What is England?

[Soup]

I am English. Most of you are English, some of you Englishers abroad. Some are Scottish, and Irish, and Welsh, and others from the scattered lands of the anglophone world. All of you have some level of proficiency with the tongue of Shakespeare, Alan Shearer, and Lord Haw Haw, the frenulum of which stretches back to this small nation within a nation.

I like England, most of the time. The good England of Ishiguro and Orwell, Tony Benn and Mr. Ben, affected kindness to suburban hedgehogs.

But there is a bad England. Not just the bigoted England of Football Lads and Tommy Robinson, but that of curtain-twitching, I'm-alright-Jack, common-sense cuntery. A contemporary history of England: "Of Gammons and Breadlines".

To me, England is home. An unspectacular countryside of pleasingly squared-off fields, a quiet belief in liberty and prosperity without American-style overkill, an avaricious commercial-imperialist nation with a pioneering and still extensive welfare state. Nowt more English than the City and the NHS, a generally unshowy patriotism, and an embarrassing deference to royalty. A land of vast difference between a global, hypercapitalist metropole and a far more representative northern and western hinterland. Pubs close too early, nocturnal city centres are pisshead wastelands, and our cuisine barely exists. I love it, and it's a bit shit.

What is your England?

[thenoise]

It's a shitheap but it's our shitheap.

[bgmnts]

The old enemy.

[Zetetic]

Hopefully it'll be gone within my lifetime.

[Soup]

Where's it gonna go mate? Wales? They don't even have an M&S.

[Gulftastic]

[hedgehog90]

England

[Howj Begg]

This Summer I read The World Turned Upside Down and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I'm currently reading Keats and Gibbon's Decline and Fall. I went to 10 proms and i listen to BBC Radio 3 pretty much every day. I finished a degree at Birkbeck college which was specifically set up for the working class. I met up with my fellow students to celebrate the end of our course. None of them are English in origin. I'm not either.

Very earnest post, which I apologise for, but that's my England.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

The mild climate and benign flora and fauna make it a comfortable feeling place outside of winter. It rains, there's gloom, but the English late Spring and Summer can be beautiful, often in a more delicate way than the continent, which matches our complexion.

Deciduous trees, bobbly fields and stone walls, meandering rivers and grazing animals give it a genteel look. I can see why people fall in love with it.

Some of the architecture from our Victorian exploito-MAX colonialism is wonderful and gives our cities an almost unearned grandeur.

I like the clash of cultures, both present day and in our legacy. It makes the place wonderfully odd, without detracting from any qualities we think of as our 'character'.

We're surprisingly good at sport and have even won stuff now and again, but we need to stop assuming we will win every time because this annoys our neighbours a lot.

But it and you has been weighed, itemised and valued and everything here is for sale or for use. Even the old fashioned Conservatism, pre-Thatcher had a sentimental pride in public assets. That has long gone. We need a new national idea, post-neo liberalism to restore our social values.

[Soup]

I like the clash of cultures, both present day and in our legacy. It makes the place wonderfully odd, without detracting from any qualities we think of as our 'character'.

There's something very English about sectarianism and heterogeneity: Angles v Britons, Normans v Saxons, Catholic v Protestant. And for a mostly pragmatic nation we've always been led, I think, by the small but hugely important radical dissenters. A nice paradox of change and continuity, and a unified nation with deep divisions and differences. The North South divide, for instance, is enormous, but even an area with as strong a unique and non-national identity as Yorkshire can only be thought of as something fundamentally English.

But it and you has been weighed, itemised and valued and everything here is for sale or for use. Even the old fashioned Conservatism, pre-Thatcher had a sentimental pride in public assets. That has long gone. We need a new national idea, post-neo liberalism to restore our social values.

This is true, and is the modern English tragedy (even if neoliberalism and its discontents are somewhat noticeable throughout the west). But I hold out belief in the idea that the English, as a whole, have not abandoned this sense of the public polity in the way that politics has for the past 40ish years.

[Pijlstaart]

Men at the docks unloading pallet after pallet of exotica, with us, neckerchiefed urchins looking on in wonder. Fruits, melone and coconut for the summer fetes, big as your head, some of them. Rich, heavy breads, laden with honey and molasses. Great steaming pots of India rubber, being rubbed by an india man with his shit stirrer. A deformed man watches us from a threelegged chair outside a pub, he has killed three men, but we weren't to know.

Being misgendered. Getting chased out the house by mother every morning because she's going to do something nefarious and now so will I. Boiled clothes. No therapy.

[tookish]

What is England but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor with the dogs?

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

England
This article is about the country. For other uses, see England (disambiguation).

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom.[6][7][8] It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west. The Irish Sea lies northwest of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south. The country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, and includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight.

[mothman]

Really? 100 islands? That just makes me want to visit them all.

There's an irreverence towards authority, a feeling of pleasure on seeing the mighty brought down a peg or two, that counterintuitively coexists with reverence towards certain institutions, like the Royal Family.

[thenoise]

Really? 100 islands? That just makes me want to visit them all.

Some are privately owned.

[Johnny Yesno]

England

Ha, I knew it would be. +1

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

A nation that takes equal pride in individualism and queueing.

[BlodwynPig]

Crumbling prisons high on spice
50 quid popcorn at empty cinemas
Winkle picker shoes and thin red ties

[mothman]

Some are privately owned.

You're not helping.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Crumbling prisons high on spice
50 quid popcorn at empty cinemas
Winkle picker shoes and thin red ties

Bring me my bow of burning gold

[a duncandisorderly]

this... the one thing that, unquestionably, english people do better than anyone else, is rock music. I'll grudgingly allow a few scots & welsh into the sentiment, but this island does rock music better than anywhere else in the world.

[Twed]

An unspectacular countryside of pleasingly squared-off field

I disagree with this. In Europe, yeah, maybe. But get outside of the continent and you'll find that others find the green, oakey, agricultural landscape of rural Britain quite gorgeous.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Soup was intending a compliment, I think.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

this... the one thing that, unquestionably, english people do better than anyone else, is rock music. I'll grudgingly allow a few scots & welsh into the sentiment, but this island does rock music better than anywhere else in the world.

I question this. Sure, England has produced many of the best rock bands, but so has the USA and possibly even some of the other countries.

[a duncandisorderly]

I question this. Sure, England has produced many of the best rock bands, but so has the USA and possibly even some of the other countries.

you're welcome to question it, of course, but you'd be wrong.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I question that, too.

[Dex Sawash]

I think we can agree that Canada's right out though

[thenoise]

Krautrock deserves a mention, although Germany also produced Hitler so let's call it a draw.

[mothman]

I think we can agree that Canada's right out though

Bryan Adams runs out of thread bawling inconsolably.

[Johnny Yesno]

Krautrock deserves a mention

Aye, it's far more interesting than the tedious piffle that is English prog.