A plastic bowler hat cracked along its diameter and trampled into the muck, and a flag which had its staff snapped into two and the whole thing committed to the floor.
Those were the only visible remnants of the preceding St. George's Day celebrations: trinkets which hold so much meaning as to become meaningless and so they must be cast aside.
English people don't know how to mark the occasion, anyway. We say that we're not allowed to - 'they' stop us doing it in case some minority group or other takes offence - but in reality there is increasingly less to commemorate with the passing of each year.
I've lived here all my life, and I don't know what it means to be English. I am from here but not of here. I speak English, but do not feel English. I think everyone else, if they are brave enough to admit it, is in the same boat. This is why I say that the flag and the hat are so rich in symbolism that all their power is lost, for there is not one single thing which anyone can point to as encapsulating a nation. There are instead millions of disparate, floating ideas: the queen, tea, Wembley, slavery, the bulldog, Michael Faraday, perma-drizzle, the BBC.
If one's parameters are narrowed, the same problem rears its head. Let's say that instead of the whole of England, London is sufficiently representative of the country to stand in as a suitable replacement for the purposes of 'what it means to be English.'
The weight and severity of the city, indivisible, is again too much, though. and our thought capsizes before we manage to grab it. And selecting one possibility from the billions of physical objects and abstract ideals which comprise London (which represents England) seems cruel and arbitrary. The Underground? Being called a cunt by a random stranger? The Old Bailey? The Houses of Parliament? No one single case - except perhaps the second - explains what it is to be English.
Perhaps that is it. Instead of focusing on the golden, precious ideal of a nation state, we should instead dispense with sentiment and speak with the breath of truth in our lungs. To be English is to be persistently worried about having a knife stuck in you; is about being called a cunt; is about the atomised war of omnia contra omnes, and coughing up one's guts happily at quarter to two in the morning. The noise of my coughing is the perpetual music to which I exist, and I blame the English weather.
I started out trying to find positive or neutral sentiments which represent the whole of England, and I couldn't do it. I can, though, find hundreds of ideas or statements in the negative which every crappy little village all the way through to the biggest conurbations, has in common. What better way, then, to remember such traits than by getting drunk, snapping your flag in half and stamping your bowler hat into the ground?
