The full article:
Call yourself British? I’ll be the judge of that
Racism and nostalgia for empire aren’t the only things that define our identity. We also have korma, Quidditch and clown princes
Giles Coren
Friday July 01 2022, 9.00pm BST, The Times
The “Life in the UK” test for foreign nationals hoping to become UK citizens needs to be overhauled, according to a review by the House of Lords’ justice and home affairs committee, because it describes the evil British Empire as having once been thought of as “a force for good in the world” and thus alienates Johnny Foreigner, who, as we know, doesn’t like it up him.
Further travesties within the test, which is apparently causing examinees to “have less respect for the UK”, include asking candidates to guess at the appropriate action to take after spilling beer on someone in a pub (which I accept is confusing because surely it depends on whether or not he was looking at your bird) and being “a random selection of obscure facts and assertions”.
Now I’d have said that “a random selection of obscure facts and assertions” is a pretty fair description of every British conversation, exam answer, popular history book and newspaper article I have encountered in my 52 years of being, through no fault of my own, British. But the committee’s chairwoman, the Lib Dem peer Baroness Hamwee, is furious about it and this week declared that “the UK today is about more than stereotypes such as roast beef and pantomimes”. Oh yes she did.
Her ladyship has thus, of course, demanded that the test be transformed urgently. And I, of course, have obliged.
Please read the questions carefully and mark your preferred answer with the green pen you always keep with you when reading the paper, so you can write a letter telling me to grow up, Bernard Levin never did things like this. Use both sides of the paper. Raise your hand if you need a wee. You may begin.
The British Empire:
A. Brought laws, language, trains, cricket, proper clothes and a sense of decency to the fuzzy-wuzzies.
B. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
C. Was worse than the Nazis.
The British media are:
A. Dominated by a handful of woke babies bent on communist revolution.
B. Flawed but still among the freest in the world and really quite entertaining sometimes.
C. Racist.
1066 was:
A. The year our glorious history of world domination began.
B. One of many occasions when mass migration strengthened our culture and sense of national identity.
C. In the olden days, and thus racist.
Emma Raducanu is:
A. Hot foreign totty.
B. A shining example of modern, multi-ethnic, confident, equal Britain.
C. The super-rich beneficiary of an elitist pastime built on slavery and complicit in the racist subjugation of minorities.
The British national dish is:
A. Roast beef.
B. Chicken korma.
C. A racist chimera that fuses the ideals of far-right nationalist extremism with a failure to respect the intersectional crisis at the heart of the world’s food supply.
Penalty shoot-outs are:
A. Always won by the filthy cheating Boche.
B. An unsatisfactory but at least quite quick way to settle a drawn football match.
C. Racist.
Prince Andrew is:
A. An embarrassing clown.
B. A sad clown.
C. A racist clown.
Britain’s national sport is
A. Cricket.
B. Quidditch.
C. Racist.
The British education system is:
A. Obsessed with sex and gender issues at the expense of proper subjects like Latin and Greek.
B. Good overall but unfairly weighted in favour of the middle classes.
C. Racist.
Cannabis laws in the UK are:
A. Feeble. It is a very dangerous drug and a gateway to even worse ones; users should be incarcerated and dealers flogged.
B. Out of date. The odd puff won’t do you any harm every now and again, like at Glasto, for example.
C. Racist.
Horatio Nelson was:
A. A national hero although unfortunately a bugger.
B. One-eyed Admiral of the Fleet and captain of HMS Victory at Trafalgar.
C. A slave trader, probably a transphobe, definitely a Blairite. Oh, and racist.
The prime minister is:
A. Boris.
B. Johnson.
C. Raci . . . look, why are you even asking me?
Mostly As, Bs or Cs? Welcome to Britain, you’ll fit in beautifully.
Whole new ball game
With the second-round exits of Andy Murray and Raducanu from Wimbledon sending us all back to that warm, comfy place of annual tennis failure, perhaps it is time to refocus our national sporting ambitions on padel, the tennis-squash hybrid that was feted in The Times last week as the hot new sport for all.
Celebrity fans include David Beckham, Lionel Messi and Rafa Nadal and 89,000 in Britain play regularly, according to the Lawn Tennis Association. That is a little way down on the five million in Spain, where it has usurped tennis in popularity and stands second only to football as the nation’s biggest participation sport, but with 125 courts having been built here since 2019 and two under construction at Queen’s Club, it must surely be the next big opportunity for court-based national heartbreak.
I have started playing padel myself, attracted by the slower balls, smaller courts, which mean less cardiovascular stress for the older player and especially the four walls which mean you don’t spend half your game running around picking up balls. It is also a bonus that the game’s stumpy little fibreglass bats do not require anything like the natural talent or drilled-in skill to wield competently that a tennis racket does. And best of all, because the game evolved in Spain, the top players are all hairy little fat blokes.
I am getting pretty damned good at it, I don’t mind telling you, and am considering going full-time, if not professional. The only problem is one of image. Those little paddles do bear an embarrassing resemblance to Swingball bats and indeed a crueller man than I might describe padel as “swingball without the pole”.
But it was my sport-averse wife who really took the spring out of my step the other day, as I headed off with my special padel shoes and stunted little padel bat carrier (like a tennis bag that’s shrunk in the wash), when she glanced up from her newspaper, looked me up and down and said: “Dork tennis again, dear?”