There I said it.
Barely a week goes by without someone - a friend, a colleague, a random passer - muttering the immortal words 'this bloody country!' in my earshot.
Usually I'll give a sympathetic smile and roll my eyes at the rain/late bus/graffiti but other times, when I'm feeling feisty, I'll question why then, if this country is so very, very awful, they don't just...well, pack up their gear and emigrate?
Don't get me wrong, I quite agree that there are a lot of things that are eminently shit about the old green, green grass of home. Our trains are always late, our Prime Minister (at least for the next week) looks like a St Bernard who's just been picked up off the roadside by the RSPCA (and his main competitor like a suspiciously smooth buttock), we consider Bruce Forsyth to be the height of showbiz talent, our estate agents are pushy gits with over large tie-knots.
Ok, it's not a fashionable thing to say but I like Britain - a lot. I'm proud to be British and although I would happily live elsewhere to experience another lifestyle and culture for a bit after a few months I'd probably run screaming back in to Queenie's arms begging for a decent sausage.
Here then are my very bestest British things:
Queues
It's not that I enjoy queuing per se, that would be a stupid statement to make. It's more to do with what the queuing represents. It's the apotheosis of the British obsession with manners. We're a nation of people who say sorry when somebody else bumps in to us.
But the best, the absolute best thing about our obsession with queuing is that not one of us actually wants to do it, we're just being terribly British about the whole thing. I love watching the queues in Sainsburys - the shifty sideways glances, the odd rebel attempting to insert themselves midway along the self checkout line, somebody breathing down your neck as they shuffle as close as humanly possible to ensure that even a Kate Moss sized malcontent can't challenge their position.
Next time you're in a very British queue, pull on a bowler and enjoy.
Eccentrics
A few weeks ago a force was unleashed on the UK, a force which stunned even that paragon of unflustered common sense, Jeremy Paxman. That force was Alex Guttenplan, the team captain of the 2010 University Challenge winning team: Emmanuel College, Cambridge. I was not alone in developing a passion for the 'plan. Why? Because (despite having an American father, himself a renowned Pulitzer nominated journalist) he was the epitome of our very favourite type of Brit - the intelligent eccentric.
From Stephen Fry to Boris Johnson, Isabella Blow to Malcolm McLaren to Janet Street Porter and Quentin Crisp, Britain does a great line in those eccentrics who walk the fine line between madness, stupidity and downright genius. Guttenplan, though probably not set to become a TV icon a la Fry or Dr Brian Cox (he was in D:Ream, now he fiddles about with the Large Hadron Collider and knows everything there is to know about Sat-URn), made me smile with his Paxman-baffling knowledge of just about everything, and I wasn't alone in doing jumpy claps every time he was on screen. He was a wee Monday evening celebration of the Best of British and we couldn't help but love his serious little face for it.
The NHS
This week, due to some kind of idiotic clerical error, I was left without the regular medication which prevents me from losing my mind and rampaging naked up and down the streets of Market Harborough with an axe in one hand and the head of a goat in the other. I went cold turkey for a couple of days. I felt queasy and headachey, my hands and feet tingled and I was really, REALLY grumpy. Like, scratch your eyes out and put them in my blender grumpy.
Why didn't the medication get to me? Because the computer system for the UK's hospitals don't link with the computer systems which our GPs use. So there has to be letters, through the postal service. Or it may be that the specialist carves his recommendations in to a stone using his fingernails and has it paraded to the doc by seventeen naked virgins. One or the other.
Devastatingly flawed it may be but we seem so often to forget how extremely lucky we are to live in a country where we don't have to scrimp and save to afford a life saving operation, where our doctors and nurses and midwives though dangerously overworked have a high level of training and decent equipment to work with.
Our life expectancy is high, infant mortality is low, we have more doctors per 1000 people than the USA and around the same number of nurses. We give birth to our children in relative comfort and choose how and where we do so. If we're injured an equipped ambulance and trained professionals are sent to help us. And we don't have to pay.
It could be better, but it could be a hell of a lot worse.
The Countryside
Travelling by train from Nottingham to Manchester (it was only four minutes late!) I passed through the Peak District.
This was just as the snow was starting to melt.
Watching the snow tipped peaks, the clusters of daffodils, the streams cutting through valleys, the abandoned mines (Ok, ignore those) passing by me in a blur. I teared up a bit.
In fairness I was hungover and somebody had just inserted a large Pizza Hut Meatfest in to the luggage rack above me but still, the British countryside...it's beautiful and varied and ever so slightly tear jerking when you've had one too many very delicious British ales.
Diversity
Since when was immigration a bad thing?
Without immigration our music would be interminably dull - no grime, no garage, no Specials. We'd have to rely on Simply Red for 'soul'. Brrr. Our fashion world would be an unexciting landscape of Pringle knits and Burberry coats with no Chalayans or Ozbeks or Gallianos. Art would be free of Emin and Ofili and Chapmans Jake and Dinos, Gilbert would have to do his thing free of George.
Most importantly, if there was no immigration, the Daily Mail would be have to become a weekly and my amazing cleaner would have to go home (selfish, moi?).
I like the fact of being a mongrel - a little bit Irish, a little bit Welsh with a lapsed Catholic father and a not-at-all-Jewish Jew mother, educated at CofE schools despite being an atheist. I like that I look different to my friends and that they speak different languages and have different life experiences I can learn from and be entertained by.
The diversity of Britain makes it an exciting place to live, always on the cutting edge of fashion, science and education. Our food has been turned from dull grey slop to vibrant, delicious variety, we embrace religions of all sorts and nobody, in theory at least, is penalised or judged for their belief or their race or their class.
Screw you guys, Britannia rules.
