Holiday

Speaking as one of the five-and-three-quarter billion people who didn't get a day off today, happy 4th of July to all you Americans out there. I hope you are all having enjoyable barbecues, fireworks, football games etc. We in Britain are having Bitterness Day, where the lingering resentment of a 230 year old war is allowed to have its full run and we moan about the bloody Yanks all day long.

I in fact spent today with a work experience girl called Margot. She had just done her GCSEs and was taking a week to see what Leicester City Council do with her parent's money. Actually her family live in a huge house in a tiny village in the countryside and send her to boarding school in Oundle, so Council Tax in their house is not quite the issue it has been in mine recently. It also explains why she was called Margot. She was very 21st Century public school - a combination of BBC English, hockey sticks, clothes from Fat Face and the unbendable self-confidence that comes from having extremely rich parents.

She was actually very pleasant, and we spent most of the day talking about her choice of university. I warned her off Cambridge as it is in the middle of nowhere and full of unbearable tossers and Americans on holiday. Edinburgh, on the other hand, is lovely, as is Durham. Oxford was her choice as she wanted to be an Arabist, and the Foreign Office are well known for only opening letters from Oxbridge graduates, the me-rejecting bastards.

Anyway. I was thinking on the way home from the laundrette about the smart new Germany shirt in my clothes bag and the fact that despite England's timely exit from the World Cup being five days ago, a good two thirds of the flags on display for the team are still there. There will always be a general background number of them gracing the cars and the houses of the poor, but the levels of St George on my street at least are still abnormally high. As I walked past the Merry Monarch pub (a misleading name if ever there was one - it isn't regal and it certainly ain't merry) on Fosse Road I wondered how long I'd last if I were to don my lovely white DVB shirt and walk into the snug. About two minutes at the outside, I reckoned. The levels of cultural tolerance in Britain are varied to say the least. It is profoundly depressing to think that someone younger than me felt that World War Two was an acceptable reason to point at me and make aggressive mutterings when I went outside in my Germany shirt for about five minutes on Saturday afternoon. It was my own fault, of course. I really shold have known better. The fact that there is a better to know, I have a problem with. But this is not quite the subject for this particular day.

Now before we start, I want it understood that I lack all national feeling. At no time will you hear me trumpeting Britain as the fount of all that is good in the world, or that the people of some other nation are not as fabulous as we are. I live where I live, and that's it. I was just as happy to see Germany win their big game against Argentina on Friday as I would have been had England managed to beat a country with a population of less than that of Yorkshire the day after.

To crack that last snide remark I had to look at Wikipedia to find the population of Portugal. I am a thorough man, with not much to be doing, so I can only assume anyone reading this blog will be looking for factual errors as closely as I would to everyone else. I am not going to be caught out. Anyway, I was not surprised to see that the entry for that country is currently protected from editing due to vandalism. A deeper look found that the entries for Christiano Ronaldo and Big Phil Scolari are similarly protected. That's so depressing it makes me want to cry. But that's what English national feeling seems so often to be - the cream of English manhood trying to put the words "Cheating Cunts" into Wikipedia articles becasue we lost a football game. This is another reason why I am less than patriotic. Again, this is something for another day.

So. I am not coming at this from some percieved culturally superior standpoint. But there is little we like better in Britain to have a good old go at the Yanks, and today, on the day you celebrate a fringe of political outcasts making a declaration of independence that hardly anyone wanted from a country that had fewer individual freedoms than you did to begin with and was at best only nominally in charge anyway, that's what we shall do.

First of all, well, where to begin? I was going to say "being loud", but then I thought of "dreadful television programmes", "all the crap that surrounds hip-hop music" and "dimwitted politicians". There is also Christian Fundamentalism, a general lack of awareness of the rest of the world around them, their thing about guns, a tendency towards flag-waving, the death penalty, a nasty habit of invading countires with little thought as to what to do afterwards and finally Tom MySpace, whose omnipresent shit-eating grin and willingness to sell the contents of my blog to the highest bidder I can well be shot of.

But then I think, what do they think of us? I don't really know, but I do know that we must sometimes look odd. Cold, stand-offish, repressed, scruffy, deluded as to our own importance, stuck in the past, smug, arch and superior. The French call us their cousins. That means we're family, it doesn't mean they like us. The Germans call us partners. That means they sell us things with us, it doesn't mean they like us. No-one does really, if the results of this year's Eurovision Song Contest are anything to go by. So who am I to judge?

Frankly, no-one. I have never been outside the European Union and know full well that even after nine months of immersion in a culture, as I had when I lived in Germany, you still lack a lot of insight. I wouldn't presume to know how a German looks at the world. I just don't know. Also, falling madly in love with a girl from Cambridge may have limited the impulse to absorb more of Germany. However, that's by the by.

So yes, this culture thing. Basically I don't understand the Americans and I don't really expect them to understand me. I think the death penalty is barbaric and pointless, abortion is unpleasant but neccessary and, contrary to Charlton Heston's proclaimations, guns do in fact kill people. I know lots of Americans feel the same way. Similarly I find it ridiculous that the English are so self-important, embarrassing that we can't have a drink without also having a vicious punch-up and that we'd all be an awful lot happier if we could bring ourselves to just talk to people rather than rely on gossip, innuendo and baseless stereotyping. I know lots of Britons feel the same way as well.

But the next time you're in Europe, remember - chanting "USA! USA! USA!" in a bar will not endear you to anyone. And don't put a maple leaf flag on your backpack and try to pretend you're Canadian, either. The Canadians find it very annoying, plus we all caught on to that little trick pretty much straight away.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal