I’ve travelled to 53 countries all around the world and one thing I’ve found almost everywhere is pride in one’s nationality. People are proud to be American, Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Israeli …<\/p>\n
Here, in the United Kingdom, people are proud to be Scottish, Welsh or Irish and, if they are from that part of UK, they will be sure to tell you. But, almost uniquely, I have not detected any real sense of pride in being English.<\/p>\n
This is why, although today is the Feast of\u00a0 St George who is the patron saint of England, here in England the event is hardly noticeable. Why is this?<\/p>\n
I think that it’s a mixture of two oddly contradictory sentiments. On the one,\u00a0 hand, the English think that it’s rather arrogant, even unpleasantly nationalistic, to be particularly proud of the country to the point of proclaiming it.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, the English are aware that they have an incredible history and culture, but they are so understated emotionally that they see the achievements of England as so obvious that they do not need to be highlighted or celebrated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve travelled to 53 countries all around the world and one thing I’ve found almost everywhere is pride in one’s nationality. People are proud to be American, Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Israeli … Here, in the United Kingdom, people are proud to be Scottish, Welsh or Irish and, if they are from that part of UK, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2284,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions\/2284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}