Every Sunday

No one knows what the United Kingdom is, least of all the UK or me. Is it Britain? Is it Great? Four countries, or three or two or one? London imposed on the rest? Last colony of the British Empire. Our national blindspot. No one thought to liberate us, with our other little islands left flagging around the world.

When does historical injustice just become entertaining history? The partition of India? Before the repression of colonial independence? Perhaps with the Boer concentration camps? Or the massacre of Peterloo? The deportations to Australia? The opium wars in China? Definitely not the transatlantic slave trade or the scramble for Africa? But perhaps the puritan witch-hunts? Maybe the plantations in Ireland or the subjugation of Scotland? The suppression of the monasteries and the Catholic faith? The Norman invasion and harrying of the North?

One and a half thousand years of muddling through, of fudges, of ‘constructive’ ambiguity. Intolerantly tolerant. Feudally subservient and irrepressibly rebellious. Deeply dysfunctional, most peaceful of places. Harbinger of the new world, increasingly irrelevant. Post-modern utopia, ancient establishment. Cosmopolitan, riven by caste and class. Safeguard against tyranny, ruled by a king. There’s nowhere I understand less and yet somehow still feel quite so at home.