Why Is American TV So Bad?

When we lived in London in the 70’s a business acquaintance form New York was in town on business. As neither of them had been to England before, the guy brought his wife along for the trip. Susan and I invited the couple for a meal one evening. They were naturally interested in in our life in London; me as a foreigner and Susan as somebody married to one.

The couple were staying at a hotel at Lancaster Gate in the centre. It seems that they had decided to take a walk in the neighbourhood of their hotel. This area of London is very densely built up with most of big, old house broken up broken up into flats. It’s about a ten minute walk from the hotel to Paddington Station.  Across Bayswater Road from the hotel is Hyde Park. So, it’s a real city centre sort of area.

Over dinner they told us how much they were enjoying getting to know London, but they were curious about one thing: Why were there no supermarkets in London, where did Londoners buy their food? Of course, we explained that there were, in fact, supermarkets in London. We mentioned that we did a weekly shop at our local Safeway in Kensington. The point of this little story is that generalizing from a limited sample is rarely a good way to come to conclusions about a new place.

One recurring theme with BBC Radio 4’s commentators and interviewees is that, on visiting the US, people found American television, particularly the news programs, to be pretty bad. I’ve often wondered about this because TV here, in my opinion, is about the same level of quality as the American counterpart: some of it’s good and some of it’s not. The most common complaint about TV news in the States is that it’s all local with no international coverage. At 6:30pm most evenings we watch the BBC West Midlands regional news program. Surprise: there is no international news covered on this show; it’s local! Is it possible that Brits visiting the US turn on the TV in their hotel room and get the local New York or Los Angeles, or more likely, the Orlando or Las Vegas, news?

Generalizing from the particular, if I ever heard it!

Sports

The British media and, I presume, the people who read, watch, listen to it absolutely love sport. This love often manifests itself as “We are”, “She is”, “He is” the Best in the World. Sometimes this is even true as, for example, in the current cricket test series with the England side trouncing the visiting Indians. On the other hand, the build-up to sporting events offers an opportunity to anticipate the Best in the World status for the British team or player.

BBC Radio 4 and BBC1 TV are two of the media channels that can’t seem to resist this impulse. For reasons that I’ve never been able to understand, this applies especially to tennis and particularly to the prospects for Andy Murray and, before him, for Tim Henman. I like tennis and am a faithful watcher of the Wimbledon tournament every summer. In the two or three weeks leading up to Wimbledon, the BBC manages to interview a surprising number of “experts” who dutifully predict that this year Murray/Henman will surely win. Of course, so far the experts have all been wrong.

During the tournament BBC TV has several hours a day of coverage of the matches with expert commentary by former players. Between matches the commentary team spends its time interviewing each other mainly about how Murray is up to win this one.

In my opinion, Murray is not a bad player; maybe a bit too emotional, inconsistent and sometimes not very sportsman-like for my taste. If it weren’t for players such as Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer, Murray could probably win one or two of the major tournaments. Unfortunately for the BBC those competitors are there.

I have to grudgingly admit that the BBC’s promotion of Murray year after year is pretty entertaining.

Road Signs

Every country has its own conventions about road signage and that’s as true of the UK as anywhere else. Most of the time the meaning of the signs is clear and the information or warning useful. Here's a small collection of my favourite signs.

This just means that you've come to the end of a posted speed limit and the speed reverts to the normal limit for the type of road you're on, i.e. 70 mph on a motorway, 60 mph on other roads outside built-up areas or 30 mph in built-up areas. That's a lot if information for one sign!

This sign tells you to be careful of Evel Knievel wannabes jumping motorcycles over cars on the road. 

Low Flying Aircraft
DUCK!!!

You don't want to see this sign in January.

The Magic Roundabout is in Swindon, Wiltshire. I can testify from personal experience that it is indeed scary

The sign above is the UK Slippery Road sign; the one below is the US version. Please note that in the UK, your wheels will cross each other when you skid.
And the US one has a driver in it!

Funny Thing about Accents

I was just going up to the chemist’s shop (pharmacy) to collect a prescription, when a guy stopped me in the street and asked if I lived in Leominster.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Is there a Lloyds Bank in Leominster,” he wanted to know. I told him there was one and gave him walking directions to the bank. Then he asked me if I was Canadian.

Six years ago, Susan and I moved back to England after five years in the States. I would have thought that my accent then was even more American than usual. It’s natural for people who hear my foreign accent to ask where I’m from, but since returning, I’d say that 70 or 80% of the ones who decide to guess about my origins opt for Canadian. In my previous nineteen years in England, I can’t recall anybody mistaking me for a Canadian. It doesn’t bother me to be thought a Canadian, but the change from a few years earlier is a curiosity.

Susan and I have discussed this phenomenon and we’ve wondered if it has something to do with the presidency of George W. Bush and the Iraq war. Bush and Americans in general became very unpopular in Europe including the UK.  This development came at the same time that we were in the USA.

Our conclusion is that English people who have the natural curiosity about my nationality feel that it is more polite to guess Canadian rather than American. The logic being that if I am, in fact, a Canadian, I won’t be insulted by being mistaken for an American. On the other hand, if I turn out to be an American after all, well, no harm done.

Or maybe I really do sound like a Canadian.

Community Garden – Follow-Up

Both of our local papers, The Hereford Times and The Hereford Journal, featured articles about the arson fire in the ECHO community garden the other day. The stories mentioned the damage that had been done to the garden and the tools, shed, composter and water butt that were lost. And, guess what: people have contributed spades and forks, a new composter, a lockable storage box for tools and even a new shed for the garden.

Is that community spirit, or what?!!

National Health Service

Somebody in the States asked what I thought about the National Health Service here in the UK. I’ve been meaning to write something about the NHS for a while now, and this is a good excuse. First of all, it’s not completely free. Everybody in work pays a specific tax for the NHS much the same as the Social Security tax in the US. I think this money just goes into the Treasury like all the other taxes and then the Government doles out the money to fund all the various parts of the healthcare system.

From there on it’s free to the users who are all the people who live here legally. This means that when we need to see the family doctor, called General Practitioners or more commonly GPs, there are no bills to pay. The GPs are organized into small groups called surgeries that contract with the NHS to provide services in their area. For example, our surgery has seven or eight doctors and the associated staff of nurses and clerical people. Most of the time we can make an appointment with the same doctor each time, however, in an emergency, we have to take whichever doctor is available.

The GPs are the gatekeepers for the rest of the system providing prescriptions, arranging for hospital treatment and so forth.  A couple of years ago I needed an operation on my right hand. It was arranged that I would have the procedure at the hospital in nearby Hereford. Our small, local hospital doesn’t have the facilities for surgery. Anyway, during the pre-operation tests they found out that I had a minor heart problem that needed to be fixed before the operation could be done. My GP was the one who took charge of all this. The short version is that the heart issue was sorted out and the operation was a success. Then I had to have a series of work sessions with physiotherapists at both the Hereford and Leominster hospitals. The only thing I had to pay for was the parking at the Hereford hospital; parking in Leominster is free.

If you’re old like we are (over sixty) all your prescriptions are free as well. This also applies to people who receive certain social benefits. If you don’t qualify for free prescriptions, you pay a fixed price for each prescription regardless of the drug being prescribed. We just take the GP’s prescription to the pharmacy and it’s free. I have three renewable prescriptions that I renew on surgery’s web site. It gets passed automatically to my nominated pharmacy and two days later it’s there.

The dental services work a little like prescriptions except they’re not free for elders. There is a fixed list of prices for various dental procedures that are much lower than the private sector. I even get my glasses paid for by the NHS.

Right now the new Conservative led British government is trying to reorganize the NHS and reduce its cost. Budgets are being cut, but the reorganization plans have had to be diluted after serious public and media objections.

What do I think about the NHS? I think it’s great! Sometimes it’s a little slow and bureaucratic, but, hey, I’ll put up with some small inconvenience for all this free service. There are other ways to provide social medicine; the more common way in continental Europe is to build the system on subsidized, one-source health insurance run or supervised by the government. These plans provide excellent healthcare as well. If I were living in the US, I would be campaigning for some kind of social medicine. It’s hard for me to justify an advanced country whose citizens don’t receive these benefits.

Morality and the Riots

There’s a phone-in program on right now on BBC Radio 4 on the subject of what should be done to prevent the recurrence of the recent riots in the future. One of the themes that has come up frequently in the last week, and has been emphasised on this program as well, is the idea that the people at the top of the society behave as if they are entitled to whatever they want. Politicians, bankers and the Murdock newspapers are usually cited as examples of the concept. Regular rules of society don’t apparently apply to them. The conclusion is that, with these bad examples in front of them, kids from poor neighbourhoods say to themselves, “Why not take what we want too.”

There may very well be some truth to this theory. My problem with it, though, is that it picks out specific, defined sub-groups of the general society as behaving as if there are no rules for their own behaviour. One of the things that surprised me when I first came to live in England was the pervasive disrespect for rules of any kind. Having previously seen the UK from an outsider’s point-of-view, I came here expecting to find a very polite, orderly, queuing-up sort of society. What I found instead was that, except for bus stops and supermarkets, queuing is not so common.

In a pub or shop it is often necessary to demand your turn to be served in pretty direct terms. Otherwise other customers will just keep pushing to the front. On the road the experience is the same, only scary. During the day, delivery vans commonly park in no-parking zones and block half the street. It always seems to me that the courteous and logical thing to do is take turns passing the illegally parked van. But that is not the way it works. If one car heading in one direction around the van is successful, all the cars behind it will close up the gaps and follow. Cars heading in the other direction don’t have a chance to pass on.

Staying on the subject of driving, speed cameras have become very common around England. They’re a cheaper way to enforce speed limits than having cops do the job. The funny thing is that most people here feel strongly that the cameras are unfair, unsporting really. The idea is that since there aren’t enough cops in cars to patrol the roads properly, drivers are entitled to drive at whatever speed suits them.

The conclusion that I draw from all this (and a lot more in the same vein) is that it’s not just kids, bankers and newspaper editors who aren’t subject to the rules of society. A significant portion of the general population feels the same way. Of course, there are issues of degrees. Most of the population isn’t rioting, but there is a continuum from trivial to serious of exactly the same mind set.

Measuring Things

I read once that Thomas Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to get the new United States to adopt a kind decimal measuring system. And I recall that, during Lincoln’s presidency, the US Congress passed a law or resolution making the metric system the official measurements of the country. That didn’t seem to take either.

Here in the UK, the business of measuring stuff is a bit different. We have a nice little Skoda Fabia car with a trip computer that calculates, among other things, the average fuel consumption while you’re driving along. I have a lot of fun with this trying to get the most economy from the car. This statistic is displayed in miles-per-gallon. That’s fine with me; I’ve used that measure of fuel economy for most of my life. However, gasoline/petrol is sold here by the litre, so it’s pretty difficult to calculate the cost of driving the car. All our road signs are in miles to the next place of interest. Speed limits are posed in miles-per-hour.

Some years ago, the British government was required under prevailing EU treaties to enact regulations mandating that things would be sold in metric measures. But, they negotiated a couple of exceptions: milk and beer would still be sold in multiples of pints. Now in most shops and supermarkets everything is labelled with both metric and imperial weights and measures.

For a while, the BBC weather forecasters were moving away from reporting temperature in Fahrenheit degrees and rainfall in inches. These days, they report temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius degrees and rain comes in inches as well as millimetres.

That reminds me of another curiosity: in Britain there are no centimetres. Everything is measured in millimetres. I wonder if there isn’t a little know government department somewhere that has responsibility for deciding what measurements we use. And the civil servants in this department don’t think that Brits are capable of understanding that centimetres are ten times as big as millimetres and metres are one hundred centimetres long.

By the way, I weigh 95 kilos or about fifteen stone.

Plumbing

Living here you’re surrounded by old, historical stuff: castles, thatched cottages, Roman ruins and plumbing. Sooner or later, I knew, I’d have to write something about English plumbing. Here’s what I've learned about the history of English plumbing:

·         The pressure in the public water system used to be unreliable, sometimes strong and other times weak or non-existent. So if you opened a tap you were always in for a surprise.

·         Because of the problem with the pressure, a work-around had to found and it was. Every house has a cistern in the attic space with a ball valve connected directly to the mains water supply. The tank fills up when the pressure is good and the ball valve shuts off the supply when the tank is full.

·         The cistern has to have a lid on it to guard against dirt, bugs, etc., but the lid doesn’t seem to work very well. These tanks, over time, tend to attract dead mice or birds, insects of various kinds and mould infections.

·         All the taps in the house are connected to the cistern in the attic, except for one. As the water from the cistern can’t be guaranteed safe to drink, the cold water tap in the kitchen sink is not hooked up to the cistern, but draws directly from the mains water supply. So, we’re only supposed to drink water from the cold tap in the kitchen.

·         When single spout kitchen taps became fashionable, there was an obvious problem: The hot water comes ultimately from the potentially contaminated supply in the roof. But, once more, a work-around was found. All single spout kitchen taps in the UK have a partition all down the middle of the spout to keep the clean cold water separate from dodgy hot supply.

The two pictures tell almost the whole story about British toilets.

I said "almost" because of something I saw on the web site of B&Q, a big chain of DIY stores here in England. They are now selling Fluidmaster Toilet Cistern, Valve & Pushbutton Kit to replace all that machinery in the toilet tank; rather like the toilets in the rest of the modern world.

Driving on the Other Side

I just realised that I’ve been driving a year longer in cars with right hand controls than with the wheel on the left. I’ve never had much of a problem switching back and forth between the two arrangements. When I drove a rented car in England for the first time, everything was okay except that I had a tendency to look up and to the right for the central rear-view mirror. That issue went away a long time ago.

Sometimes I wonder if there is any aspect of the arrangement of controls in a car that’s inherently better than the other. The only thing I’ve come up with is that, as the majority of drivers are right handed, maybe it’s better to use the left hand on the gear shift and keep the right one free to steer, but I’m not too sure about that theory.

However, it is a bit stranger to drive a right hand control car in a country that drives on the right or left on left, if you see what I mean. Susan and I drive to Belgium three or four times a year to visit friends and relatives. Everything’s fine driving down to the Euro-tunnel or the Dover ferry docks. But, diving out into France we’re now on the wrong side of the car or the road, depending on your point-of-view. Surprisingly, this isn’t too bad. The only real issue is passing other cars and trucks when you can’t see around them from the driver’s side. On the Freeway/AutoRoute/ Motorway/Autobahn (FAMA), where there’s plenty of room and the traffic is divided, even this isn’t very taxing. In towns and cities a lot of the streets are one-way so that’s pretty easy as well.

For a few years, we had a Fiat Spider that I’d bought in the States and dragged around a few countries. This model was never made in a right hand control version. So we drove around Warwickshire, where we lived, on the wrong side. Now, this was a little more challenging. In those days, there weren’t any FAMA’s in Warwickshire and the main towns, Stratford, Leamington, Warwick, don’t have very many one-way streets. So, the whole county was pretty much a no-passing zone for us.

So I’ve concluded that switching sides of the road and sides of the car just isn’t a very big deal most of the time.

Americans in Britain

The Office of National Statistics here estimated that there were about 189,000 American citizens living in the UK in 2009, or around one third of one per cent of the total population. I noticed this long discussion in the Evening Standard blog titled Why do Britons Hate Americans so much? Just about the whole range of opinion on the subject is expressed in these contributions, except one: Americans are stupid.

Back in the 1980’s I heard a phone-in program on the BBC Radio WM. I can’t even remember now what it was about, but I do remember an exchange where the BBC moderator disagreed with a caller’s statement. At one point, the caller said, “… Americans are stupid.” The BBC host interrupted him saying, “Yes, but…”, that is "Yes, that’s common knowledge" ; "But, I don’t agree with whatever else it is you’re saying."

Jeremy Clarkson, the Top Gear guy, used to have another program on the BBC, a sort of variety thing. He sat at a desk with a big world map on the wall behind him. All the countries of the world were shown with one exception: where the USA would normally appear, the map was blank.

The Falklands War

The Falkland Islands, Las Malvinas in Spanish, lie off the coast of Argentina in the South Atlantic several thousand miles from the UK. The islands are a British Overseas Territory, which I think means Colony, but maybe not. (See Fuzzy Boundaries below, 1 August 2011.) In 1982, when the Argentinian army invaded the Islands, I was living in Venezuela and working for a Venezuelan company, but at the beginning of April that year I was in London on a business trip.

 It was a convenient time for both the Argentinian and British governments to have a little war to distract attention for their low popularity figures. On top of that, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s husband, Denis, was a major shareholder in the Falkland Islands Company. As soon as the news broke in London about the invasion, the whole country went a little crazy. In the railway stations there were blackboard signs announcing the immediate cancellation of all military leave. Mobilization for a counter-invasion force to depart was completed in just four days and the task force sailed for the South Atlantic.

I had flown back to Caracas on the day after the invasion, and was attending a cocktail party with work colleagues the next night. Naturally, the Argentinian action in Las Malvinas was just about the only topic of conversation that night. Venezuela and Venezuelans were very much on the side of their fellow South Americans and the invasion was seen by most people as anti-colonial in nature. The general feeling was that the British task force was a bluff and that the Brits wouldn’t really bother with fighting a war over these far-away islands.

At that party I was a lone voice arguing that most Brits really liked a good fight and a significant minority had to make due with Saturday night brawls in the clubs and pubs. Furthermore, I said, Thatcher wasn’t bluffing; this was her chance to prove she had bigger balls than President Galtieri in Buenos Aires. It worked. Thatcher had approval ratings in the low 30’s before the invasion and she won the next election with a comfortable majority. And, I don’t know for sure, but I guess Dennis’s share holdings probably turned out alright as well.

Our Quiet Street

There’s not very much vehicle traffic on our street. It’s a dead-end so most of the cars are local residents or people parking here to walk to the shops in town. The street is three blocks long with a sidewalk on one side all the way to the end. Where the street stops, a grassed footpath connects our neighbourhood to other houses further down the path.

It’s a walk of two or three minutes from our end of the street to the main shopping area of Leominster. With the footpath the street is a convenient shortcut for people to get from home to the shops and a lot of people take advantage of it. The strange thing is that the majority of these pedestrians don’t use the sidewalk, but walk in the middle of the street instead. Some of them move over to the side when they hear a car coming and others don’t.

What’s up with that?

Yanks

Last night I was telling Susan that I wanted to write something about the British meaning of the word Yank since I had used it in the title of this blog. I mentioned that yank or Yankee was a pejorative term here. She said that it used to be that way, but you don’t really hear it any more.

I think the prejudice is still here, but I guess it must have a new name that everyone is too polite to say in front of me.

Another Nice Cop Story

December, 2009 brought us a lot of snow with blocked roads and the whole winter wonderland thing. When the main roads were cleared a bit, Susan needed something from a shop in Ludlow and I volunteered to drive up and get it for her. The drive wasn’t bad, but the parking lot in the center of Ludlow was a real mess with about a foot of snow all chewed up from the cars going in and out.

After my errand, as I was walking back to the car, I reached into my jacket pocket for my keys, but my pocket was empty. I went through the pantomime of patting all my other pockets; no keys. I guessed that they might have fallen out of my pocket when I pulled out my gloves, so I went back to the car and started looking around on the ground. Of course, I couldn’t see anything in the chewed up snow of the parking lot. Then I retraced my steps to the shop scoping the sidewalks on the way. I checked in the shop in case I’d dropped them there. Still no luck.

I’d have to take the bus back home, borrow Susan’s keys and return on the bus to Ludlow, a round trip of a couple of hours. Fortunately, we have old people’s free bus passes. This brought up another problem: I’d only paid for an hour in the parking lot and there was no attendant there. I phoned the Shropshire Council offices in Shrewsbury and explained the situation, gave them my car registration number and it was all arranged that my car would not  be towed away or get fined.

I finally got back and collected the car with no problems.

The next day, a Sunday, I got a phone call from the West Mercia Police station in Ludlow. Some good citizen had found my keys in the parking lot and turned them in to the cop shop. I drove right back to Ludlow; went to the police station; identified myself and got the keys back.

But, I asked, how did they know the keys belonged to me and how did they get my phone number. Here comes the cool part. On my key ring I keep one of those little tags from the supermarket for their customer loyalty program. The cops had called the local Tesco and gave them the number from my tag and got my name, but the Tesco manager wouldn’t give out my address or phone number for confidentiality reason. They knew where the keys had been found and called the council office to see if they knew anything and got my registration number. From this they contacted the Vehicle Licence records office in Swansea, Wales, and got my address. The on-line phone book gave them my home phone number.

Can you believe it, all this to return a set of keys!? Nice cops.

Community Garden

Susan has volunteered for the last couple of years with a local charity called ECHO helping to build a community vegetable garden. ECHO has a range of activities that support local people with learning disabilities. The garden is one of these. Four ECHO participants and a small team of local gardeners have made what was a derelict piece of land into a pleasant and productive garden that is an asset for the whole community.

In the last few months, there have been vandalism and thefts from the garden. God knows what kind of people are doing this stuff, but everybody in the neighbourhood thinks it’s pretty disgusting.

Last night at about three in the morning, I was woken up by some noises in the street outside our house. I looked out the front window and saw two police cars and a couple of firemen rolling up their hoses. I could see lights and hear activity down the path from the end of our street leading to the garden. A little while later a fire engine backed out of the path and left the area.

This morning I walked down the path to see where the fire had been. Someone had burned down the garden shed, which in turn destroyed a number of evergreen trees on a neighbour’s side of the fence. The fire destroyed some of the vegetable beds and melted a plastic compost bin and a nearby plastic water butt. On my way back to tell Susan what had happened, a police car drove up and the cop called me over. He was here to find out who was in charge of the garden and write up the arson report; nice young Community Relations Officer.  Susan and I got him fixed up contact info for ECHO and away he went.

It was not a very good morning, but the cops around here are pretty good.

The Battle of New Orleans

Here’s a curious little story about the teaching of history in this country that is so steeped in its own history. Sometime, way back in the 1970’s, Susan and I were discussing American history when I made some remark about the War of 1812. Susan, who is well educated and very well read, had never heard of it. I explained what happened and hit the highlights: the siege of Baltimore and the writing of the Star Spangled Banner, the burning of the White House in Washington and the battle of New Orleans and Andy Jackson. We speculated that this war had been left out of her education because the British didn’t win. Two in a row against the Yanks would have been would have a bit of education too far.

According to Wikipedia, “Johnny Horton's 1959 version is the best-known recording of the [Battle of New Orleans], which omits the mild expletives and much of the historical references of the original. Horton also recorded an alternative version for release in British Commonwealth countries which did not have unfavourable lyrics concerning the British: the word "British" was replaced with "Rebels", along with a few other differences.” Lonny Donegan, of Skiffle Group fame, also recorded the song in England using almost the same lyrics as Horton’s American version.

Now days, the song comes up on Radio 4 every couple years, and guess what, it’s always the Horton British version with Rebels instead of British who ran though the brambles.

Fuzzy Boundaries

One thing that’s always struck me as odd about Britain is that it’s not very well defined. Geographically the boundaries are, at best fairly fuzzy. For example, the islands surrounding mainland Britain are sort of British, but, in some cases, not really. The Scilly Isles off the Southwest tip of England are definitely part of England; in fact, they’re included in the county of Cornwall. On the other hand, the Chanel Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and a few more rocks, speak English, are loyal to the queen, use the pound as their currency, drink English beer in English pubs and allow the government in London to set foreign and defence policy. But, they have their own local government and legal system. The Isle of Mann in the Irish Sea is in a similar situation. By the way, the Manx parliament is older than the British one. I won’t even begin to get involved with Gibraltar.

Scotland and Northern Ireland are also in the sort-of-but-not-really category. For a while now Scotland has had its own government in Edinburgh that gets more and more autonomy as time goes by. And since the last election, the Scottish National Party (SNP) has had an outright majority in the Scottish parliament. It is the expressly stated policy of the SNP to hold a referendum in Scotland on independence, well, sort of independence.

Northern Ireland also has its own quasi government, but a lot of the decisions are made in London and the Irish government in Dublin has an informal veto on some things. Half its inhabitants want to be Irish citizens and the other half prefers being British.

My theory is that all this fuzziness has to do with two main things:

•        The first is imperial history. When the English/Norman kings consolidated their control in London, places like Wales and the Northern half of England were viewed as colonies of a country that existed primarily in the Southeast of the island. William the Conqueror (also known as the First and the Bastard) even sterilized a strip of farmland right across the middle of England to separate the North from the South. The echoes of these attitudes can be heard today. Everyone talks about Britain or England as if they represented a real country when the fact is that most of it is really a colony of London and the surrounding counties.
•          The second is the fact that the Brits never got around to defining their idea of nation and government in a constitution. So, each incumbent government makes up the rules as they go along.

The result of this history is a sort of country that continually redefines, or fails to redefine, itself.

Europe is the other big problem. The UK is sort of, but not quite, a member of the European Union. In normal discourse, the word “Europe” is used to designate a foreign place on the other side of the English Channel. And no British Government is crazy enough to join the common currency, the Euro. On the other hand, successive British governments have signed up to most of the treaties that make up the EU. The result is that a lot of laws and regulations that have effect in Britain originate in Brussels and the court of last appeal is a European court.

Most of the tabloid press and a healthy proportion of the voters are definitely anti-Europe. On the other hand, the biggest proportion of British exports goes to other European countries. So, is the UK a European country or not? Emotionally it’s definitely not; economically and legally it is. The whole idea of Britain in Europe is a bit fuzzy actually.