State of England

The roots and the branches of my own country have always been dear to me. My concern for the landscapes and mindscapes of messy old England is connected to my wider concern for the fate of rooted human cultures - rooted, that is, in place, in time, in nature. What are we, any of us, without this?

England is a strange, old, broken land. It is at once one of the oldest ongoing nations in the world, and one of the newest confections. It feels to me, and has done for decades, like a country suffering from a spiritual sickness. As if something has been taken from us - or given away. Who are the ‘English’? They - we - have no folk culture we can remember, no unifying religion. We know little of our own history. We often can’t tell the difference between ‘England’ and ‘Britain’. To my mind, all of this is linked with the fact that England - or rather, England’s elite - gave the world both the industrial revolution and the world’s biggest empire. For these things to happen, the English people first had to lose: their land, through enclosures; their folk roots, through industrialisation; their sense of history and tradition, through the twin catastrophes of the Reformation and the rise of the merchant class, which gave us, and the wider world, consumer capitalism.

None of this makes me a Land Of Hope and Glory type, a Farragian tub-thumper or some dastardly ethno-nationalist. I’m the grandson of a Greek Cypriot immigrant, married to a British Punjabi, living with our mixed-race kids in Ireland, a country where I have no roots. This is not really amenable to a quest for cultural purity. English identity, like any other, is messy, as readers of The Wake will know. But it still matters. A nation that doesn’t know itself - doesn’t know its landscape, its stories, the curious corners of its folk cultures, the spirits that inhabit its tuns and barrows - well, that’s not a nation at all. That’s a territory; a mall; a postcode in a global McWorld. A mere ‘economy.’

England deserves better. It’s my country, and I reserve the right to shake it by the shoulders and tell it so. These articles do that, in their varied ways.