That sceptred Isle - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

Botnst · #1 01-13-2009, 06:28 PM

The age of indifference
Andrew O'Hagan
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009

In the summer of 1976, something happened in our house that challenged my notion of international relations. The English came to stay. Ours wasn't the kind of house where people came to stay: it was a council house 25 miles from Glasgow full to the brim with noisy boys, unhappy dogs, phantom parents and football gloves. But my father had met this man on a building site in Coventry and rashly - or, one might say, merrily - asked him and his family to come and stay in what he called then, and still calls now, Bonnie Scotland.

The discussions and tears before the visit went on for weeks: my mother immediately christened them "the English" and threatened to go on strike. I remember her saying she hadn't a clue what to feed the English and where would the English sleep? Did they have cornflakes or porridge for breakfast or did they expect a banquet from Harrods?

I'd like to be able to tell you that when the English turned up - all five of them, tumbling out of a hippy caravanette - everything went well and peace and understanding broke out in the land of Robert Burns. But it didn't. The English colonised the house exactly as my mother predicted. The kids jumped on the beds and laughed at the three-bar fire. The English daddy never stopped talking in his big English accent and the mammy went straight upstairs for a bath and started smoking in the bathroom. I knew the English were different because the children were doing handstands in the hall up against my mother's woodchip. My three brothers and I sat silent on a green sofa. My father read the Daily Record. My mother was in the kitchen with smelling salts, and one of the English children sang a rude song that included the word "bastard".

"Are they Protestants?" I asked my mother.

"Aye, they are," she said. "And worse!"

Long after the English had gone south, for years actually, my family discussed the horror of that summer invasion, but I found myself wondering about them. Who were these exotic beasts, the English? They seemed to be individualists - at any rate, they weren't a family in the same way we were. Maybe I was secretly quite pleased that they had muddied my mother's Anaglypta. Maybe I reckoned they were freer than us. But my first experience of the English left me with the beginnings of a theory - that whereas the Scots and Irish were a people, a definite community, innately together and full of songs and speeches about ourselves, the English were something else: a riot of individualism with no real sense of common purpose and no collective volition as a tribe.

The following summer, the Queen's silver jubilee brought bunting and arguments to our street. Allegiance wasn't much of an option round our way, though the Orangemen of the town wouldn't have agreed, and soon another antithesis floated over the airwaves in the shape of the Sex Pistols, whom my brothers loved to death for singing "God save the Queen / She ain't no human being". We went through the motions with the ice cream and jelly on Jubilee Day, but everybody I knew thought the Queen was an English joke. The Sex Pistols sounded more like it, an altogether different kind of Englishness.

There was, and is, an English arrogance which resides in the view that they are naturally dominant within the British Isles. This notion was virulent in 18th-century Britain, when the Scots and the Irish were lampooned in the journals and pictorials of the day. The British Museum holds a great and hot-making archive of English caricatures that show the Scots and the Irish as drunken, hopeless, arse-kissing louts. Dr Johnson baited his friend James Boswell along similar lines, and the Scots got their own back in ways briskly intellectual and industrial. Yet the resentment lasted. My grandparents would bristle at the idea of any supposed English superiority - I remember reading a line of Milton's, "Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live", finding it intolerable and wondering whether or not reading it aloud would give my granny a heart attack.

What drove my forebears to drink wasn't Dr Johnson, but the Edwardian imperial snobbery of the English that hurt the Irish and undervalued the Scots contribution to the making of the United Kingdom. My people weren't nationalists, they were socialists, and they disliked the English habit of superiority in what they otherwise considered to be a perfectly sensible union.

more at: http://www.guardian.co.uk:80/books/2009/jan/10/andrew-ohagan-george-orwell-memoriallecture

LUVMBDiesels · #2 01-13-2009, 09:46 PM

Ah, yes the UK in the 1970's...

The English have always looked down on the Scots and Irish. Funny how after 300 years of unity the countries are still so different.

beevly · #3 01-14-2009, 11:29 AM

I remember sitting in an Irish pub one afternoon with an English friend, chatting up the barmaid all afternoon (a very attractive young lady who had just returned from a visit to America). As the evening crowd filtered in, I realized we were getting more than a few hostile stares. I later found out it had nothing to do with me, in fact in rural Ireland an American accent is often good for a free beer and a lively conversation --- rather, the fuss was all about my friend's English accent. This was only a few years back.

Geezer1 · #4 01-14-2009, 11:03 PM

Years ago, I was in a hotel bar in Bedford, England. I started talking to a couple of fellow patrons, electrical engineers working on an airborne radar system. I was vaguely familiar with the system, and said something like "Oh, you're Scots." They remarked that most "fookin' Yanks" didn't know he difference. I agreed, and added that most Americans didn't even know Scotland was a separate country. I couldn't buy another drink!

Botnst · #5 01-15-2009, 07:45 AM

On the flip side, I was with some pals in a bar in Torremolinos and some UK guy offered to buy us "yanks" a beer. The bastard couldn't differentiate our accents? How uneducated! We were deeply offended.

Vladamir · #6 01-15-2009, 03:24 PM

Torremolinos......good grief!!!!!