view, was more enjoyable than any other single part of the fortnight.
But one of the few things I don’t remember from that holiday is arriving home again – that feeling of being glad to be back in Britain, which I remember from all my other trips abroad.
In general, you don’t see Britain at its best when you re-enter it after a holiday. Places such as Heathrow airport and the docks at Portsmouth are fairly unpleasant. One worries what it looks like to foreigners and wants to make excuses for it. It’s like you’ve just introduced an old friend to a group of people and then noticed he’s got a damp patch round his crotch.
Gatwick airport is the worst. It’s been there for decades and yet it never seems to be finished. It won’t settle into being a mere scar on the landscape, however brutal. It remains an open sore. It also insists on putting up posters advertising how much money it’s spending on all this building work, which simply make you think: 1. You should have spent that money ages ago – before you opened the airport perhaps. Or: 2. The charlatans, incompetents and security hysterics who run this hellhole somehow have lots of money – there is no justice on earth.
But in spite of Gatwick airport, or whichever unlovely point of entry to the UK I’m trying to negotiate, I always feel, and have always felt, a huge wave of pride and patriotism when I come back to Britain. I’ll happily sit in traffic on the M25 contemplating how much nicer our crash barriers and motorway signs are than those in France/Spain/the USA/Italy. I’ll find the drizzle atmospheric. I’ll admire our number-plates, our skips, our yellow road grit containers, our keep-left signs, our pylons.
And it isn’t just a fondness for the familiar. It feels like I know that they’re better, that this is a better country, whatever its inadequacies, than anywhere else. This sounds tremendously jingoistic and doesn’t, for a moment, stand to reason. But I think it’s a common inclination. In its most developed forms, it leads to extremism. But I’m hoping the mild case of it that I suffer from is harmless enough and just results in my being broadly pleased with where I live.
There’s an opposite and balancing prejudice from which, judging by my circle of friends, just as many people suffer. That is to be inclined, in the same knee-jerk way, to dislike the attributes of your own country, to find French/Mexican/Indonesian light switches/police hats/parking meters better than our own.
This is no more based on reason than my patriotic inclination, but I reckon it’s more socially acceptable – or, at the very least, deemed cooler. I feel slightly bitter about that. As prejudices go, surely it’s worse, more misanthropic, to be inclined unfairly against the country where you’re brought up than it is to favour it?
Patriotism is a weird thing. I don’t know whether it’s at all positive or useful, but it seems pointless to suppress it. It can’t be any worse than supporting a football club and probably isn’t much more likely to lead to terrible violence. (I never supported my local football club, which was fifty yards from the house where I grew up – partly because I wasn’t encouraged to feel rooted in my home town, partly because home games fucked up the local parking and put my parents in a bad mood, and partly because I find football intensely dull, which is why I’ve never supported any other football team either. But I can’t deny I always hope Wales will win the rugby.)
Like following a sports team, being proud of your country allows you to take credit, or at least derive pleasure, from successes that you’ve actually had little or nothing to do with, like winning the Premier League or the Second World War. But unlike supporting a sports team, patriotism also involves complicity in events and activities that are downright dastardly. Britain’s history provides plenty of examples: the slave trade, the potato famine, imperialism, child labour and so on. You have to find an answer to the question: ‘How can you possibly support and be proud of an institution that has been responsible for these terrible acts?’ (as Billy Butlin’s wife used to ask as they watched the redcoats).
Different sorts of patriot have different answers to this question. I get the feeling that the French – having had so many different constitutions and regimes, as well as the discontinuity caused