Tell me about the cultural touchstones that have shaped your sense of Englishness

[BornAtTheEndofBrightonPier]

Or Scottishness, Welshness or Northern Irishness, if you're from one of the other nations of the UK (I'd love to steal Under Milk Wood from the Welsh MNs, but I can't do that!)

I have a few:

• Squeezing myself headfirst through the hole in the Mên-an-Tol in Cornwall, while the woman whose garden it stood in assured me I’d be blessed with good health for the rest of my life. I think it was 1991, when I was five.
• Exploring Bronze Age tumuli (burial mounds)
• Turner paintings that capture movement and light
• Thomas Hardy's heroines, like Tess Durbeyfield and Bathsheba Everdene
• The excitement of being a child at the back of the car and driving through a ford
• Organ music in church (particularly when it's Bach)
• Georgian architecture of Bath
• David Hockney
• The novels of Graham Greene
• The 1948 film of Brighton Rock starring Richard Attenborough (I'm from Brighton, so this is an extra special one for me)
• The novels of Evelyn Waugh
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• Watching the 1946 version of Great Expectations on Christmas Eve
• M. R. James's ghost stories
• Hadrian's Wall and Sycamore Gap (RIP 😢)
• Glastonbury Tor
• Noggin the Nog (the cartoon Viking, repeated on TV in the early 90s)
• Maid Marian (the kids' TV show)
• Narnia
• Swimming around the arch of Durdle Door
• The League of Gentlemen
• Alan Partridge (even though I can't stand SC)
• Folk rock like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span
• The Beatles
• Roxy Music
• David Bowie
• "All the Young Dudes"
• All pubs with character, both town and country
• Just William stories
• Powell and Pressburger films
• Walking through Kemp Town in Brighton just as a sea fret rolls in
• The illustrations and stories of Beatrix Potter
• Beatrix Potter's house in Cumbria
• Brighton Museum and Art Gallery
• White horses carved into hillsides
• Wuthering Heights
• Lewes Bonfire Night
• The Burning of the Clocks in Brighton for the winter solstice
• The film Lawrence of Arabia

I couldn't sleep last night, and these came to mind. I'd love to hear other people's lists.

I’m afraid the only time I experience a sense of being English is when my country collectively embarrasses me. Thatcher, Brexit, Reform/Restore…

Have you not traveled much? Theres a huge range of Englishness from Cornwall to London to Norfolk to the Lakes.
Prime Minsters and politics come and go.

I get the lament for the EU, but personally I don't understand why we would want to shackle ourselves to a corpse. France is in a shocking crisis, that will embroil the whole EU economically. I'm quite chilled to be outside the fight.

I’ve travelled. There’s much to enjoy all over the world. But being English isn’t about which corner of the globe we happen to be squatting on. It’s about what English people DO.

@exaltedwombat but you can’t think of anything
I mean Thatcher was one person 40 years ago. Reform/Restore have no more seay than Jeremy Clarkson is or Zac Polanski.

Lol, this, there isnt much about being british anymore

Thatcher was one person, but her influence persists. Not sure what point you’re making about Clarkson and Polanski but I’m afraid the Far Right represent the feelings of a distressing number of people who identify as ‘English’.

You are showing your very limited knowledge on the subject very plainly. There are people on here who lived through it , so I would advise you to just listen a bit more and learn ? You sound utterly unbearable.

That's British, not English. I am ashamed to say I'm British but OK with being English.

Why let the Westminster pantomime define your sense of national identity??

One of the best bits of English humour has to be the constitutional peasants scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Well I didn't vote for 'em."

The ability to laugh at ourselves is my absolute favourite thing about being English.

Assembly and all the hymns, my friend bought a copy of ‘come and praise’ about 10 years ago and I had to buy one too when she showed it to me, recognised so many songs! ‘One more step along the road I go’, etc.

Singing the wrong words to Christmas carols, going to midnight mass.

Country dancing and maypole at the vicarage fair in primary school (do-si-do your partner and not getting in a tangle were the best bits).

Dirty Den asking for a divorce on Christmas Eve. Blackadder, The Young Ones (was in love with Rik).

Weeding the local graveyard every summer with brownies at our local (900 year old) church, and the annual brownie trip to the pantomime on the train.

Isle of Wight holidays every summer, tray of tea for two on the beach with six cups.

Wandering around Wapping Wall and the docks where one of my grandads had worked, totally deserted on the weekends.

Emergency 10p to phone home but would buy sweets and reverse the charges if any emergency happened (blizzard, bomb scares, crane falling over). My mum always accepted!

Guy Fawkes Night fireworks on the school field with a jacket potato.

Sunday roast.

Street parties for royal weddings, driving to the train tracks to wave at the royal train flying past after Charles and Diana got married.

Winchester Cathedral and high street. Reading Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shallot, Jane Eyre and all of Jane Austin’s work.

The endless bomb scares on London transport 1980s/90s travelling to and from school/work. Getting off trains and then back on to find out it was now going somewhere else. Working at the BBC when the car bomb went off. Driving across Hammersmith Bridge everyday when the bomb was found there.

Working in a pub over the summer holidays with the World Cup on the tvs. Saturday job in an aging high street department store that never had any customers.

Sport on the tv, remember watching the unfolding horror of Hillsborough, we mostly had football on the tv growing up, watch more rugby now, go to Twickenham a few times a year.

Picnics on the green in summer, watching the cricket.
Cream teas (homemade) on the beach!

You didn't read my follow up post on the matter, did you?

I know quite a bit evidently. Perks of having a history teacher / historian father, I read quite a lot.

Eisteddfodau and choral singing, especially in Welsh.
Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.
St David's Day and seeing children dressed up for it.
Welsh cakes and bara brith.
Speaking and hearing Welsh.
Rain 😉
Welsh slate.
Traditional Welsh blankets and woollen accessories.

Choral music in a cathedral (despite not possessing a single religious bone)
Excellent lyrics in English pop songs (think Pulp)
Our humour.
London - I no longer live there but every time I visit its richness gives me a bolt of energy.
Villages and landscapes - particularly walking through them, treading the paths trodden for centuries
Our adoption and absorption of so many cuisines into our own.
I could wang on for hours about this!

Count binface
Anytime I stand in a queue anywhere that isn't in the UK
When I speak to my non-uk colleagues and have to explain the subtle slight they were just exposed to but didn't pick up on.

I miss British sense of humor though. It's disappeared recently. Everything is so depressing. A good sketch show is needed to unite us.

Is the Mên-an-Tol in someone’s garden ? It’s on the moor?!

Missing the point.

I have a close friend from another European country and I asked her what she associated with being English. She said

tea drinking
Being in old pubs whilst it's raining outside
queuing
going round the houses to say what you mean rather than being direct
apologising

which I think is all pretty English too!

Parts of London: The City, Victoria Embankment, Westminster, The West End, the Southbank, Theatreland and The National, The Houses of Parliament, Covent Garden, the Tower of London, The Globe.

Literature: Dickens, Jane Austen (and visiting the JA experience in Bath), The Brontes, Laura Purcell, David Mitchell, Bridget Collins, Sarah Walters, Shakespeare, Hillary Mantel

Oxford and Cambridge and old brick unis (like my alma mater) with colonnades

Historical skullduggery - The war of the Roses and the rise and fall of the Tudors and those players in their courts.

The beautiful Cornish coast and the crumbling mine stacks of its industrial past.

The boat race!

I think the way the Welsh have maintained their language in the face of their linguistically dominant neighbour is wondrous. Yma o Hyd!

In some ways it's an odd question @BornAtTheEndofBrightonPier as, being English, I can't help it, just as I can't help being a woman.

My passport says British, but what can you do? I am beyond grateful that Australia has granted me citizenship.

Casting about - Shakespeare.

One of the most English/British traits, for me, is well displayed on many Mumsnet threads - our ability to be bolshy contrarians.

As I said - very limited knowledge. I read your post. Your father might be a history academic - so what ? You are still showing yourself up as ignorant and viewing through a colonial lens. You should listen to others more.

Last night of the proms
The Royal family
Fireworks night
How green it is in spring
The way everyone goes about their own business, but the way everyone will drop everything to help if someone is genuinely in trouble or hurt

I love my home

The PP made a mistake with their original post, that he or she later corrected (I take the PP to be a man based on how they've phrased some things). I didn't see the edited version until much later:

Bomb scares.
Bombs going off.
British soldiers searching my mother’s shopping bags and dumping food on the ground and stamping on it and my mother crying trying to pick it up off the ground.
Sorry to bring the happy tone down..
Police officers with guns searching us in shops.
Sorry to bring the tone down..

(My emphases)

On first and only reading of the PP, it was the repetition that made it feel passive-aggressive and accusatory. If I'd read the corrected version first, I might have taken it as sincere, but repeating the apology made it sound sarcastic and, consequently, as though the PP was reproaching the thread for having a lighthearted conversation about cultural identity. I don't think reading the tone as goading was unreasonable.
It's perfectly fair for lighthearted threads to stray into more serious and painful territory. I just assumed that, if the post was intended to be deliberately provocative, that was a pretty cynical way to go about it.

It's perfectly legitimate to criticise Britain and the British; we're a democracy, and criticism is part of the democratic process. But historical revisionism is another matter: it obscures the truth and attempts to rehabilitate or launder the reputations of those responsible for quite a bit of the suffering (see the role of the IRA).

But if you're using the Troubles simply as a means to an end, and that end is to have a pop at the English, that's reprehensible.

And that's the danger when historical suffering becomes a political weapon rather than a catalyst for a historical self-examination.

As the late (and much missed, IMO) Lord Rabbi Sacks once argued, “When bad things happen to a group, its members can ask two different questions: ‘What did we do wrong?’ or ‘Who did this to us?’ The entire fate of the group will depend on which it chooses.
If it asks, ‘What did we do wrong?’ it has begun the self-criticism essential to a free society. If it asks, ‘Who did this to us?’ it has defined itself as a victim. It will then seek a scapegoat to blame for all its problems."

"colonial lens"...

Historical revisionism much?

Britain’s tactics were at times brutal , but that has to be weighed up against the fact the IRA were indiscriminate bombers and hit-men. Terrorist don’t abide by any rules, but democracies on their receiving end, are always expected to.

If you weren't blinkered by ideology, you'd be able to acknowledge that.