Culture/Country.

“We are the desperate Dan appreciation society,” sang the Kinks way back in sixty-eight, “God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties.”

Ray Davis chirruped that song in his half-falsetto, a hymn to what, even back then, was a dying land of mythical village greens and snoozing gentleman in cricket whites, of not-too-sweaty summer afternoons and toasted crumpets. It was a land being overtaken by the white heat of modernity and whilst the Kinks, as one of those new fangled musical beat combos called pop groups, were clearly part of that particular glimpse of the never-ending shift forwards, they were still mourning a life escaping them; a life that’s now encapsulated in the Sunday tea-time TV of Heartbeat and Midsommer Murders and Doc Martin and whatever that thing with Stephen Fry swaning around Norfolk was called. Or so I expect, I haven’t actually seen any of them, but I expect that they’re desert for people still swollen with meat and veg from lunch, those desperate for cosy, harmless, clotted cream, simplistically ideal distractions to flood their minds.

“We are the draught beer preservation society, God save Mrs Mopp and good old mother riley, we are the custard pie appreciation consortium.”

And so on.

About two and a half years ago, before I’d decided to embark on his arguably insane idea to convert myself from salesman to writer, before I’d applied for a creative writing masters, but after I’d realised in the drunken dead of the night that if I had to spend much longer talking about housebuilding and exhibitions and visitor numbers and pretending to be impressed by toilet mechanisms or pre-built brick walls I was going to lose my mind… After that point, I was wondering what I was going to do. It had to be, I decided, something I cared about; something I was passionate for, but what?

‘All the things you really like are quintessentially English,’ my girlfriend of the time possibly said without looking up.

And she probably had a point.

Somewhere in the back of my imagination there’s a lost world of England (and the rest of Britain too). A world of thatched roofs atop tumble-down cottages, of irregular dry-stone walls, of aching rolling country side sweeping up to herds of blue-grey sheep, of ruby red dry warm beer, of heather and ginger beer and lost islands and gorse covered entrances to secret caves and every other Enid Blyton cliché you want to find, of wind battered coasts with freezing waves cascading across scattered pebbles and underneath flimsy piers with their multi-colour lights flickering in the early evening to sound of an ukulele, of sheer drops through scree down to the tarns huddling in the napes of mountains, of Cotswold stone villages, of befuddled second hand bookshops, of low beamed grouchily offensive charmingly dilapidated pubs, of castles and forts and magnificently ostentatious stately homes hidden under canopies of forest land or aggressively striking out at the summits, of endless cups of tea, of crap ice-cream, of bacon sandwiches, of Sunday roasts, of faggots, of gravy, of steak and kidney pie, liver and onions and mashed potato, of Beatles, of Kinks, of Small Faces, of Edgar, of tumbling streams over looked by narrowly crumbling bridges, of pick-your-own-strawberry-farms, of fairplay, of picnickers braving the drizzle, of spitfire pilot whiskers on retired gentlemen dreamily watching the clouds drift on past, of whisky from rocks, and cider of dropped apples, of gently creasing hills rolling as far as the eye can see. England my Britain, my home - the place that makes me.

All this is outside of the London I love; all this is the backdrop to the urban dirty wink.

“Oh gin in teacups and leaves on the line,” sang Pete Docherty in the only Babyshambles song to be worth a second hearing, “violence in bustops and a pale thin girl with eyes forlorn behind the check-out.”

There is a soulful melancholy beauty in the cities, but this is the romance of the country’s notion of itself.

Except, it might just be a load of old crap; nothing more than a lingering doubt in my memory or that of a cracked vocal at the end of an old vinyl record.

The thing I most liked about being a salesman was the travelling up and down the country visiting clients and potential clients and ex-clients who were trying to avoid me. Despite the long slogs up and down the Ms 1, 6, 40, 4 and all the others, my excursions took me to virtually every corner of the country. There used be a three-dimensional road map wrapping itself around my mind; I could see how the network fitted together. It’s not there now, or it is, it is deeply down in the archive. I don’t miss it, but I do miss rolling into towns I would never have any other reason to visit just as the sun sneaked over the horizon.

Of course, because it was the construction trade I actually spent a lot of time on light and heavy industry estates giving everywhere a fairly grey, metallic, smokey tinge so that places like Worthing and Sandy and Hull and Morley which I’m sure are actually lovely, are synominous in my mind with belching fire stacks from a hundred years ago and smouldering resentment and portacabins and crap coffee.

Well, okay, maybe Hull isn’t really lovely.

But aside from everything else, doesn’t being fiercely in love with your country lend one to a slight inadvertent association with the wrong sorts of ideas? There is, I feel, a little bit of xenophobia around thinking your country is the most amazing, because, of course, the implication is that everywhere else is rubbish.
Because from French wine and cheese and hearty Burgundy stews, the whole of Paris and the foothills of the Pyrenees, German Pilsners and the madness of Berlin, American sunsets and Turkish dawns, Italian smiles and Danish shifting beaches, Polish vodka and Croatia stars above the clear dark sea, everywhere I have been I have fallen in love with something.

Except Hull, of course.

“I don’t know, though,” I say to the empty night air. “It’s like we’re this little bastard, arrogant, mongrel race jammed into a tiny island in the top corner of the globe and we sauntered out across continents laying waste to everyone who got in our way.”

Which, of course, is a hugely simplistic view of Imperialism. Maybe it did a little good, maybe it ruined the world for a couple of centuries. Maybe it helped more than it harmed. Maybe, maybe, maybe, but for everyone who dares to start a sentence with “bloody foreigners” or for every time Nick Griffin shows his fat, feeble-minded face, the one that looks like it’s been used a dumping bucket for both snot and seamen, well, they need to remind themselves where we all came from and what we’d be left without, should we be cast from the global village. For even when the last gunsmoke from the Enfield 303s and the Webley Colts has finally cleared we have to stand up and take responsibility for the sins of the past.

Even the Royal Family.

Ttt. The Royal blooming Family. What to do, what to do…

I find my natural urges want to see them stripped of rank and cast out, the wealth and luxury diluted and redistributed, but then I think of all the old heroes and myths and the decades I studied of English, of British history, and I can’t help but feel that they make up a part of us all. I may, at last, be too old to be a punk-communist-rebel. Not that I’d ever quite gotten around to starting aside from in the falsified idyllic image of self I once carried around in my head, a vision of long grey mac and half drunk scotch and billowing unkempt hair.

For there are elements that we all can admire in the King Arthurs and Merlins and giants sleeping underneath the ground, and of knights galloping off down trenches to slaughter dragons and the Richard Is, the Henry Vs, the Elizabeths, the Shakespeares and Marlowes and Ben Jonsons, the Shelleys and Keats and the Byrons and the Rabbie Burns and the Dylan Thomases and the Graham Greenes, the Elveyn Waughs and PG Wodeshouses, the George Bernard Shaws, even the Osar Wildes and once and again the George Orwells. The people who wrote and fought out the lands into existence through words and description of sights and sounds and tastes.

But that was the past and the future is, as a man who never stopped being a punk once said, unwritten.

I no longer want to tear down my society. Not anymore, not for a long time. I want to help it be better. Even better than it is now.

“Where were you in seventy-six? The looooong hot suuuuummmer, want to be a rebel, turn the hosepipes on,” sang Badly Drawn Boy not so long ago.

“Mmmm-hmmm,” I tunelessly hum, joining in and missing the point for my own convenience as I tap out these words furiously because the deadline is looming, but maybe I’ll get away with it because, amongst everything else, “ah was born in t’UK.”