Patriotism in Britain has become a competitive sport with no agreed rules, no referee and an enormous number of people convinced they are winning it. Everybody is patriotic. Everybody else is doing it wrong. And almost nobody, when pressed, can name a single thing about the country they would actually miss if it went.
I know this because I am pressed about it constantly. Living abroad for twenty odd years turns you into a sort of unpaid consulate. Every trip home there is a family gathering, and at every family gathering there is a man, it is usually a man, who has decided that my having left is a position I should be asked to defend, and who then explains patriotism to me at length while I hold a sausage roll.
So I have been keeping notes. Not on him specifically, though him specifically, but on the whole cast. Because the thing you notice from outside is that British patriotism is not one thing. It is at least seven, they do not like each other and they are mostly loving something that is not the country at all.
The one thing all seven loved at the same time was Brexit. Here is the bill for it in a thirteen minute film. Every line comes with a receipt.
Here they are. You will have been cornered by at least three.
1. The Reenactor
Lives in 1940. Has never been in a war, has never met anyone who was in that war, and has constructed an entire personality out of a period he would have hated, because rationing was miserable, the pubs shut at ten and nobody had a car. Refers to the Blitz in arguments about bin collections. Uses "the spirit of Dunkirk" to describe a queue at the Post Office.
The tell is that his 1940 has no actual 1940 in it. No powdered egg, no telegrams, no fourteen year olds down the mine. It is a 1940 assembled entirely from Sunday afternoon television, and it is populated by a cast of quietly heroic men who look a great deal like him.
The people who were there, the ones I knew as a child in Suffolk, almost never talked about it and when they did it was not with pride. It was with a sort of tired amazement that they had got through.
If cornered, ask him what his grandad did in the war. He will know. Then ask what his grandad said about it. He will go quiet, because the answer is usually not much, and that silence is the most honest thing about the whole period.
2. The Flag Man
Bought the flag recently. This is the tell, and it is the whole tell. The flag is new, the pole is new, the bracket on the front of the house is new and the enthusiasm arrived at roughly the same time as the algorithm did. Ask him where the flag was in 2012, during the one summer the country was briefly and genuinely pleased with itself and you will get a short answer.
He will tell you the flag has been reclaimed. From whom, he is less clear. It was in his loft. Nobody took it.
It was just that, for about forty years, hanging a flag off the front of your house in an English cul de sac was understood to be slightly odd, in the way that wearing a rosette to the supermarket is slightly odd, and then one day it wasn't and he was told it wasn't and he went to the garden centre.
If cornered, agree that it is a good flag. It is. Then ask him what it means, and let the pause do the work.
3. The Empire Accountant
Will tell you about the railways. Has a running ledger in which several centuries of extraction are entered on one side and some track is entered on the other, and the books balance and he is very pleased about it. Has never visited any of the places the railways are in and has no plans to, because the food disagrees with him.
The Empire Accountant is not a historian. He has one fact, the railways and one number, which is usually wrong, and he deploys them the way a man deploys a folding chair, to sit down on the argument until it stops moving. Ask him about the Bengal famine and he will hear it as an accusation against himself personally, which is odd, because he was not there and nobody said he was.
Has a running ledger in which several centuries of extraction are entered on one side and some track is entered on the other, and the books balance.
If cornered, do not argue the ledger. Ask him which bit of the empire he is proudest of, and whether he would like to go. He will not want to go. He never wants to go. The empire he loves is the one on the biscuit tin.
4. The Anthem Enforcer
Watches the players' mouths during the anthem. Not the match, the mouths. Has opinions about who is singing and how loudly, can produce a list and has produced it, on a forum, with timestamps. This is a man who has found a way to be disappointed before kick off, which for an England supporter is admittedly efficient.
There is something almost touching about the Anthem Enforcer, because he genuinely believes the singing matters, that a nation which mumbles through the second verse is a nation in decline. He has never asked why nobody knows the second verse. The answer is that it is dreadful, and nobody has ever been able to hear it over the crowd and the crowd is the actual anthem and always has been.
If cornered, sing it at him. All of it, including the verse about scattering our enemies. Watch him realise he does not know the words either.
5. The Tebbit Examiner
Still running the cricket test, forty years after it was proposed, on people who were born here. Will ask a man from Leicester who he supports, receive the answer Leicester and look dissatisfied. There is no correct answer. That is the design.
The test exists to be failed by the people it was aimed at, and passed by the person setting it and it has never once been applied to a British expat in a bar in Alicante cheering for Spain because the beer is cheaper.
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I fail it, incidentally. I have lived in Finland long enough that when the two countries play each other I feel a sort of mild loyalty to both and a strong loyalty to whichever one is losing, which is a very English position and would get me deported by the Examiner in about a minute.
If cornered, ask him who he supports. Then ask him who his grandparents supported. Somewhere in that family tree there is a man who came from somewhere else and supported somewhere else, and the Examiner knows it and has decided it does not count.
Fact box
Around nine in ten people in the UK say they are proud to be British. They do not agree on a single reason why.
National pride polls consistently high across decades. Ask what specifically makes people proud and the answer moves constantly, from the NHS to the countryside to the armed forces to, in one survey, the weather. The pride is stable. The object of it is not, which is the whole problem with the seven people in this article.
6. The Away Day Patriot
Only patriotic abroad. At home he complains about Britain from the moment he wakes up. The trains, the weather, the council, the price of a pint, the fact that nothing works and everyone is on the take. Put him in a bar in Alicante and he becomes an ambassador, at volume, to people who did not ask, explaining that Britain is the greatest country on earth to a Belgian who was reading.
He returns home and resumes complaining within about forty minutes of landing, usually at Gatwick, usually about Gatwick. This is not hypocrisy exactly. It is that his patriotism is a costume, and costumes are for going out in.
Nobody wears the costume at home. At home you can see the seams.
If cornered, agree with everything he says about Britain, at home. Then ask why he keeps going on holiday to Spain. Let him explain the weather. Let him explain the food. Let him get all the way to the end of the sentence before he hears it.
7. The Moaner
Thinks the buses are a disgrace, the rivers are full of sewage, the trains cost more than a flight, the high street is a row of vape shops and the whole thing is being run by people who have never used any of it. Will say so at length, unprompted, to anyone, including tourists, including me, including the Belgian in Alicante if he can find him.
He is the one the other six cannot stand, because he refuses to perform. No flag, no anthem, no railways. Just a running, detailed, well-informed account of everything that is wrong with the place, delivered in the tone of a man who has been let down by someone he trusted.
And here is the thing. Number seven is one of only two people in this article who actually likes Britain. You do not spend that much energy being furious about a place you are indifferent to. The Moaner has a picture in his head of what the country could be and is holding the real one up against it every single day, which is exhausting and unfashionable and is, I would argue, the most patriotic thing on the list.
If cornered, you will not be cornered. He will be. Buy him a drink.
And the other one
The other one never made the numbered list, which is the whole point of him. He is the bloke at the garden centre on a Sunday who knows the names of the birds, who will tell you what the hedge is for and when it was planted, who has views about a particular stretch of coast path and gets slightly emotional about them. He does not own a flag. It would not occur to him. He has a coat.
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He loves an actual country, made of actual places, rather than an argument about one. Nobody has ever asked him what patriotism means, because he does not look like he is doing it. He is just there, on the coast path, in the coat, knowing what the bird is.
Learn the birds. That is my advice, and I mean it more than the rest of this. It is cheaper than a flagpole, it annoys nobody and it is the only version of loving the place that survives contact with the place.
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