World Cup Fever... Again
As if in the blink of an eye, a decade has passed. It seems like only yesterday that I was being driven mad by the strains of that bloody ‘thirty years of hurt’ song and already it’s fully forty years since England won the World Cup. I still couldn’t care less. Please, world, I beg of you, let England win, so the nation can get this giant chip off its shoulder and get on with doing something more productive.
The World Cup always brings to the fore the curious collection of nationalisms we have in the UK. English flags have sprouted all over the country, causing mild and very middle-class consternation about whether or not this is really the done thing. English identity is an ill-defined beastie, partly owing to the hangover of Empire days when we were too important to need to explain who we were, partly because we’ve been here so damn long without any sweeping changes to shake us from our torpor. And partly because the negative has sufficed: ‘we’re not (insert crude racial epithet), therefore we are English’.
Here in Wales, the debate is whether to bite our tongues and support the English, or to collect national flags from around the world and fly them in support of whichever nation is playing England. I kid you not, people actually do this. The Deputy Chief Constable of North Wales fretted that the display of English flags in Wales “could lead to racism and violence”. Which just goes to show how many Welsh people do support the England team.
Personally, I can’t help finding all this a bit silly - I’m as much English as I am Welsh, and having lived in Japan the distance between the two neighbouring cultures does pale into insignificance. There is a lasting and in many ways justified resentment in Wales towards the more affluent and powerful South-East of England, but priding ourselves on not-being-English, and getting kicks out of seeing them lose, is pretty pathetic. Can we not think of anything good and positive to say for ourselves?
And can’t we all just, y’know, get along? Sigh...
The World Cup always brings to the fore the curious collection of nationalisms we have in the UK. English flags have sprouted all over the country, causing mild and very middle-class consternation about whether or not this is really the done thing. English identity is an ill-defined beastie, partly owing to the hangover of Empire days when we were too important to need to explain who we were, partly because we’ve been here so damn long without any sweeping changes to shake us from our torpor. And partly because the negative has sufficed: ‘we’re not (insert crude racial epithet), therefore we are English’.
Here in Wales, the debate is whether to bite our tongues and support the English, or to collect national flags from around the world and fly them in support of whichever nation is playing England. I kid you not, people actually do this. The Deputy Chief Constable of North Wales fretted that the display of English flags in Wales “could lead to racism and violence”. Which just goes to show how many Welsh people do support the England team.
Personally, I can’t help finding all this a bit silly - I’m as much English as I am Welsh, and having lived in Japan the distance between the two neighbouring cultures does pale into insignificance. There is a lasting and in many ways justified resentment in Wales towards the more affluent and powerful South-East of England, but priding ourselves on not-being-English, and getting kicks out of seeing them lose, is pretty pathetic. Can we not think of anything good and positive to say for ourselves?
And can’t we all just, y’know, get along? Sigh...