Look, you’ve go a mascot that’s a Teddy Bear dressed like Richard the Lionheart, a man who couldn’t speak English, mostly lived in France and only really used England as a source of revenue to support his war efforts.
Paddington Bear would be a more English mascot, but I appreciate we can’t have an Asylum Seeker from Darkest Peru representing us. There is Pooh, of course, but I think he sold his soul to Disney, and oh how we hate sell outs.
What we really need is a Red Squirrel, that very bastion of Englishness, bravely facing off those nasty foreign Greys. Yes, a Red Squirrel, but not one dressed like a Crusader. I think the Crusader imagery isn’t very helpful, since it is too reminiscent of EU Cooperation. Let’s have a Red Squirrel nibbling Cucumber Sandwiches and sipping English Breakfast Tea while complaining about the weather.
English and Proud. Personally I have never found pride to be a very nice characteristic, let alone a very English one. We’re more a kind of humble people who like to do ourselves down. Nothing wrong with that. Puffed up nationalism is so tiring. But English reserve, low expectations, benevolence and graciousness: ah, the very taste of Olde Englande! It brings tears to your eyes. English and just a little Humble. Ah, that’s better.
Any how, I digress. The first task of the English Democrats will be to promote the proper use of English by the English. So can all of you Patriotic folk refrain from penning your epistles until you have learnt to spell and use commas properly? Thereafter I propose we compile a list of all that’s good about England and the English as a starting point, rather than all that’s bad. I shall start.
1) We love to queue in an orderly fashion even when nobody asked us to.
2) We always pull to the side of the road when an emergency vehicle needs to get through.
3) It rains a lot, but we never complain; instead we shrug our shoulders and say, “So it’s raining again then.”
4) We’re generally very charitable.
5) We believe in the rule of law.
6) Curry.
7) We used to make the best sports cars.
8) The National Health Service, of course!
9) We invented all the best inventions and then gave them away for others to make even better – jet engines, radar, jet liners, sports cars, liquid crystal displays, bagless vacuum cleaners…
10) Silent Ks.
Please carry on chaps. Make your nation proud.
Last modified: 6 November 2013
Both amusing and trenchant. And much needed. Everyone should write something like this for their country.