To want to tell old school friend she’s being thick?

[StillCoughingandLaughing]

I won’t, because I haven’t seen her in 20 years and she’d think I’d gone barmy, but I really, really want to.

She’s just shared this poem on Facebook. For a start, most of it is total nonsense. Take pride in being ENGLISH, yet wave the Union Jack?! Kids don’t learn Shakespeare any more? Since when? And kids never did learn Milton or Shaw at school - I didn’t cover Shaw until ‘A’ Level or Milton until degree level. I’d put money on her not knowing who they even were.

But this isn’t what annoys me most of all. What really gets my goat is this: Where does this true patriot, misty-eyed for the days when we all sat around discussing Saint George and Agincourt whilst eating Yorkshire pudding, live?

Texas.

@VaggieMight

I was kidding That's a relief!

But yes, it's very difficult to tell. I mean, even Andrea Leadsom replied to a parody Bercow account as if it was the real Speaker.

But then, Leadsom...

This romantic England that she pretains too is represented by an Irish literary giant? She is looking back to a chocolate box representation of England: a colonial power that was benevolent and not cruel. I love being Irish, why would I want to call myself English?: very strange. National identity causes so much strife, look what being European has done for us all - economically, culturally and politically. Europeans need to bond to counteract the new superpowers. Our defence of democracy, liberalism and our culture can't be diminished by little englanders, harking back to a power that was rarely theirs.

pretains to

They teach Shakespeare in German schools. Are there any British schools that teach Schiller or Goethe? All I had in school was Jane Austen, Gerard Manley Hopkins ... mostly English, and a couple of American writers. Have things changed today?

Ive got one of these on FB.
She posts all of this shit, and more scary she is a member of the Tory party and share a load of political stuff as well. She is all over Boris and what an AMAZING PM he is going to be and will deliver us an AMAZING future after Brexit if the haterz let him.

She lives in Cyprus.

What a load of tosh.

And just to be pedantic, whoever wrote that rubbish clearly isn't aware that Shaw was Irish not English.

@Ravenmum we did Heinrich Böll in sixth form. One time we were shown the poem that begins "Über alle Gipfel ist Ruh" but I don't think it was officially on the curriculum, and the only other German poetry I knew was on a handful of Lieder recordings I'd dug out of junk shops or taped off library cassettes. Sometimes I'm inclined to blame the decline of classics in schools for our lack of an internationalist, pan-European outlook, but then I also did Latin and yet still thought of Europe as "over there". It wasn't until university that I suddenly had the revelation that I was a European: I was sitting one day listening to Schubert's Winterreise while procrastinating, and it was kind of a road to Damascus moment that I remember really clearly. Pretty stupid that it took me that long to figure out something which should have been self-evident from the beginning. These days I'm more of a Francophile than a Germanophile (the opposite of GBS, who would have made an odd poster boy for Englishness even if he hadn't been Irish) and I'm more and more conscious of being European, for much the same reasons as everyone else. It probably is true now that you can't claim to be European without renouncing being English: it's a nonsense, but it's also political reality.

There was one more German text I remember from school, in the form of a song brought over by giggling exchange students. It had the refrain "Oh ho ho ho Arschloch!", which is probably the mot juste for the kind of people who share xenophobic doggerel on Facebook. OP, tell Miss Texas she's ein Arschloch (even a Leaver can figure out the meaning) and block.

Ah bless her

I defriended a couple of people who shared racisit memes, spurred on by Brexit. Now I wish I had stayed friends and challenged them instead.

Bloody ridiculous. People like this give me The Rage - we aren't JUST English anymore (or Scottish, Welsh etc) we're part of a global community - we're English, British, European and a member of the human race.

Why it's now become fashionable to only identify with one single aspect of your identity (thereby pigeon-holing yourself forever), I honestly don't know. Idiots.

I wish we didnt teach bloody Hastings anymore - its bloody dull when you've taught it every single year!

A moron personified. I bet she thinks Johnson is an honourable man who cares for this country. I love Seasword’s reminder that Shaw was Irish.

Right or wrong I do hate being called a European

Right or wrong I do hate being called a European

No-one can say it's wrong to hate it but you if you're from Europe, you're a European.

Surely part of Europe but not a European, I'm clutching at straws aren't I

Unfollow or delete. It's the only sensible option. Time is precious and you don't need to waste it on this stuff.

Another gammon. Delete and move on.

Lol

It's only a Union Jack if it's on a ship as well.

To be fair, the sort of people who post this stuff really have generally been hard done by in nearly every generation. Losing scores of their young men in far flung wars yet somehow strangely expecting that those who send them actually give two hoots. It's easier for them to cope with blaming 'foreigners' etc than to cope with the messy reality of the existing power structures that leave them feeling vulnerable and abandoned.

Right or wrong I do hate being called a European

That's pretty normal. It does feel odd to proclaim oneself European, after a lifetime of being conditioned to identify as English and nothing more. In my case I suppose I aspire to be European because it seems intellectual and sophisticated and cool, but this gives me terrible impostor syndrome when faced with intimidatingly cosmopolitan and impossibly multilingual Germans, Dutch and Belgians. (Not the French people I know though, they are mostly hicks like us.) But, now that identity is so politicized and our freedom of movement nearly gone, we need to choose between English and European, and soon. My new "culturally European, citizen of nowhere" persona is work in progress, but there's nothing about English identity I aspire to. Bon débarras to all of that!

Revolting and yeah she is thick.

Well the first topic in year 7 history at DDs school was the Battle of Hastings so definitely still on the current syllabus!

I love the mention of Shaw!

Also - unless I am really dense - leaving the European Union doesn't mean we will live in a different continent, does it? Still part of Europe, surely?

Still part of Europe until we get annexed as another USA state...