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I'm not one of those Englanders you will hear on the bus moaning about the demise of national values and national identity.
While I can understand the concerns of such people, especially older ones who have seen the social, cultural and economic landscapes of their areas changer dramatically over the past 50 years, I suppose I am a fatalist who just accepts that Britain is changing.
Take that vanguard of all things English, pop star Morrissey. He has recently initiated legal action against music publication NME on the basis that they misleadingly contextualised his views on the changing fabric of Britain as being those of a racist.
While I do not agree with the sentiment of his comments, I recognise the sentiments as being an expression of a valid if sentimental response to something once familiar suddenly seeming quite foreign. In my view, one thing they certainly were not is racist.
Expressing sorrow at the loss of a familiar old England where the vast majority of people always spoke English and had their heritage firmly rooted in Ye Old Blighty is sentimental, yes. But racist, no.
The whole episode, together with certain sections of the media who like to believe that Britain is increasingly becoming as an anarchic mix of unwelcome immigrants whose sole contribution to England has been spoiling "this green and pleasant land", reminds me of something someone much wiser than me once said: "Things never were the way the were."
Which is essentially true memory is subjective, so finding agreement on what some mythical epoch of a nation's past was actually like is always going to be impossible.
Take siblings. I have plenty of them, and I know through bitter experience that we rarely agree on most aspects of our shared childhoods. And we don't just disagree, we do so to such a vehement extent that even saying something like "Remember that glorious sunny day we spent at Warwick Castle in 1976?" can be as incendiary as pouring petrol on a fire. "No", one of us will retort. "It wasn't sunny, it was a hailstorm. And it wasn't Warwick, it was Windsor. And you tried to gouge out my eyeball and insert a hailstone in its place. I only narrowly avoided very serious personal injury."
So imagine what it is like for a whole nation to agree on what the past was like it just doesn't happen. The only way to avoid contentious argument in such situations is to not let personal memories compete against one another, rather, it is to accept that although all memory is subjective, almost all memories are equally valid.
In a family situation, this can be very hard to do. So unless you belong to a tolerant and philosophical family who can good-humouredly tolerate disagreement, the past is best left free from retrospective inquest.
For example, one of my closest friends comes from an amiable family who, though separated geographically, remain very close. However, last year, he got together with his clan over Christmas, seeing his sister for the first time in nearly five years.
Over the weeks they spent together, she told him that she had been seeing an analyst and they started talking about the past. Suddenly he realised that he was encumbered with whole litany of childhood grievances of which he was previously oblivious. Not surprisingly, he started to experience psychologically regressive phenomena.
My point is that this is what a nation does once it aspires to be not what it is or can be, but what it once was. At this point it regresses, becoming an ailing parody of its former self. While Morrissey was not advocating a return to the heady old days of his formative 1970s and 1980s England and, my gosh, how many profitable grievances did those two decades provide him with by ruing the state of England today he was expressing a kind of stagnant and sentimental conservatism that contributes very little that is meaningful to the debate.
Morrissey is now an expat, having spent most of the last decade in either Los Angeles or Rome. I believe this is a pertinent detail. Have you ever been to an "English pub" while abroad?
If you have, you will then understand how notions of England and Englishness become skewed to the point of pastiche by people who, while removed from the reality of their homeland, subscribe to some warped memory of what these notions mean.
This argument applies to so many aspects of how we approach the past while failing to embrace the future. Architecture is just one other such sphere where sentiment and conservatism induce pastiche and stagnation.
Compare the beauty of a Genuine Georgian home to the pastiche of its mock Georgian imitator. There is none. Then compare both to a truly contemporary house of the 21st century I know which I'd rather live in.
Sometimes I too feel sentiment stirring as I remember the way things were "back in the day", but then I remind myself that while the future may not ever be a way to claim compensation for the losses of the past, it certainly has its consolations while always remaining vibrant, exciting and surprising.
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