReplyDeletePriceless. Even when your dead cold hands finally loosen their grip on the flagpole you Brits will still think you have a choice ...
ReplyDelete