bignoseduglyguy

I’m not the biggest football fan going. In fact, as a staunch rugby fan, it is safe to say that I am unable to name more than two or three players in England’s Euro 2004 squad. Having said that, my daughters play football and frequently watch ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ so we do sit down to watch big internationals as a family occasionally. What we don’t do is festoon our windows with ‘England’ flags and play the old and wearisome ‘Three Lions On A Shirt‘ supporter’s song by Baddiel and Skinner. Loudly. Very, very loudly. Seventeen bloody times. Like our upstairs neighbour did this evening, like he always does when England play an international. With breaks for getting beer from the fridge, flag adjusting and sofa trampolining, he managed to string this homage out to over an hour and a half. All this rather marred the bucolic charm and rustic serenity of tonight’s episode of the excellent Britain Goes Wild, the BBC’s fortnight of live and recorded programming on our indigenous wildlife. The educational and entertainment value was rubber-stamped when my Dad, a dalesman by upbringin and former county council countryside officer, called to check the kids were watching and stated that even he had learned something new watching the shows. Believe me, admissions like that are as rare as osprey sighting in London.

As I have mentioned in the previous incarnation of this blog, I took up running a month or two back and have been building up to participating in the Chris Brasher Memorial 10k run. On Sunday, and by way of a change from pounding the roads of the Isle Of Dogs, I chose to run circuits of Victoria Park instead. As I ran, I took in the sights and sound in this most English of settings and as I did, I found myself pondering on the changing essence of England and Englishness, now that we are a part of an internet-connected global village. Thinking this a great idea for a blog piece, I made my way home only to discover (whilst leafing through the The Guardian’s Review section in the smallest room) that this very topic is covered in Timothy Garton Ash’s new book Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time. In the extract in the paper, Garton Ash describes an England that sits in a limbo between four competing elements, Island, World, Europe and America. I see the push and pull of these elements every day where Starbucks sits awkwardly alongside Ye Olde C15th Coaching Inn. I see it in the youths outside my window who measure their credibility in term of the latest footwear worn by their South Central counterparts but manufactured by less fortunate peers elsewhere in the world. I see it when we happily scrabble for authentic Mediterranean peppers that have been blast-chilled and flown in overnight but turn our noses up at a locally grown Cox’s Pippin because it has a slight blemish. As I see it, in our rush to embrace the easy, the convenient, the new and the bland into our daily lives, we seem only too happy to ignore or discard the cherishable, the unique, the valuable and the worthwhile. As Garton Ash relates, ‘there has been an England, and a people who have called themselves the English, continuously since at least 937’ and yet we seem more than happy to abandon this heritage to assimilate the worst the world has to offer rather than the best. The piece continues with the observation that ‘the historical connection between “world” and “island” is direct and simple. The world has now come to the island because the island first went to the world’. As the world flocks to England’s shores in forms many and varied, we seem to readily embrace the very worst excesses of globalisation and uniformity that the multinationals have to sell, whilst we fear and shy away from the cultural diversity, shared experience and new horizons that individual migrants can offer.

As the Guardian article points out, England was the cradle from which the modern notion and model of ‘human rights’ grew through the centuries. It is for this reason particularly that I, and a good many others it would seem, find it abhorant that the traditional notion of English and Englishness are under constant threat of misappropriation. This misappropriation is being stealthily but steadily carried out by those who use terms like English and Englishness to describe a country and a state of being that excludes others who do not fit a prescribed racial blueprint. I suspect many flying the flag of Saint George from their windows or mini flagstaffs on their cars around these parts, see the Euro 2004 competition as ideal cover for overblown statements of national pride and anti-elsewhere behaviour. Sadly, I witnessed just such an expression a short while ago, when I broke from writing this to collect the kids from school. I was in a line of parents exiting the school building, walking behind a tall shaveheaded white man in the now seemingly ubiquitous uniform of the masses, the England football strip, trainer socks and expensive white trainers. When the Bengali mother ahead of him failed to hold the door long enough to allow him to barge his way through, he rammed the closing door hard with the buggy he was pushing, presumably to cause it to hit her. When he failed to accomplish this, he swore, tore the door open and set off to pursue the unwitting woman across the playground. Upon catching her up, he rammed her heels extremely hard with the buggy and loomed over her, thrusting his beflagged chest and tattooed arms towards her and leering as if to challenge her to complain. Sensibly, but sadly, she turned and quickly moved away. Just as when some of those round these parts used the well-worn but hollow ‘protest vote’ argument to defend their voting in a BNP councillor in 1993, the cross of Saint George seems to be a flag of convenience, with it’s symbolism open to interpretation, depending on the circumstances.

Billy Bragg talked on the subject of ‘the England flag’ on Radio 4 earlier this week, in programme looking at the concern over possible football hooliganism in Portugal during Euro 2004. He recently participated in a march in Malmesbury where there was a single racist marching in opposition, waving a flag of Saint George. Bragg said that he wished that he and his fellow marchers had had the foresight to also carry and wave flags of Saint George, as this once simple action would have helped reclaim the flag from those who seek to use it as a symbol for their own ends. Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with this and think the idea has genuine merit, I will not be flying the flag at home or in the car. The thought of someone seeing the flag, looking at my close-cropped hair and assuming the worst is just too awful to contemplate.

Title from Vivian Stanshall’s Sir Henry At Rawlinson End.

Today, for the first time in ages, I exercised my democratic right and cast a full five votes in three separate elections;

the vote for the London Mayor
the vote for the London Assembly
and the vote for London’s MEPs

For postal voters like me, this was no easy task but londonelects.org.uk provided a handy 18-step guide to help me put crosses in boxes, fold ballot papers and seal envelopes. Elsewhere on the londonelects.org.uk, there are interesting presentations like At The Polling Station and The Lifecycle Of A Vote.

Before making my mark, I reviewed a wide range of material in order to ensure that I was aware of all the issues. Of all the information I devoured, I have a particular soft spot for the
Pointless Pledges that Danny Baker‘s listeners would propose, were they in the running for Mayor Of London. These some real crackers include filling up the new Swiss Re building in the City with liquid and turn it into a giant lava lamp and breeding a giant hamster to run inside the London Eye.

Meanwhile, SWMBO mentioned the ‘pay it forward’ principle earlier this evening (more of which later if I can bear it) and this reminded me of a recent phone call from my Dad. He rang a few weeks back to ask which way we’d like him to vote. Confused, I asked him what he was on about. He said that he wanted us to advise him on how we were voting as he wished to vote the same way. When I asked him why he simply stated that, in the twilight of his years, he preferred to use his vote to benefit us and the children, trusting that we’d be voting sensibly for ourselves, our fellow wo/man and the planet. We don’t always see eye to eye but his integrity and his concern for others always holds my respect.

It is amazing what one can achieve when one has an hour or so to spare for, with a day off work, I have finally managed to properly migrate my blog back to Blogger. Having tried three or four of the off the shelf offerings, I am now moderately happy with the tweakings I have applied to the Minima template and the general look of the site. The look is very light and airy when compared to the some say funereal old site.

Subtle changes include:

• Old site content is still available via the Oct 2002 – May 2004 archive link.
• The Star Chamber features the blogs of good friends and/or favoured blogfolk – added due to recent flakiness over at blogrolling.com.
• RSS feed is now brought to you care of Atom.

The other key change is that I have decided to limit commenting to those who choose to register to do so. This decision was not taken lightly because I truly value all comments and have made new friends and contacts through them. However, eradicating comment spam was taking up too much time, even with MT Blacklist. I hope that folks will feel that registering is worth the effort and that they continue to do so.

Maybe now I can get back to posting more regularly rather than trying to decide which bloody blog tool to use.

Sprog #4 (pointing to my chest): Your milkies don’t work – Mummy’s do!
Me (surrounded by SWMBO and female offspring): Um…yes.
Sprog #4 (pointing to her chest and those of her sisters): My milkies will work when I’m older…and hers…and hers…and hers!

After much humming and hahhing (or hemming and hawing for American readers), I have moved back to Blogger. Non-blog content will migrate to the new format slowly, as and when time and RSI permits, but for now stuff is all over the place so clicking through is even more of an adventure for my dear longsuffering readers.