SLEEPING WITH PIGS...

Bryan Appleyard: “I wouldn't have noticed it before, but, after
the extravagant politeness of America, it came as a shock. The British used to
mock the 'have a nice day' culture as false and, somehow, corrupt. But it's a
thousand times better than our own surly sub-culture and, anyway, if
professionalisation and training produce good manners, what's wrong with that?
And it's not cynical and skin-deep. Some of the most interesting conversations I
had in the US were with waiters and shop assistants. Here I wouldn't bother. We
have, as I wrote on my return, a problem, a dimming of our imaginations, a
closing of our minds....”

Thus Bryan, commiserating the dimming of this nation. And I am perfectly of his opinion concerning “our surly sub-culture,” which, though extremely fashionable at present, I think altogether uncivilised. For here’s a photograph I’ve taken of my local cycling-path. It flawlessly conveys the aspiration and unadulterated behaviour of the English pig in his own backyard.

The countryside is his scrapyard. And pardon my hubris - but can people be so abysmally pigheaded and still claim the status of a civilised nation? Where you and I are enraptured by the view of sweeping meadows, the lark ascending, and the tolling of bells marking out the glorious Hertfordshire morning, that don't mean shit to a navvy, mate. The age of poetry is gone. This is the age of the common man, and every day brings some sort of reminder that we are living under the dominion of a sub-culture that I, for one, truly do not understand.

How on earth did it happen that evolution passed him by?

For that he’s still living and breathing absolutely astonishes me. Perhaps if there is a moral origin to this problem it can be found in what Disraeli referred to as the Two Nations, an important feature of which was class selfishness and the domination of the landed interests before those of the common man. For in all this, one can detect not just the gratuitous scorn of the resilient, recalcitrant navvy, but also the suppressed rage and resentment of the oppressed “workhouse boy“, cripplingly conscious of his own ignoble origins - and regarded as the poorest of the poor, as savages who slept with their pigs. In truth, we only have to think of the brutality of the factory system, the high mortality amongst child-workers, the exploitation of the labour of women, the overcrowded industrial towns, dark and poorly ventilated coalmines, low wages and long hours to understand that the English worker, to this day, will come with an attitude. He’ll carry his grudge like a battlescar - livid with a strong sense of “them” and “us,” born out of centuries of poverty and exploitation. The fact of the matter is, that the England of Celts, Frisians, Saxons, Angles and mixed bands of other invaders, has never recovered from the Norman yoke which taught the lower orders to be ashamed of their roots and who, even in our time, still display a traditional sense of grievance against the ruling establishment.

Today, of course, you’re also dealing with a large welfare-class. Your contemporary peasants will be a mixture of unemployed loafers, dysfunctional families, and genetic throwbacks who regard all foreigners with ill-concealed loathing. Truth to tell, there is something undeniably retro about the statistical fact that one in five males in this country at the very least, shows potentially psychopathic tendencies, and that mental health problems cost Britain more than £40 billion a year in treatment and lost days at work.

It’s no secret.

It harks back to the days of Wellington and Waterloo, when Anglo-Saxon warrior mystique was constructed in colloquial concoctions of ‘scum of the earth’. The scumbag has a very big heart and that bulldog tenacity which makes him totally unafraid. And history has enhanced his reputation. There is, on the other hand, a fine line between bravery and stupidity. Indeed, it strikes me as a profoundly poignant incongruity that, once the material of Empire and the arbiter of nations, now dumbed down into a consumer culture with no direction or ideals left, there appears to be an entire class of people whose historical objective has been reduced to getting habitually drunk, fouling up the countryside, and beating the crap out of each other...

Dreamy