So that’s why there were no blog posts tonight. I was so flaked
out and feeling ill that I couldn’t think of anything funny to say. I was too concerned
with the prospect of going the whole nine yards and taking my socks off when I
go to bed tonight. Might I get a chill? Might the bed bugs and spiders sidle
off in disgust and find a new home? Might the very feet themselves desert me
for another man? It’s a worry, you know?
Nevertheless, the delirium thus engendered did give rise to
the thought that I might mention my autobiography. I began it five years ago
when my writing activities were at their most prolific. I stopped after about
8,000 words because:
a) I found it very boring.
b) I began to wonder how a person of even moderate intelligence
could allow his ego such sway as to consider it an activity worth pursuing.
I did take a peek at it, though, and found the following
passage. It’s part of my earliest recollection of Britishness, at a time when
we still paid lip service to Empire Day:
Such an inflated
perception of the nation’s worth naturally made the people of Britain, already
congenitally inclined to be insular by the detached nature of the country’s
geographical position, even more so. And the well oiled machinery of social
life and values was, consequently, more restricted and hidebound than should
reasonably have been expected of such a developed culture.
Life was largely
dictated by intractable rules and received attitudes. Any form of counter
culture was intolerable. Those given to questioning the rightness of almost
anything – from the details of fashion and diet to the Anglican view of the
right road to salvation – were considered seditious or at least highly
eccentric. But the communal sense of self belief gave full credence to the
illusion that all was as it should be. It was all part of what made Britain great.
‘Britons never, never shall be slaves’ sang the jingoists as they fondly
remembered the workings of a system that had laboured so conscientiously to
enslave others. And very few of them understood the extent to which they had
enslaved themselves with their tight social conventions, their self-deluding
notions of superiority, and their intolerance of all things foreign.
You can see why I got bored, can’t you? It sounds like the UKIP manifesto.
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