national identity

National identity is a particularly boring subject that gets too much air-time. But I'll say this much. My national identity is primarily British Islands writ large and I think if people really thought about it most other people's is too . The major cultural drivers which make me who I am are I believe shared across Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English areas.

That isn't to say that there aren't significant differences but all countries have those and in some cases they are as stark between the north and south of any of the home nations as between them.

Irish, scottish, english folk musics are nuanced but certainly from the same root. A large chunk and possibly most of my friends at primary school came from Irish and Scottish families. The islanders watch the same TV, listen to the same music, speak the same language (if only as a second language for a few), eat pretty similarly and fortify ourselves with tea & beer in similar amounts, have similar judicial systems and most of our families and friends stretch between different bits of our little damp islands.

I write this post in part, not just because of the similarities, but because the breaking up of attributes seems to snatch at shared identities meaning for instance that Yorkshiremen can't be dour, nope the Scots took that...

And because its usually the English working and lower middle classes left with the crumbs or worse identified by the gentry, pimms, rowing and village greens, which whilst lovely, make up a very small portion of the population or our past-times.

If my cultural identity were an ice cream European would be the cone, the ice cream would be british isles and the sprinkles would be English, Lancastrian, Blackpudlian.

The sprinkles are great. I love sprinkles and the Welsh for instance get a whole new kind of flake because they have their own language. But it's the ice cream and the cone that make up the most of it and spending too much time wondering exactly how my sprinkles differ from yours seems daft.

I don't want to give you the impression that I'm not aware of or that I don't enjoy the great diversity across the islands. But neither do I think that diversity is particularly special as compared to other similar sized countries. Such that I increasingly feel that telling a foreigner that I'm English, as opposed to British, is a little similar to the way a Londoner, when asked will tell you that they are from e.g. Ealing. Which always makes them sound like twats on the radio.

The Republic of Ireland is a separate country clearly so saying you're Irish is not the same. But I would say that my personal identity is such that if they decided they wanted to unite Eire with the rest of the islands and have a federal British isles with devolved governments in each state. AND we subsequently moved the main Federal government to Dublin... I would be pretty surprised but I would have no problem with that... and in fact... I quite like the idea.... ooo and we could elect a non politician as Monarch on a bi-annual basis. I vote Stephen Fry.