You have to laugh at this article by A.A. Gill about Englishness. (thx ATW)

It's the way he blends the subtle with the surreal, so that we get juxtapositions like 'The monkey noises at black players, the bellows of abuse at anyone who’s admitted in passing that they read The Guardian; the relentless nailing of ugliness, of weakness, of foreignness'.

You've got to laugh. One wonders just how well he holds in focus the fact that people only do that to Guardian readers to reinforce their ridiculous prejudices about the world, to confirm them in the ever-so-lofty notions of superiority and superior judgement about the world which they so often hold (or, how can they ever read their exactingly stupid doyen Gill from beginning to end without feeling like class snitches?).

I might add that I look English (well, sort of), sound English etc etc... (while being somewhat of a mixture and not even a clearly defined one at that) yet I find that I have no problem with identifying myself as English. Gill has no appreciation that anger and humour are the scylla and charybdis of human emotion. Only the English seem to have grasped this effectively. You might not like the exact synthesis involved, but it seems just about the only practical model out there which, as they say, 'keeps it real' and effective.