Back Story Page 0,27
by German occupation – are more distanced from their country’s past. They think: ‘Our politicians, the country’s official actions, our former empire – they’ve not got much to do with what France really is. We’re all about café culture, baguettes, art and injecting people in the bottom.’
But this type of patriotism doesn’t work for me. I love my country and am proud of its achievements, but consequently I also accept and feel shame for the bad things this state has done, even though I wasn’t even born for most of them. I’d still say that, overall, Britain is a worthy object of pride because it has been guilty of terrible things less often than most civilisations that have wielded equivalent power. Humans are always being horrible to each other and I genuinely take pride in the fact that, when this country had the whip hand, it was significantly less cruel than most. A pretty slender line of reasoning to justify singing the national anthem, you might say, but it works for me.
And, oddly, that annoying bias many Britons show against their own country is something I am perversely rather proud of too. It is a matter of national pride for me that I come from a nation less than averagely inclined towards national pride. I unquestioningly admire our self-questioning inclination. I love our self-loathing. It shows cultural maturity (others would say dotage). I’m reminded of Britain’s attitude by what Calgacus, the Caledonian general, said as he prepared to confront the conquering Romans:
Here at the world’s end, on its last inch of liberty, we have lived unmolested to this day, defended by our remoteness and obscurity. But there are no other tribes to come. Nothing but sea and cliffs and these more deadly Romans whose arrogance you cannot escape by obedience and self-restraint. To plunder, butcher, steal – these things they misname empire. They make a desolation and they call it peace.
It’s a brilliant speech – it makes me shiver. But I expect you’re wondering how that searing rejection of imperialism can possibly resonate with my pride in Britain’s history. You may think it’s because I associate that ancient Caledonian attitude with British steel and defiance. Well, you’d be wrong. Because it’s not really a Caledonian speech at all – as Simon Schama pointed out in his BBC Two History of Britain, it was written by Tacitus, a Roman.
Schama skated over this detail because he was using the speech to encapsulate early Scottish feelings of defiance. But I love the fact that it’s Roman – I think it’s one of the greatest achievements of the Roman empire. Never mind the armies, the buildings, the roads, the central heating, the aqueducts, the statues of men with their nobs out and the popular entertainment formats gruesome enough to make Simon Cowell blush: this speech shows empathy. Within Roman civilisation, there was the sophistication to understand all that was wrong, offensive and alien about Rome to its enemies – and to express that better than those enemies ever could.
History, they say, is written by the victors. Well, here the Roman victors show the compassion, the sensitivity and also the impish cheek to make the vanquished the sympathetic characters. Two thousand years later, Robert Webb and I wrote a sketch about the SS in which they asked themselves, having noticed the skulls on their caps, ‘Are we the baddies?’ The Romans were asking themselves this in AD 100. I think that’s amazing and I believe it’s a self-analytical skill that British civilisation shares with ancient Rome (and that the Nazis, in their adolescent pomp, manifestly lacked). The Romans had it first – but then, we never fed people to lions.
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The Mystery of the Unexplained Pole
On the Belsize Road roundabout, there’s an old FRP. This stands for Flat Roofed Pub and is the coinage of my friend Jon Taylor. Pubs with flat roofs are almost always terrible – scruffy, rough estate pubs covered in tatty England flag bunting. Recently built, these are pubs that have been put there purely to supply the locals with alcohol – there’s nothing historical, gastronomic or even twee about them EVER. They’re just places for pit bulls to chew toddlers while their parents drunkenly watch the darts on a big screen. (In nicer pubs it’s possible actually to play darts, but not in FRPs – the toddlers would only throw them at the pit bulls.)
I’d genuinely love to hear of any exceptions to this rule – of flat roofed