I love Britain, like most Britons I get desperately upset at her failings: when it goes wrong, when it gets it totally totally wrong, when it's shoddy, when it's inefficient, incompetent, rude, vulgar, embarrassing, when it slips into national torpor or boils into bouts of embarrassing national fever. I can moan about health and safety gone mad and leaves on the line, rail networks and crap service and crap weather and crap sporting achievements and crap politicians and crap newspapers and crap attitude. I can do all that.
In fact it's the defining signature quality of my Britishness to talk like that, to complain and to self-castigate but does it mean that I don't love this damned country? Does it mean that I don't get weepy when I think of its history, its people, its countryside, its richness, its plurality, the cultural and artistic energy, the good humour, tolerance, the ability to evolve for good, achingly slow as that ability might be? Does it mean that I don't as it were stand to attention when I think of the sacrifice of our military, the selfless good of so many working in hospitals and schools and rescue services and the million acts of unremembered kindness, decency and good fellowship practised every day by unsung heroes and heroines in every walk of life? Of course it doesn't mean that I don't love and respect that. One carps and one criticises because one loves.
It is the birthday today of Stephen Fry, actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, audiobook narrator, writer, raconteur and "national treasure".
All hail!
Ha! Happy Birthday, Mr Fry!
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He is so bloody brilliant, isn't he?! Jx
DeleteLove this video and love him to bits.
ReplyDeleteWho better than he to introduce the great unwashed to the concept of "Britishness"? Lord knows, even people born here have no fucking clue, let alone foreigners. Jx
DeleteLove Stephen Fry - favourite things he's done, Fry and Laurie, his autobiographies, Jeeves and Wooster, QI, the depression film, his episode of Who Do You Think You Are and Last Chance to See.
DeleteA multi-talented man... Jx
DeleteQuatre-vingt-onze pour cent des conversations britanniques portent sur la météo, c'est très vrai ! Stephen Fry is so witty and wise.
ReplyDeleteLa critique peut être le meilleur compliment pour aider à tout améliorer.
*d'Anjou
There is nothing we Brits like to talk about more than the weather. It's because we, being an island in the North Atlantic can often experience "four seasons in one day". I often carry an brolly, a fleece and sunglasses in the same bag. Jx
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