What is odd, and perhaps even absurd, is that I was finding typical English life quite tough. I had discovered that it was actually harder than going somewhere really alien. Going to, say, India, doesn't challenge who you really are.
I've just finished Julian Baggini's book, Welcome To Everytown. As you can tell from the number of quotations that have run on this blog, I thought it was an absorbing piece of work, the best state-of-the-nation study I've read since Robert Chesshyre's The Return of a Native Reporter. A lot of Baggini's conclusions run counter to media orthodoxy: he thinks Britain is a much more working-class country than we tend to assume, for instance, and that the rise of individualism is pretty much an illusion. Best of all, he's a good listener, and willing to examine his own left-of-centre prejudices. His ideal reader, I suppose, is the typical north London Guardian loyalist, yet his thoughts about the cultural divide between the elites and the other 95 per cent of the country ought to be required reading for everyone. (You'll find a longer newspaper excerpt here.)
For me, it was a strange experience to follow him on his journey. The landscape was familiar and strange at the same time. When I was 13, I could have recited the names of the entire cast of Crossroads, and reeled off the whole of the ITV weekly schedule. As far as I remember, I still read the Daily Mirror (I graduated to the Mail, and then the Guardian, soon afterwards.) Yet I'm now the sort of person who can say, along with your typical High Court judge, that he's never watched an entire episode of East Enders.
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