I am both incredibly proud, and unforgivably ashamed, of being English.
When I say that I am English, I do not mean that I was born in England, or brought up in England, or that my ancestors were English (the majority weren't). It says "British" on my passport. England, having no national anthem, is not really a place any more. It's an idea.
It's not a brilliant idea, mind. It is a collage, a stew, manufactured by the offcuttings of every remark made about the inhabitants of this green and pleasant land. An Englishman cannot be insulted by anything a foreigner has to say; if anything appears to be disparaging, it is dismissed as a humorous misunderstanding, or more frequently, a fault of the foreigner in question.
For example, the Hungarian humourist George Mikes, wrote a book called How To Be An Alien. In the preface to the 24th edition, he complained that the book had been received too kindly- he had hardly annoyed anyone. There was one example of a bank manager reading the book from cover to cover in one sitting and hurling it into the fire for its impertinence, but little else.
Mikes had wanted to stir something in the English, for them to realise that they were being mocked. On the contrary, the Central Office of Information requested that the book be translated into Polish for the benefit of Poles moving to the country.
So that was it. Mikes wrote about the English not as they were, but how they wanted to be seen. And so it was with many other writers- once a nation, the English became a caricature of tea-drinking, island-dwelling, excessively polite cricket fans.
This, in turn, spelt bad news for me. I always read far too much. As a result, I became English.
In particular, I would have to blame the character of Arthur Dent. He scuppered a spaceship for a cup of tea, tried teaching cavemen to play Scrabble, nearly blew up the Universe trying to bowl a cricket ball and, when stranded on an alien planet, made sandwiches. I didn't like him for a long time. Then one day, without warning, I became him.
To prove my point, I will describe something that happened to me just the other day.
I was on a bus, and it was packed. I was standing next to a Frenchwoman and her teenage daughter. Before this story goes any further, I would like to make clear that I have nothing against the French- 1066 was a long time ago and that silliness with Napoleon could have happened to anybody.
In any case, the point of the story was this: I had my hand on a metal bar and the French girl was unashamedly leaning on my hand. With her head. Her hair was on my hand. Fifteen years of education failed to prepare me for that moment.
Arthur Dent, in So Long and Thanks For All the Fish tells a story about how, sat at a table with a stranger in a railway station, he finds himself in an awkward situation. The stranger begins to eat his biscuits. Strangled by English impotence, he can do nothing but eat the biscuits along with the stranger until they part company.
Arthur is relieved to find that his biscuits are hidden under a newspaper, and it is he who has been eating somebody else's all along.
No such relief was available to me. It is most definitely socially unacceptable to rest your head on a stranger in public in England. I do not know about France. It could be that, on a crowded Continental bus, personal space becomes a thing of the past.
Yet there I wasin England, staring into space, pretending someone wasn't leaning on my hand, desperately hoping that the girl's mother would correct her. For twenty minutes, I stood there, wishing I could say something, wishing I could cause a fuss, wishing I wasn't so English. But I wouldn't have it any other way.
