Full English

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Woodchopper
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Re: Full English

Post by Woodchopper » Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:56 pm

MartinDurkin wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:51 pm
warumich wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:34 am
In rugby I support France, obv. since I value having a relatively peaceful household. The German rugby team is somewhere near the German cricket team in competence.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you mean rugby union?
Are you aware of the French Rugby Unions collaboration with the Nazis?
From Wiki (other sources are available, I don't think this is seriously disputed).
Some of the French Rugby Union's senior administrators took advantage of their close relationship with the new regime to have rugby league outlawed as a "corrupter" of French youth.[6] All funds as well as grounds and equipment belonging to the French Rugby League Federation were confiscated and handed over to rugby union. The figure of assets stripped has been estimated at two million 1940 French francs, none of which was ever returned.
There's another quintessentially English thing. Going to extraordinary lengths to bring up the Second World War at even the slightest opportunity.

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Re: Full English

Post by science_fox » Tue Mar 30, 2021 7:00 pm

I'm technically at least 1/2German and 1/4 Swiss after that I get lost a bit in the fragmentation of family history. In the census I ticked British, English and European (I don't know why I didn't include German). But mostly I think of myself as english-ish. I like tea both with and without milk the key bit being to realise that different cultures have different definitions of 'tea' and then to drink it in the appropriate manner. I suspect this has wider applications than just tea.
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Re: Full English

Post by Hunting Dog » Tue Mar 30, 2021 7:10 pm

Fishnut wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:13 am
I should identify as English but there are so many negative connotations to that term in my head that I can't (similar to warumich's gf). If someone says they're English I have visions of people waving St George's Crosses around and telling people they don't like to "go back where they came from". That's not a group of people I want to be associated with.
^^this - I've only ever lived in England but wouldn't identify as English - I'd go British, then European, then piss off and mind your own business (a lot of my ancestors from multiple sides were Huguenot so I suppose I could go for that)

for sports, Mr Hunting Dog was born in Kenya, lived in Scotland and has Welsh relatives so we support things in that order as appropriate (Running/Rugby/Rugby when Scotland are being useless again)

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Re: Full English

Post by Martin Y » Tue Mar 30, 2021 7:27 pm

bolo wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 5:25 pm
Fishnut wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:46 pm
English identity is intrinsically tied up with our empire, but the ones who seem to want to proclaim it as their identity seem to be the ones most desperate to recreate that empire.
I'm not entirely sure I understand this. Surely it was the British Empire, not the English Empire? And at least among my ancestors (not necessarily a statistically valid sample) the ones involved in colonial exploits in India etc. were mostly Scottish. What am I missing?
That was my thought too but it might be significant that Fishnut heard it from an Irish guy. From my POV it was the British Empire and Scots were if anything overrepresented in the whole "Do you have a flag?" thing. But the occupation of Ireland is probably seen as something the English did (despite the large Scottish contingent in the later plantation of Ulster) so I can imagine from an Irish POV it might seem that an English person preferring to be thought of as British might be trying to avoid that bit of history. To be honest, embarrassing bits of your own nation's history tend to get swept under the carpet or spun as something more heroic so an awful lot of people just tend to be unaware of the stories other nations might expect they should be ashamed of.

Then of course there's the whole English = British thing where it used to be commonplace, and not just among English people, to say England and mean Great Britain. We still talk about Anglo-Whoever agreements and treaties and "Anglo" definitely means the whole UK. Unless it's Anglo-Irish when maybe it means Great Britain but it's probably best not to think about it too much.

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Re: Full English

Post by Fishnut » Tue Mar 30, 2021 8:10 pm

Martin Y wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 7:27 pm
bolo wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 5:25 pm
Fishnut wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:46 pm
English identity is intrinsically tied up with our empire, but the ones who seem to want to proclaim it as their identity seem to be the ones most desperate to recreate that empire.
I'm not entirely sure I understand this. Surely it was the British Empire, not the English Empire? And at least among my ancestors (not necessarily a statistically valid sample) the ones involved in colonial exploits in India etc. were mostly Scottish. What am I missing?
That was my thought too but it might be significant that Fishnut heard it from an Irish guy. From my POV it was the British Empire and Scots were if anything overrepresented in the whole "Do you have a flag?" thing. But the occupation of Ireland is probably seen as something the English did (despite the large Scottish contingent in the later plantation of Ulster) so I can imagine from an Irish POV it might seem that an English person preferring to be thought of as British might be trying to avoid that bit of history. To be honest, embarrassing bits of your own nation's history tend to get swept under the carpet or spun as something more heroic so an awful lot of people just tend to be unaware of the stories other nations might expect they should be ashamed of.

Then of course there's the whole English = British thing where it used to be commonplace, and not just among English people, to say England and mean Great Britain. We still talk about Anglo-Whoever agreements and treaties and "Anglo" definitely means the whole UK. Unless it's Anglo-Irish when maybe it means Great Britain but it's probably best not to think about it too much.
Sorry for being slow to respond to this. I think Martin's got some of it. There's also the fact that while people from all parts of the UK participated in the Empire, it was driven and led by the English, and while there were most definitely Scots and Welsh who had their own colonial excitements, they have also been on the receiving end of British expansionist tendencies to their long-term detriment.
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Re: Full English

Post by warumich » Tue Mar 30, 2021 8:20 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:56 pm
MartinDurkin wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:51 pm
warumich wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:34 am
In rugby I support France, obv. since I value having a relatively peaceful household. The German rugby team is somewhere near the German cricket team in competence.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you mean rugby union?
Are you aware of the French Rugby Unions collaboration with the Nazis?
From Wiki (other sources are available, I don't think this is seriously disputed).
Some of the French Rugby Union's senior administrators took advantage of their close relationship with the new regime to have rugby league outlawed as a "corrupter" of French youth.[6] All funds as well as grounds and equipment belonging to the French Rugby League Federation were confiscated and handed over to rugby union. The figure of assets stripped has been estimated at two million 1940 French francs, none of which was ever returned.
There's another quintessentially English thing. Going to extraordinary lengths to bring up the Second World War at even the slightest opportunity.
Growing up in Germany you get used to the idea that many things you love or live with daily had Nazi associations in the past, including Volkswagen, Krupp, BASF, Heidegger, and your own dear grandfather. The trick is to acknowledge this, learn from it, make reparations (tbh we could have done much better on that score) and generally try make sure this sort of thing never happens again.

What you don't do, is to leave statues to prominent genocidal human rights abusers in your city centres for "educational purposes" while stripping the actual education system of any meaningful exploration of exactly this.

Eta, while gaslighting the descendants of their victims about how f.cking great the country that f.cked them over is, and how they should be grateful for all eternity that we decided to let them live here, as long as they clean, cook and drive our buses and don't have any ambitions to have more than token political or boardroom influence.

Eta 2, sorry but I'm a bit annoyed
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Re: Full English

Post by MartinDurkin » Tue Mar 30, 2021 10:50 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:56 pm
MartinDurkin wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:51 pm
warumich wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:34 am
In rugby I support France, obv. since I value having a relatively peaceful household. The German rugby team is somewhere near the German cricket team in competence.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you mean rugby union?
Are you aware of the French Rugby Unions collaboration with the Nazis?
From Wiki (other sources are available, I don't think this is seriously disputed).
Some of the French Rugby Union's senior administrators took advantage of their close relationship with the new regime to have rugby league outlawed as a "corrupter" of French youth.[6] All funds as well as grounds and equipment belonging to the French Rugby League Federation were confiscated and handed over to rugby union. The figure of assets stripped has been estimated at two million 1940 French francs, none of which was ever returned.
There's another quintessentially English thing. Going to extraordinary lengths to bring up the Second World War at even the slightest opportunity.
What extraordinary lengths? As the problematic history of the FRU is not widely known, I thought warumich might be interested.

(fwiw I don't identify as English by the way)

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Re: Full English

Post by individualmember » Wed Mar 31, 2021 6:37 am

Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:56 pm
There's another quintessentially English thing. Going to extraordinary lengths to bring up the Second World War at even the slightest opportunity.
True. And I really, really, really f.cking hate it :twisted:

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Re: Full English

Post by individualmember » Wed Mar 31, 2021 6:45 am

Fishnut wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:46 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:26 pm
The thing is, English culture has been dominant in the British Isles and much of the rest of the world for centuries. We've exported our culture and imposed it on others round the world. Close to home Welsh and Irish people who were punished in school for speaking in their mother tongue. Further afield kids in Africa today go to school dressed up in copies of public school uniforms that were worn by the children of colonial administrators.

The whole post makes a very good point but this bit in particular stood out as well worth a closer examination. I remember talking to an Irish guy who felt that English people who call themselves British was as an attempt to distance and dissociate themselves from the Empire. It's an argument I have difficulty arguing against but I think it's more complex than just a way of pretending our history didn't happen.

English identity is intrinsically tied up with our empire, but the ones who seem to want to proclaim it as their identity seem to be the ones most desperate to recreate that empire. And I just don't want anything to do with that. Calling myself British instead my small protest against nationalism. It's meaningless and entirely symbolic but it's about all I have right now. So, for me, it's not about wanting to pretend our empire didn't happen but recognising that it did and it was horrific and isn't something we should be celebrating or lamenting the end of.
I think this brings up the matter of the difference between how we see ourselves and how others see us. I remember when Tony Blair was given the title of Middle East Peace Envoy and practically falling off my chair at how astonishingly terrible that idea was. Of course an English person would love that but it must have seemed like a sick joke to anyone from the Middle East.

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Re: Full English

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Wed Mar 31, 2021 8:33 am

TBH calling myself English & British together is my small protest against nationalism - I just don't see how you make the identity of being English better by contributing to its reputation as a descriptor used predominantly by racists.

A flaw in the "English = racist" argument is that the most visible, most vocal people who call themselves English are the EDL fuckwits with St George's flags painted on their faces and the three lions tattooed on their uncovered chests. They're the ones you'll see in the news, being counter-protested by antifa and similar organisations. But other than them, English people in general don't think too hard about national identity or make much of a big deal about it. So if all you do is pay attention to the ones who shout loudest, of course you'll get a sense that the only people who are claiming they're English are the racists. Unfortunately, though, once you start creating that narrative, and the people who do care about empire and racism and nationalism abandon the label, it becomes a self-fulfilling thing.

I'd also counter (again, sorry) the idea that Englishness is fully tied up with empire. Yes, it's our history. Yes, we haven't really dealt with it as fully as we might. Unfortunately our societal division has split into two camps, one which thinks empire was entirely a litany of racist international abuse, and one which thinks it was a great and mighty contribution to the world. But it's not everything we are. The discussion about it in depth needs to be had, but Englishness doesn't equate to empire, any more than Frenchness does or being German or Spanish. We are more than that - and maybe it needs to be more aptly defined than it has been. I think the point about it being the British empire is a fair one - would an Indian or Pakistani with well-developed thoughts on the empire be more concerned with the label English or the label British, I wonder?

As I say, I just don't see how abandoning the label "English" lets anyone but the nationalist fuckwits win. Certainly, the more people like David Lammy make it clear they think of themselves as English, the more it becomes a kinder thing to be.
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Re: Full English

Post by JQH » Wed Mar 31, 2021 8:50 am

individualmember wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 6:37 am
Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:56 pm
There's another quintessentially English thing. Going to extraordinary lengths to bring up the Second World War at even the slightest opportunity.
True. And I really, really, really f.cking hate it :twisted:
I like to point out to the "Two World Wars, one World Cup" brigade that in WWII and the World Cup we had some assistance from the Soviet Union.
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Re: Full English

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:12 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:26 pm
At the risk of making myself unpopular ...

I think that statements that Englishness as a cultural identity that isn't strong or doesn't exist would be seen as ridiculous by many people from outside England. As far as identities go, the symbols of Englishness are very strong. They cover things like language, literature, film, TV, sport, clothing, food, music, buildings and monuments. The list is endless.

The thing is, English culture has been dominant in the British Isles and much of the rest of the world for centuries. We've exported our culture and imposed it on others round the world. Close to home Welsh and Irish people who were punished in school for speaking in their mother tongue. Further afield kids in Africa today go to school dressed up in copies of public school uniforms that were worn by the children of colonial administrators.

Yes, English culture has imported and assimilated lot, but crucially only what we wanted. People don't think that their English cultural identity is very strong because they hardly ever have to think about it. In thousands of ways the world is built around their cultural identity. Englishness is just assumed to be the natural state of humanity and therefore not worth thinking about. People who say that they don't recognize their Englishness resemble millionaires who like to say that money isn't important to them.

If English culture were ever to be as threatened as the English have threatened other cultures, it would probably be far more important to people.
I think this is an important point. I can understand wanting to repudiate the unpleasant aspects of English nationalism, but at the same time I think identifying as "British" is something that only English people, especially southerners, would do.

Having lived in various bits of teh forrinz for most of the last decade, I'd group people with UK nationality into English southerners and northerners, Welsh, Scottish various flavours of Northern Irish (I don't know enough people from NI well enough to have really nailed this down). If you don't strongly identify with aspects of Scottish or Welsh culture then I have to break it to you that you're English, but have never really had to notice.

Having a grandparent from somewhere doesn't mean owt either. My grandparents are from all over the shop, but don't ask me to cook you a braai or pronounce a single placename in Jutland accurately. Whereas my dad was born in England but got called a p.ki growing up. Seeing as his immediate ancestry was from a completely different continent, one can tell that racists aren't very good at identity either.

I think it would be great for the English to embrace the positive aspects of their identity, make peace with the sh.t parts, and take back control from the Take Back Control crowd.
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Re: Full English

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:26 pm

A miscellany of other random points, so as not to post 1000 times in a row ;)
bolo wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 5:25 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:26 pm
The thing is, English culture has been dominant in the British Isles and much of the rest of the world for centuries.
That dominance in the United States is perhaps why nobody speaks of English-Americans.
Also the Revolution was against the Brits, so there was a deliberate movement to being not-English in the origin of the USA.

It's also interesting that ancestry-wise there was roughly as much immigration from Germany as from England into the USA, but looking at the map on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_ ... al_origins the English were concentrated on the East Coast, whereas practically all of the "flyover states" are German - which does support the idea that it's cultural dominance rather than raw numbers that may be important.

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 5:39 pm
I wonder how tied up with empire the French get with their national identity, or the Spanish or Portuguese, or even the Belgians.
Portugal kept its African empire till the 1970s, although the dictatorship rebranded it all as "Greater Portugal". The Portuguese still don't seem to have really come to terms with the fact that colonialism and slavery and stuff were bad. There's also a huge amount of casual racism, and a general lack of sensitivity. But in general national identity here is still hugely bound up with Age of Discovery sailors and explorers, and having an empire, as if the country hasn't done anything much since.

It's odd in a way, because the Carnation Revolution against the dictatorship owed a huge amount to the African Independence movement and activists like Amílcar Cabral. Soldiers were sent overseas to defend colonialism, found they didn't like it, then came back and found things weren't much better at home either so they ousted the regime. But sadly the current waves of immigration from various bits of the old Empire is facing a predictable backlash.

Lew Dolby wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 5:50 pm
Seems to me though that most of what gets listed under "english culture" (or even "British culture") isn't uniqely English or British.

Most of the people I come across frequently down the local who bang on about "preserving English culture, innit" are the very ones I'd expect to see outside, pint inhand, jeering at morris dancers or a folk singer.
Self-deprecation is an important part of English identity. As is jeering at people for trying their best to do nice things.

warumich wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 8:20 pm
Growing up in Germany you get used to the idea that many things you love or live with daily had Nazi associations in the past, including Volkswagen, Krupp, BASF, Heidegger, and your own dear grandfather. The trick is to acknowledge this, learn from it, make reparations (tbh we could have done much better on that score) and generally try make sure this sort of thing never happens again.

What you don't do, is to leave statues to prominent genocidal human rights abusers in your city centres for "educational purposes" while stripping the actual education system of any meaningful exploration of exactly this.
I think you've made some really good points in this thread, and clearly have a deep understanding both of English identity and the complications surrounding it. Which, I'm afraid, is disqualifying ;)
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Re: Full English

Post by TAFKAsoveda » Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:40 pm

I Find that despite being of mixed french/english background I feel more English in France and French in England so I’m not sure I am either!

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Re: Full English

Post by noggins » Wed Mar 31, 2021 1:11 pm

I just dont see any benefit to me relabelling the nationality derived bit of my Weltanschauung to “English” instead of “British”.

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Re: Full English

Post by Martin Y » Wed Mar 31, 2021 1:57 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:12 pm
I think this is an important point. I can understand wanting to repudiate the unpleasant aspects of English nationalism, but at the same time I think identifying as "British" is something that only English people, especially southerners, would do.
No, it's pretty strong where I come from which is, to a first approximation, the side of Glasgow that doesn't identify with having arrived from Ireland in the mid-1800s. While being Scottish is an absolute given, also being British, i.e. being the Establishment and not being the guys with the foreign religion and loyalties elsewhere, is at least as strong.

I don't know how similar or different that attitude is in other cities like Liverpool. Glasgow probably has more of a Belfast-style sense of the people with the privilege feeling it's under threat and clinging more to a shared Britishness for support. That insecure feeling probably doesn't arise in Liverpool or other English cities because the numbers imbalance is so great.

The God-awful toe-curling horridness of sectarianism is an ugly side of that identity to have to live with but you don't get to choose your family and nobody voluntarily gives up their privilege so here we are.

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Re: Full English

Post by Woodchopper » Wed Mar 31, 2021 3:48 pm

Martin Y wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 1:57 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:12 pm
I think this is an important point. I can understand wanting to repudiate the unpleasant aspects of English nationalism, but at the same time I think identifying as "British" is something that only English people, especially southerners, would do.
No, it's pretty strong where I come from which is, to a first approximation, the side of Glasgow that doesn't identify with having arrived from Ireland in the mid-1800s. While being Scottish is an absolute given, also being British, i.e. being the Establishment and not being the guys with the foreign religion and loyalties elsewhere, is at least as strong.

I don't know how similar or different that attitude is in other cities like Liverpool. Glasgow probably has more of a Belfast-style sense of the people with the privilege feeling it's under threat and clinging more to a shared Britishness for support. That insecure feeling probably doesn't arise in Liverpool or other English cities because the numbers imbalance is so great.

The God-awful toe-curling horridness of sectarianism is an ugly side of that identity to have to live with but you don't get to choose your family and nobody voluntarily gives up their privilege so here we are.
Good point.

On the other side of the sea members of the Orange Order identify themselves as British and the banners read ‘Brits Out’ not ‘English Out’.

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Re: Full English

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Mar 31, 2021 3:52 pm

Yes, fair enough. I'm not well-versed in sectarian tensions at all, to be honest. I probably should have restricted my comments to people from England, and been a bit less dogmatic.
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Re: Full English

Post by tom p » Wed Mar 31, 2021 4:11 pm

bolo wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 5:25 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:26 pm
The thing is, English culture has been dominant in the British Isles and much of the rest of the world for centuries.
That dominance in the United States is perhaps why nobody speaks of English-Americans.
Fishnut wrote:
Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:46 pm
English identity is intrinsically tied up with our empire, but the ones who seem to want to proclaim it as their identity seem to be the ones most desperate to recreate that empire.
I'm not entirely sure I understand this. Surely it was the British Empire, not the English Empire? And at least among my ancestors (not necessarily a statistically valid sample) the ones involved in colonial exploits in India etc. were mostly Scottish. What am I missing?
You're not missing anything.
The Scots have just successfully hoodwinked much of the rest of the world (and themselves) into thinking they were some of the first victims of English imperialism & thus they are somehow not responsible for the sins of the Empire.

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Re: Full English

Post by sTeamTraen » Wed Mar 31, 2021 4:15 pm

My paternal grandfather was a medical doctor, an Ulsterman, and a bigot. When he moved to Birmingham, he became a member of the committee of his local golf club and apparently took great delight in black-balling any Catholics who tried to join.

I now understand how hard his children, including my Dad, tried to avoid this side of him. Until I was about 13, circa 1972, I didn't know what a Catholic was. The Troubles had been on the TV news for three years by then but it was always the one news story that Dad would never comment on, although for everything else on the news and indeed most of TV he could have given the cast of Gogglebox a run for their money.

Because of Grandpa Brown I now have an Irish passport, which is nice post-Brexit. But maybe if my Dad hadn't rejected that side of his past (he otherwise got on fine with his Dad, just not about the religion-'n'-politics thing), he would have taken up his Irish birthright, so that my own kids could now have it too. (Or, of course, I could have done that myself before they were born, but I had zero f.cking clue that I might be entitled to it, and I'm not sure I would have forked out the ~€300 in today's money that it costs.)
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Re: Full English

Post by discovolante » Wed Mar 31, 2021 4:32 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 3:52 pm
Yes, fair enough. I'm not well-versed in sectarian tensions at all, to be honest. I probably should have restricted my comments to people from England, and been a bit less dogmatic.
I was going to say earlier that cluelessness about sectarian tensions in the UK is another English thing, but then I got worried it was just me, but now I know that there are at least two of us :P
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Re: Full English

Post by Martin Y » Wed Mar 31, 2021 5:40 pm

It might be worth adding, or maybe not but it only just came back to me, that the solid Britishness thing was very much instilled long before I grasped the sectarian thing which was not much spoken of in cosy middle class areas like ours. I can remember when I was about 7 or 8 another boy asked if I was a Protestant or a Catholic and I was embarrassed because I didn't know.

It's curious I suppose because you imagine cultures all over the world with that kind of tension involve kids being taught to hate the other lot. I guess not; you just gradually pick it up. We weren't even taught which side we were on. Not even that there were sides. I remember one solitary bit of graffiti near our house. "1690" it said. It was there for years. It was puzzling. I assumed they probably meant 1960 and got it wrong. Which further reminds me of a once fellow student from Belfast who surprised me when she said The Troubles were very much a working class sport and didn't much intrude into middle class life there either.

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Re: Full English

Post by individualmember » Wed Mar 31, 2021 6:09 pm

Martin Y wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 5:40 pm
Which further reminds me of a once fellow student from Belfast who surprised me when she said The Troubles were very much a working class sport and didn't much intrude into middle class life there either.
My aunt who is as middle class as they come was paying protection money (ahem, making a donation to the prisoners fund) to the gangsters for years. That’s an intrusion into middle class life in my book.

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Re: Full English

Post by sTeamTraen » Wed Mar 31, 2021 7:19 pm

Martin Y wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 5:40 pm
I remember one solitary bit of graffiti near our house. "1690" it said. It was there for years. It was puzzling. I assumed they probably meant 1960 and got it wrong.
In one of Irving Welsh's books there is a subplot in which
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Re: Full English

Post by Cardinal Fang » Wed Mar 31, 2021 7:45 pm

My father was both born in British India (although the city he was born in is now in Bangladesh). He were British citizens simply by virtue of that (he was born there because grandfather was a C of E priest sent out there to do good work amongst the "natives" according to GF's diary).

One great grandparent was Eastern European Jewish (it's rather alarming to see on that part of the family tree that apart from my great grandparent and their direct descendents it stops absolutely dead in 1942-1943. Brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, cousins - all vanish. No records of what happened to them), another (different part of the family tree) was from South Africa.

I've been told in the past that that having immigrant great grandparents, and a parent who wasn't born physically in the UK (never mind he was still a British citizen) means I'm not "properly" English. However I can also trace one line of my family tree back to a craftsman who lived on London Bridge at the time of the Domesday Book (yay for guild records!). Interesting how having some ancestors who were born elsewhere trumps having a line in your family tree traceable to at least 1086 in the views of some xenophobes.

CF
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