On England

After much deep thinkings I have come to the conclusion that England is now nothing more than a collection of noble notions which exist only in the half-remembered past. Did I really grow up in the land that invented fairness and tolerance, the stoic endurance of hardship, make-do-and-mend and leaping to the defence of the underdog? Or was the propaganda so good that the Albion we were brought up on half a century and more ago was a mere figment of the fevered imagination of several hundred years’ worth of deluded historians, writers and thinkers?

Whether by the over-writing of that glorious history by the Marxist destroyers of inconvenient facts, or by the constant erosion of shared values in favour of a loose collection of un-earned entitlements, that land, real or otherwise, is lost. English, British values are no longer prized and the upcoming generations are being force-fed a utopic vision of a federal super state which will deny them the freedoms that forebears so vigorously contested. Theirs will be a future bland in substance but dazzling in ubiquitous, mind-dulling technologies; the machines are winning after all.

I’m not really angry; more disappointed. The promises of a future worth having are now torn up and thrown away, but there’s no point in getting angry – the time for that is gone. Better, I think, to hang on to one of those lost English values of stoicism, bide my time and time my exit. Yes, I can kick up a fuss, if the occasion warrants, but ultimately it is easier to absorb the slings and arrows and make the decision to rise above them. I do get exercised about the loss of the country I used to belong to and that used to belong to me but I realise that in the end England is really just a piece of land I have to share with millions of others who are increasingly not like me at all.

The young? I never liked them. Foreigners? Not that I dislike them for their origins, far from it; I applaud those who uproot and travel to better themselves, but why should I personally attempt to accommodate those who have no understanding of or allegiance to the scrap of land I used to think of as England? The old? I never understood the old and now I’m nearing old myself I still see nothing I have in common with them. Life can brutalise a man, but not me. I‘m no brute. True I need little in the way of comfort but that is simple resilience, not lack of sophistication. I’ve seen sophistication and comfort and idleness and I’m not sure I want much to do with it.

'Urry up 'Arry!

I still have things I want to do but if I want to try and do them while living in the UK I have to work seven days a week to merely stand still financially. So in the end I shall leave it behind without much of a backward glance. I can take my insular English self-reliance with me and I can retire elsewhere in the world. My land may have been forfeit to the forces of political correctness and uncommon sensibilities, but I can take England, my England wherever I roam.