A vote for love.

This morning, in the dreich and the drizzle of my beloved Scotland, I voted.

I voted No.

No has been caricatured, in the white heat of this frantic race, as a negative. But no can be splendidly positive, a cry from the heart. When Rosa Parks said no to the men who told her to go to the back of the bus, she was striking a blow which echoed down the years. When Nelson Mandela said no to bitterness and division on his long walk to freedom, he was setting a shining example of the human spirit. When the Pankhursts said no to the querulous plea that ladies should keep quiet and know their place, they were inspiring generations of women.

Saying no can be a fine and splendid thing. You can say no to bullying or demonisation or prejudice. You can say no, I shall not be silenced. You can say no to received wisdom or cheap assumptions or category errors. You can say no to confirmation bias or lazy thinking or taking the easy way out. No is one of the great words in the language, two little letters which can mean so much. Give me a lever and I can shift the world – no can be such a lever.

I voted for the Union because I think people are stronger together than apart. I voted for it because I hate waste. Something can be wonderful even if it is imperfect. The answer is to change the imperfections, to work on a better tomorrow, not to throw the whole thing out. Preserving this United Kingdom is not saying it is flawless or spotless or without fault. She is an old lady, this Blighty I love, and like all of us old ladies, she has creaking joints and a bashed heart and moments of grouchiness and grumpiness. She sometimes gets it wrong, but that does not mean that wrongness defines her. She can still brush up and put on her dancing shoes.

I voted for the Union because I remember the fine parts of its history. There are plenty of dark episodes, of imperial adventures and social exclusion and nasty prejudices. But the dark does not cancel the light. The clouds do not mean the sun never shone. Today, I think of the Great Britain which outlawed slavery, and repealed the Corn Laws, and enacted Catholic emancipation, and gave women the vote, and changed the law so that two men or two women who love each other may marry.

I think of the Britain which survived the Blitz and fought them on the beaches and never surrendered. I think of Winston Churchill, who once said: ‘Success is not final; failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts’. I think of him standing like a lion and insisting that ‘we will defend our island nation’. It is this island nation for which I voted.

Much less famously, Churchill also once said: ‘Although an Englishman, it was in Scotland I found the three best things in my life: my wife, my constituency and my regiment.’ He fought bravely with the Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front, and earned the respect of his men by insisting that they had dry socks. I love that story. It goes along with my faith in the small things. It speaks of my belief that love is not in flowery words or romantic gestures, but may be found in the most mundane actions. Dry socks are sometimes better than roses.

I voted no because I love the wideness and openness of Britishness, which stands for me against the narrowness of nationalism. I like that you can be black British, or Jewish British, or Welsh British or Scots British. I like the fact that it encompasses so much, from The Last Night of the Proms to the Edinburgh Festival to the Eisteddfod to the Royal Meeting at Ascot. It is the place of Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady and Auld Lang Syne, of Macbeth and Black Beauty and Molesworth. It is the gardens at Kew and the Western Isles, the Peak District and the wild Yorkshire moors, the Cornish coast and the mountains of Snowdonia. It is ‘Very flat, Norfolk,’ and ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, and ‘We few, we happy few’. It is five days of Test cricket and the mighty roar as champions gallop up the Cheltenham hill and the sound of a massed pipe band. It is understatement and rain.

I like what Martin Bell said about Britishness. He said: ‘It's tolerance, decency and determination to talk about the weather on all occasions and a tendency, when a stranger stands on one's foot, to apologise.’

I voted no because my ancestors came from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England, and I do not want to have to choose between them. I voted for inclusiveness and old bonds of affection and history and culture. I voted for the poets and the playwrights, the jokes and the stories, the landscape and the sea, the wisdom and the folly.

Most of all, I voted for love.

I love this place. I did not realise quite how much I loved it until I feared it might be gone.

 

Today’s pictures:

I voted in my scruffy doing-the-horse kit, with the muddy earth of Scotland on my boots:

At station three, which will today witness history:

With the lovely Stepfather, who is not covered in mud:

You’ve been WHERE?:

Over there????:

I suppose I had better come and check:

The democratic process, you say?:

And yet even on this glorious day, you still make me work on my canter. I suppose everyday life must go on:

If I were only a bit more flaky than I am, I would believe that she really thought today should be some kind of school holiday. The fate of a nation is at stake, and yet I still insisted that she do her transitions.

I still wrote 2125 words.

I still made soup for lunch.

I still tried to pick the winner of the 4.10 at Ayr.

It is an extraordinary day, but the ordinary still has its place.

All my loves were represented, in that ordinariness – the red mare, the green soup, the fleet racing horses, the English language, the family, the Scottish earth. And in the extraordinary – the cross in the box. And now, there is just waiting, and hope.

No, thank you.

Because I am a goofball, I forgot to send in my electoral registration. Today, there was a wild panic, as the deadline charged down the track like a brakeless freight train. The only answer was a lot of downloading, scanning, filling in and emailing, all things that I am really, really bad at. Luckily, I have a kind friend who is organised, and she helped me with it.

‘I can’t thank you enough,’ I cried. ‘I may now take part in the democratic process. This is what Mrs Pankhurst chained herself to the railings for.’

My kind friend laughed, kindly.

I love Scotland. I fell in love with these hills as you might fall in love with a person, and moved five hundred miles north to live in them. I left my old life and my old friends behind in the south. I still miss the old friends sorely; it is the only sadness of this northern life. I wish for a Tardis, and wormholes. But the hills won.

When I cross the border to Scotland, after a trip to the south, I cry actual tears of homecoming. This place is home to me in a way which is stitched into the deepest reaches of my heart. I love the beauty, the people, the wild spaces. Those spaces amaze me still, they are so improbable in this small, crowded island nation.

I do have Scottish blood. ‘Quite a lot of Scottish blood,’ says my mother, staunchly, at breakfast. I also have Irish blood, English blood, and Welsh blood.

Sometimes I think nationality means nothing. It is a human construct, after all. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, and nations are often no more than random lines drawn on a map, or recent inventions, cobbled together out of territorial ambition, political compromise and contingency. Italy and Germany were only unified in the late 19^th century; they are band-box new. Before that, an inhabitant of the duchy of Savoy was a foreigner to an inhabitant of the Kingdom of Sicily.

All that is intellectually true. It is not emotionally true. The feeling of culture and history and ancestry does mean something. Nationality may be intellectually indefensible, but it is viscerally meaningful.

In the year when the great sprinting mare, Black Caviar, came to Ascot, I went to the Royal Meeting for the first time in years. The place was teeming with Australians, many of whom had never been abroad before, who were following their mighty heroine. I made friends with many of them, at the pre-parade ring and in the stands. I took on, absurdly, the role of ambassador, apologising for the weather, making jokes about the oddness of the British way.

Late on the first afternoon, after spending much time laughing and joking with the great Aussie contingent, I found myself upsides a very British gentleman, one of those old racing types I remember from my childhood. We also laughed and joked, but in a very different way. I suddenly realised I had been very literal with the Australians, because we did not share a culture. With my old racing gent, we fell into the language of our own tribe, dry and ironic, reading between the lines, understanding cultural references without having to amplify. It was not that one was better and one was worse, it was just that with those different nationalities I spoke a different language, even though it was all English. The old gent and I knew each other, even though we had never been introduced in our lives.

I love Britishness, I can’t help it. I love the idiotic obsession with failure, the hatred of showing off, the pragmatism and stoicism, the instinctive saying of sorry when someone bumps into you in the street. I love the queuing and the tea and the understatement. I love the Queen, even though I could give you eight good arguments against a hereditary monarchy. I love the bosky hedgerows and the wild moors, the lakes and tors, the Norman churches and the stately piles. I love the hill farmers and the farriers and the dry-stone-wallers. I love the sucking of the teeth and the shaking of the head. I love that most Britons, when asked how they are, will not answer ‘marvellously well’, but just mutter ‘not too bad’.

I love my Scottish and Irish and Welsh and English blood. I don’t want to have to choose. I could mount a serious, empirical argument for the Union. I could draw on all that history I learnt. I could even break out a bit of economics and geo-politics. But my decision is entirely one of the heart. I want to remain an Ordinary Decent Briton. I do not want to have to carve a slice of myself off. Being British is stamped on my heart.

And that is why, with the utmost respect for those of opposing views, with quiet politeness and reserve, I shall be voting No, thank you.

 

The bells ring; or, in which I refuse to be a cynic.

The day escaped me. There was a lot of loveliness and a lot of rushing about. My beautiful mare had her back done by a brilliant woman. Red was at her sweetest, kindest and best, and it makes my heart sing that now she shall be free from tension and muscle strain.

I have no time for writing now, hardly time for thought. I am still finishing my day’s work and trying to write this blog at the same time. But I did have one thought. It is: I am singingly glad that the bells rang out, and there was a forty-one gun salute, and that the band of the Scots Guards played Congratulations for the royal baby.

I was oddly touched by a picture of happy people waiting outside a London hospital door, sheltering under practical British umbrellas, holding out banners of celebration. The sneerers will sneer, and the mockers will mock, but I think they reveal themselves as nothing more than snobs. They think they are being frightfully clever and egalitarian, wheeling out their republican complaints and their buckets of cold water. What they are really saying is – you, you idiot crowds, you sheep-like rejoicers, are less discerning, less clever, more easily gulled than we are. We, we sophisticates and intellects, see through the flim-flam, the absurdity, the paper-thin circus, to what really matters. You are just being fooled by bread and circuses.

I’m with the Ordinary Decent Britons on this one. I think it is enchanting to have a day of national delight. I’m all for collective celebration. A young prince is born; let the trumpets ring.

Of course it is an oddity to be born a princeling; of course it makes little rational sense. But it is stitched into the national tapestry; it has echoes of Shakespeare in it. It is a happy, gaudy, historical absurdity, and it brings joy in its wake, and I never, ever look the gift horse of joy in the mouth.

If you dissect anything too much, you can reduce it to flimsy. Cricket is nothing more than five long days with a bat and a ball, with rules no one can understand, with commentators saying ‘my dear old thing’, with silly mid-ons and leg before wicket. Yet it brings the same wild uprush of happiness.

A new life has arrived, and if he gets forty-one guns blasting off in Hyde Park instead of a bunch of petrol station carnations, I say hurrah for that. Sometimes I think being a cynic is a cop-out; it’s a defensive crouch, a cheap shot, a drawing back. Expressing uncomplicated enthusiasm is more of an emotional challenge, because it lays you open to mockery; balloons exist to be burst.

The bells are ringing now, as I write this last sentence. I smile as I hear them. Let them ring.

 

No energy left for proper pictures now. Just a very small selection:

This HorseBack mare is called Red. I love her. She worked her magic on a visitor this afternoon:

Stanley the very Manly has a sodding big stick:

And he’s off to find another one, EVEN BIGGER:

The HorseBack foal:

A delphinium:

My own ridiculously beloved Red, never afraid to look goofy, even with her own excessively posh bloodlines:

If she were a human, she would be a princess, and I let off metaphorical 41 gun salutes for her in my head every day.

The Ashes; or, the wonder that is Blowers.

This morning, I started writing a rather long, involved blog. I thought you might like a good, meaty Saturday read. But then I switched on Test Match Special and Henry Blofeld was on such cracking form that I had to stop everything to listen.

Test Match Special is one of the shining lights of British broadcasting. I don’t imagine there is anything else in the world at all like it. It is peopled by eccentrics, jokers, joshers and statistics geeks. ‘What’s the record, Malcolm?’ At which point Malcolm makes a little humorous murmuring noise and digs out some obscure stat from 1911.

TMS is such a glorious programme that I think I would listen to it even if I knew absolutely nothing of cricket, and had no interest in the game. It is a raging joy and delight for anyone who appreciates the English language and the British character. In the Ashes, we get the added enchantment of a couple of wonderful Aussie voices, livening the cultural mix. It’s such a clever thing, because it makes the perfect counter-point to the old, old sporting rivalry.

In the box, with the genteel cake and the polite messages from the devoted test fans, the Australians and the English are sweetly courteous and sporting. They admire the other side’s skill, cheer a great shot by an opposing batsman, are scrupulously fair. There is an astonishing lack of chauvinism, even though you sense of course they desperately want their own team to win. When the youthful revelation that is Ashton Agar amazed the entire cricket world by putting on an eleventh man stand of 98, saving the day for Australia after a catastrophic collapse, every English commentator was devastated that he was out before he reached his hundred.

I adore test cricket. I have no interest in the quick version of the game and don’t follow twenty-twenty. I love the extraordinary tension and drama that builds up over the five days. I love the fact that nations who do not have test sides are baffled by the fact that a single match can last for so long a time. I love the stories and dramas and characters that are given room to breathe over those long, rolling, sunlit days.

I love the idioms. The very fact that there is a position called ‘silly mid-on’ makes me smile. ‘He just tickled that,’ the commentators say, with a straight face.

I love the storied rivalries. The Ashes is the most special of all, because of the snaking history of Australia and England with leather and willow. It started in 1882, when Australia thrashed England on home turf, and a newspaper wrote an obituary: this is the day that English cricket died and the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. A group of women in Melbourne then presented a small urn to the English team, containing the burnt remnants of a bail, and so The Ashes was born.

And still, 130 years later, that tiny urn is fought over with fierce, diamond-sharp competition. Little boys from Brisbane to Bolton grow up dreaming of representing their country in The Ashes.

If I had the time, I would cancel everything and sit all day and listen to every minute of the eight hours of coverage. It’s hard to believe that you can be on the edge of your seat in a game that takes such a long time, and breaks for old-fashioned tea. But you are. As it is, I tune in and out whenever I can, and if I miss a particularly thrilling spell, I go back to the iPlayer in the evening and catch up with the day’s play, listening in a trance of hazy pleasure.

Dear old cricket. Dear old Blowers, who encapsulates for me everything that is splendid about this form of the game. He exclaims in delight every time he sees a flappy pigeon, gets improbably excited when he spots a shiny bus driving past (he has a thing about buses), calls every single person, no matter what their age or position, ‘my dear old thing’, gives the players straight-faced nicknames. ‘And here comes Starkers,’ he says, as the Australian fast bowler Mitchell Starc runs up to the crease. (For the Dear Readers from abroad: starkers means naked, in British slang.) He is the most treasury of national treasures, someone who will never be replaced.

As I come back from working my mare, and settle into a lazy Saturday, and think vaguely what will win the July Cup at Newmarket, I turn on Blowers’ wonderful voice and I genuinely feel all is well with the world.

I woke this morning in rather a bad mood. I felt tired and twitchy and filled with self-criticism and angst. Not working fast enough, too many things to do, too many tricky decisions to take. I don’t like myself much when I am in this mood, because I have so much luck and so much to be grateful for, and I have no right to feel so scratchy. But Blowers banishes all that. He has the miraculous talent of spreading sunshine wherever he goes. I smile and my shoulders come down and the clouds roll away. All possible things will be well. How lovely it is that one good man can perform such a miracle, through the radiophonic device.

 

Today’s pictures:

A few shots from the week:

The beloved beauty:

The little HorseBack foal:

Stanley the Dog dauntlessly catching flies:

The hill:

Going to extremes.

I try to do work, but my mind keeps going back to Woolwich. It shocks and horrifies in so many ways that the brain feels battered, trying to take it all in. It is, most of all, so un-British. A man ranting on a city street, his hands shining with blood, fanatical hatred in his eyes, his familiar London accent at odds with the extremist platitudes falling from his mouth is not what one expects, in this country.

We are not the nation of warm beer and cricket and maiden ladies cycling to church which John Major once nostalgically conjured up. I’m not sure Britain ever was that, even in the lost age to which Major was clearly harking. Blighty is, however, a battered old warrior, who has been round the block more than once. Extremes have not flourished here, in recent history.

It might have been a wild, untamed place, centuries ago, when the Marcher Lords went untrammelled and kings and their favourites were murdered in unspeakable ways. There were crazed extremes when the country divided into Roundhead and Cavalier. But when Europe was torn with internecine strife in the 19^th century, Britain did not join that particular party. There was no 1815, no 1848; no barricades in the streets of London as there were in Paris or Vienna. (Admittedly, the British did protest for specific reasons: they rioted over the unjust Corn Laws, and marched for the Chartists. But these were movements of quite a different kidney.)

Later, in the twentieth century, when the Fascist and Communist movements roiled Europe and Russia, the equivalents of right and left here petered out into damp squibs. The Blackshirts could gain little purchase. The Communist Party of Great Britain was characterised through much of its history by squabbling and swerves in policy, before it finally disbanded.

In its recent history, Britain really does seem to exemplify the middling sort. In contemporary life, there is absolutely nothing to compare to the God, Gays and Guns wing of the Republican party in America. No member of the House of Lords would ever take to the floor to insist that the world was created six thousand years ago and that this should be taught in schools, as has been expressed by august senators. (This is not swishy one-upmanship; Blighty has other weaknesses to American strengths.)

There is, even now, in the sometimes intemperate age of the internet, a sense of restraint, pragmatism, stoicism. The best way to be beloved in Britain is not to be passionate about any cause (this is considered a little too much and dicing with dullness) but to be ironical and self-deprecating. Humorous self-deprecation may be the defining characteristic of ordinary decent Britons. Even in usual conversation, the centre holds; the Goldilocks principle applies. The classic British rejoinder to the polite question of How are you? is Not too bad, thank you.

So what happened yesterday had layers of ramifications to its shock. It was not just an horrific murder in itself; it was The Extreme, walking and talking on a London street. And then, out on the internet, other extremes began to join in. Send them all home (who? where?); time for Britain to grow a backbone; Enoch Powell was right. This last one made me genuinely puzzled. ‘But,’ I said to my mother, ‘the Tiber is clearly not foaming with blood.’ Some of the comments were so vile I do not have the heart to write them down here.

The English Defence League and their cohorts began to join in. There was a strong flavour of Take Our Country Back. From whom was not explicitly stated; the foreign, the other, the in any way different, I could only assume. The irony was that the killer who spoke to the camera was a Briton, born in Romford, whilst the incredibly brave woman who talked calmly to him, as he held his bloody knife, who tried to distract his attention away from vulnerable mothers and children, was not British at all. Are we supposed to send this extraordinary person back too?

Just as I began to despair, to believe that my reading of the British character was all wrong, that perhaps it was the nuts and lunatics and extremes who now held sway, the gentle voice of reason began to assert. People called for calm, begged not to meet hatred with hatred. One man who lived in the neighbourhood said he was just going to get on with his ordinary life, because that was the British way.

It is hard to remain reasonable in the face of such visceral horror. I suppose it is human, in some ways, to want to find a scapegoat, demonise The Other, identify a neat, convenient group to blame. But extrapolation is a dangerous and misleading game. One Muslim does not mean all Muslims. By this warped logic, one might as well say that since 93% of the prison population is male, all men are criminals.

There is also the almost congenital inability to process risk. When something like this happens, there is always a shout for hard-line tactics, the cry to ramp up the war on the terrorists. But in the cool halls of statistics, where fact lives, you are six times more likely to die in your bath than be killed by a fanatical fundamentalist. (Latest figures: annual deaths in bathtubs – 29; averaged annual deaths over the last ten years by terror attacks – 5. Those numbers are from England and Wales; there do not seem to be national figures.) Are we to insist that everyone take showers? That is before one even goes into the big numbers, the ones that run into annual thousands – road deaths, suicides, poisoning, falls.

I think the thing that makes me saddest is that in amidst all the noise, the central tragedy gets lost. There was a brave man who gave honourable service to his country who is no more. He will have family and friends and comrades who mourn him. The ragged shouting voices do not honour their grief or his passing, but merely try to hijack a human loss for their own, frightened purposes.

 

Just one picture today, of these Scottish hills, which always act as consolation for me when the inexplicable happens:

Sunday Jubilee

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It was a really happy day.

Very early, I went up to see the mare. She raised her head, whinnied, and cantered from the farthest corner of the field, swirled to a halt in front of me, raising a dramatic cloud of dust, ducked her head, and whickered. She has never done that before. She usually waits, regally, as if she is the Queen herself, for me to come to her. I felt as if she had given me a huge present, and showered her with love and carrots, both of which she seemed to find eminently acceptable.

I did two thousand words.

Then I thought, bugger it, I’m supposed to be working all afternoon, but the Diamond Jubilee does not come along every day, so I went up to my mother and the Lovely Stepfather, and we watched some of the dear old BBC coverage. I have been so cut off from the world in my deadline fever, that the idea of a royal regatta existed only very faintly on the far edge of my consciousness. But oh, oh the boats. The whole Thames was filled with them, everything from dour old working Yorkshire coal boats (the captain of that was my favourite; ‘Here’s one for the North,’ he said, grinning all over his face) to Edwardian pleasure cruisers. There were proper Naval vessels and narrow boats and lovely Victorian rowing skiffs. There were Olympic rowers and, perhaps the thing that amazed me most of all, Venetian gondoliers.

‘Someone went and got VENETIANS,’ I yelled at my mother.

The Queen looked awfully happy, and the banks were lined with Ordinary Decent Britons, yelling and whooping and giving three cheers.

On paper, Republicanism makes perfect philosophical sense; the hereditary principle is, on the face of it, absurd. But on a day like today, it just feels a little bit snobbish and curmudgeonly. There were crowds of people, having a perfectly lovely time, in the gloomy summer weather, and I defy anyone to shake a reproving finger at that.

At four, vaguely aware that there was something going on on our village green (a very rare thing in Scotland; it was laid out on an English model by some old laird who had been brought up in the south) I wandered down with the Pigeon. And there was the village, dancing. They were doing a mass strip the willow, to much hilarity. Then there was three cheers for Her Majesty, and a rendition of God Save the Queen. It was oddly touching. Balmoral is not away, and half our shops have By Royal Appointment signs above their doors; here on Deeside the Royal Family feel like locals.

I loved the whole thing. The older I get, the more I appreciate a bit of good old British pomp. I even rather love the fact that, in London, it was raining. Sunshine would be far too vulgar and faintly European. We are bred to bad weather. On the radio, some onlookers were being interviewed. ‘Is the weather dampening your spirits?’ asked the presenter. ‘Oh, no,’ they said, and with marvellous non-sequitur, ‘You see, we are from Norfolk.’

Yesterday was my father’s birthday. It was the Derby. He adored the Derby. He always went, looking very smart in his shiny black top hat. I was fired with the excitement of the great race, and it did turn out to be a great race, where a new champion was born, and a nineteen-year-old Irish boy called Joseph O’Conner made history, riding his father’s horse Camelot to victory. No father and son combination has ever won the Derby in its 230 year history. I shouted my head off, and missed my own father so much I could hardly breathe.

In the morning, rather madly, I had told the mare the story of how her famous grandfather won the Derby. She listened politely. I wished, suddenly, violently, that my dad could have been there to see her, in all her aristocratic beauty, with her outrageous bloodlines. I cried for him, astonished at how acute and fresh the sorrow still can be, over a year after his death.

So, all human life has been here, in the last 36 hours. The memory of my dad, the sweetness of the living family, the joy of my horse, the best racing in the world, every kind of boat on the dirty old Thames, the village out in its pomp, the celebration of our own dear Queen. And I did over four thousand words, and am closing in on the end of the book. Not bad, really.

 

Today’s pictures.

The village green celebrating the Jubilee:

 

My lovely Red, bowing her beautiful head:

The Pigeon in her special Jubilee lead:

She really does look rather queenly herself.

The hill, rather blurry today:

What I especially liked about the celebration today is that it was all so tremendously British. I’m not sure exactly why, and I’m not sure exactly why that gives me pleasure, but it does.

It was the best of British, and I wave my own little metaphorical flag.

In which Lord Bragg leads me to ponder the national character

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I love Lord Bragg. There, I’ve said it. It’s out there.

I don’t know what he’s like in life. He might be an utter charlatan, for all I know. But I love him because every Thursday he gets three or four academics, the best in their field, round a table and lets them talk. I sometimes think no other country in the world would have a radio programme like In Our Time, and I bless the dear old Beeb weekly for it.

Today, he was talking about the revolutions of 1848. This made me highly excited. Apart from the First Reform Act and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, almost nothing interests me more. (You think I am joking. Tragically, I am deadly serious.) At the age of eighteen, when I was studying for my history degree, I found the 1848 ructions deliriously exciting. I liked to think I had a bit of a radical soul in those days; I think I rather identified with all that taking to the barricades.

So today was a lovely gallop down memory lane for me, and my love for His Braggship increased. But then he asked the interesting question: why did Britain not have one? The profs muttered and giggled. Constitutional monarchy, they mumbled; reform from within; the Chartists. Queen Victoria, said one of them, suddenly stalwart, was an awful lot better than those cretins on the European thrones. I was rather amazed. Are you even allowed to say cretin on Radio Four?

Of all my history essays, the one I remember as if it were yesterday was on this very question. From 1789 to 1815 to 1830 to 1848, as Europe roiled and erupted, as the paving stones in great cities were ripped up to make barricades, as monarchs trembled and high ministers resigned and new constitutions were hastily written, Britain just kept calm and carried on.

It’s not as if the British were not interested in revolt. The poets and the theorists and the socialites were initially thrilled by the French Revolution. The Duchess of Devonshire was always running off to Paris, as if the fall of the monarchy were a tourist attraction. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, wrote Wordsworth. People got very grumpy with Burke when he foresaw disaster. Then Robespierre went mad, and it wasn’t so romantic after all, and everyone cleared their throats and shuffled their feet and looked at their shoes and changed the subject.

But for all the reform movements and radical ideas, there was no late eighteenth century or nineteenth century revolution, despite the turmoil just over the English Channel. I remember having a very robust notion about this. I said it was because of the essentially conservative nature of the British character. The British did not like uproar and chaos; they liked routine and small certainties.

I vividly recall writing about the minor bread riots which would break out, like clockwork, on Monday mornings. The workers would get paid on a Friday. They would then spend all the cash on drink, wake up on Monday broke and hungover, have a little riot, and then everyone would go back to work. (Can this really have been true? I certainly used it as convincing evidence.) Anyway, according to me, that was how the British did revolt.

Of course my argument slightly falls down when one reflects that we did have a bloody revolution, and killed a king too. The Civil War set families against each other, fathers against sons, brother against brother, and led to rabid witch-hunts and crazed religious tests.

Perhaps it was the folk memory of that awful experiment which kept Britain calm in later centuries. Perhaps it was that the vested interests and the monarchy were very clever at giving away little bits of power and making them look like great concessions. (The First Reform Act was presented as revolutionary, but it only produced a very limited franchise.) Perhaps it was that there were occasional crusading prime ministers who really seemed to be on the side of the common people, like Peel in 1846.

My nutty theory, which I must have dreamed up to be cussed and to excite my tutor, does make me wonder now whether there is such a thing as national character. It’s something I think about a lot. Do all Americans really love winners, and believe in American exceptionalism, and still have the frontier spirit running through them? Are the Germans really that efficient? Do Ordinary Decent Britons truly believe in reticence, and stoicism, and queuing, and the underdog? Is every last French person entranced by good food and intellectual debate?

Despite this, I do wonder if there might not have been a minute grain of truth in my teenage argument. I think the British are historically conservative, with a very small c. All the politics here takes place in the centre ground. Unlike in Europe, extremes and ideologies have never taken hold. Moseley’s fascism was dark and dangerous, but he was mostly treated as a joke. On the other side, the Communist Party only ever had a minute membership. In contemporary times, Tony Blair made Labour electable again by dragging it to the centre ground; David Cameron did the same with the Tories, in an attempt to banish their nasty party image. Perhaps, if there is anything in the idea of Britishness, it is a default setting of the middling sort, a Goldilocks tendency: not too hot, not too cold, just right.

Well, it’s just a theory.

 

Some quick pictures. There was amazing light this morning:

Pigeon, elegant in black and white:

Carrying her tail like a flag:

With her slightly quizzical face and neat paws:

The hill:

Tomorrow I go to stay with my very old friend M in the Borders. There shall be no blog until Monday. I apologise for this shocking dereliction of duty. I'm afraid the Pigeon and I shall be living it up somewhere south of Peebles. It is very, very naughty of us.

Have a lovely weekend.