Culture?
There’s been a lot of talk recently about culture, and british-ness, and mulit-culturalism… It sometimes feels like the only things us Brits have in common is a desire to get drunk and to career from one fake holiday to the next. Whenever I travel and see local traditions it always makes me realise how little we have in this respect. So, today is Valentine’s Day where the card industry wants us to feel guilty if we don’t mark our deepest feelings with the purchase of a padded card, we’ve just had Christmas, which in a predominantly secular society is not really about gratitude, isn’t exactly spiritual, and is really about being coerced into buying stuff people don’t really need or want. Looking forward we have Shrove Tuesday next week sponsored by Jif - why would you buy fake lemon juice? Now I’m all about convenience and would typically buy rather than make filo pastry but a lemon?? Then we have Easter (Jesus died to save our souls so have a shitty chocolate egg for a fiver!), May Day, and a couple of random holidays in August that we don’t even pretend represent anything. To complete the year we send out our children onto the streets to harrass and blackmail terrified pensioners or pelt them with eggs.
This isn’t a new thing - in my lifetime it hasn’t really changed, except that lemons are possibly more widely available now and available with our without a plastic coating… So what does it mean to be British? What are we trying to teach immigrants, and our children? The honest answer is that I don’t know - we’re quick to judge and condemn the Americans but at least they know what they’re about - they have proper holidays (Labour Day, Memorial Day, etc), the American Dream, strict moral codes and a strong sense of who they are - they have fierce personal liberty enshrined in a constitution, a passion for success and hard work and a sense of patriotism - they are extraordinarily proud (and grateful) to be Americans. Are we so proud to be British? Or English, or is that European now? Most British people are united by their constant disappointment with the weather, distrust of politics and a sense of abject frustration at the state of our woeful transportation system. Massive numbers are emigrating each year to Europe, US/Canada and Australia - all places I think of as being much ‘happier’ places.
If we could easily take our friends and family with us I wonder how many of us would consider leaving?
As an economy we are much better off than we were just 20 years ago - children living in poverty have access to DVDs - often bought down the pub, more and more is spent on education and health, but it seems that people don’t feel better, happier, more fulfilled - the tidal wave from a christian society to secular consumerism has left a vacuum which we don’t seem to know how to fill - except with alcohol, recreational drugs, sugar and processed food and watching endless celebrities doing really daft things on telly.
This has taken a far more negative tone than I had envisaged but that just represents how I feel about my homeland right now. As a nation we need to really think hard about what makes us happy, makes us British and why we don’t celebrate St George’s Day (23rd April if you didn’t know).