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I grew up in Ireland, where there has been significant preoccupation with England for as long as I can remember. Although England was often the 'other' by which Irishness could be defined (for the obvious historical reasons) we were also constantly influenced by English culture. We would all watch the BBC or Channel 4 before we would watch RTE or UTV. The children’s programmes I remember most fondly are all English. The comic book I enjoyed reading most was 2000AD. In my John Peel listening / NME reading teenage years I was generally more interested in American bands, but there were always a couple of favorites from England. When raves and clubbing took off around 1991/92, it wasn't long before it seemed like everyone in Dublin (or at least everyone in Sides / the Olympic / UFO) were reenacting what had gone on in and around London and Manchester two years previously. As a result of all this, I associate a lot of positive things with England. I suppose that, not being English, I was able to pick and choose only the positive.
Other thoughts I have on what it means to be English are strongly influenced by a former girlfriend and the way in which she regarded England. She was born and raised in Bournemouth, but the two of us were living in Brussels at the time. My circle of friends there was predominantly English, Irish and Scots. The Irish and Scots, for the most part, seemed content both with being from where they were from and for others (continental Europeans, Americans, Canadians) to make judgements about them based on nationality (possibly because the judgements were generally "you all love to have fun and speak with appealing accents"). The English, on the other hand, while still 'proud' to be English, seemed reluctant to appear to be proud to be English...yet also resentful of feeling this way (the only other people who struck me as having this same conflict were German). When drunk, my then girlfriend and another of our friends would display an unusual degree of (mostly tongue-in-cheek) jingoism if somebody were to show more interest in the Irish or Scots than in the English. The thing is, her parents were Australian and Israeli and his were Indian.
I think that Reidcourchie hit upon something w/r/t the Celtic fringe's prejudices. I have often been surprised by otherwise reasonable Irish people's knee-jerk reactions to England and the English (even essentially jokey ones like cheering for Argentina when watching a World Cup match with English friends), yet I can also understand where this comes from. I have never felt more conspicuously Irish than I did when I lived in London (even though I think of London as being its own entity, a part of England but also separate). I think it partially stems from history lessons (and perhaps republican grandparents), but it also stems from a paranoid suspicion that you are judged for being of a colonised nationality. |
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Simply marvellous. 
