To really understand Blighty, and put it in context to other nations, you have to live abroad soaking up other cultures and then you have an informed opinion.

A beautifully green, grotty, grey and bewildering failed nation of a state.

The highs are so much higher and the lows so much lower than in other modern states.

The uneducated and rampant poverty is so much more pronounced than in the rest of Northern Europe with the exception of some suburbs in Paris. The rich, the filthy non-tax paying rich are so much more abundant than the rest of civilized Europe.

The working class are utterly brutalized, so too the upper classes.

And those country lanes and rare days of summer make it all worthwhile for a time at least. And the Friday and Saturday nights in search of booze and casual sex.

Young England, middle aged and half English (and Welsh, Irish and Scots): in drinking habits only the Russians come a close second, Italians are the exotic ideal of sun and sophistication, we would like to be American but our ancestors never crossed the pond.

We like to punch above our weight on the world stage. Whatever that means.

Those who leave on the brain drain ticket never return. The pay, the conditions and welcome is so much better over here.

Its getting worse, all the evidence in the media points to it, and yet, when I returned for funeral last year it seemed to be getting better. I only witnessed one mindless act of violence on Cheshire Oaks, MacArthur Glenn Outlet Village and the Nandos chicken with the Andy Warhol design was a real treat.

Fruity curry from English fish and chip shops, now there's a delicacy that existed nowhere else.

Pockets of old England, still in Norfolk and elsewhere, surrounded under siege and drowning in the Indian summer of real ale and wasp evenings, when the ghosts of headless horseman and cavaliers roam the countryside in search of Hammer film producers.

I remember when my first daughter was born, my father urged me to return to Blighty as if she would be tainted by staying in Europe and that being in England was a necessity for her Englishness and well being.

Woofboxer is correct in his statement that a lot of Brits have to try and constantly justify their position in the country they have run away too, and that things are so much worse back in Blighty. Mainly this is the sad, dissafected sorts one meets in certain parts of the tropics, particularly the South China Seas.

There's something essential about the British experience, even when one has left and whose wealth and lifestyle could not be replicated on those temperate shores, that one misses and feels a longing and saudade for.

As long as people talk about and take the piss out of Blighty, we're fine.

'...there's only only thing worse than being talked about and that's not being talked about' as Wilde said, or some such.

The only Canadian I know is Dan Ackroyd who owes his fame to playing an American Blues singer, oh and that Mike Myers bloke who owes his fame to playing an Englishman.

Last edited by formby (2011-06-03 15:16:10)

Last edited by 4F Hepcat (2011-06-04 00:18:25)