New York, New York, New York...

My life is pretty great. Occasionally, for example, I get taken to New York. My wife has to go there for work often enough that I get to tag along, sneaked on as hand baggage, maybe as often as once a year. A perfect storm of air miles, baby-sitters and opera commitments hit last weekend with the upshot that I found myself in Manhattan with a whole Sunday to waste as I saw fit.

The problem, at least for someone who occasionally blogs about travelling, is that the more often I visit somewhere like New York, the less remarkable it is. I'm past the initial shock, but still many years away from Proustian remembrances. I'll never be cool enough to be blasé about Manhattan, but I am beginning to accept that it is a real place that I can walk around and explore. Given one free day by myself, I'm not swamped with the frenzied pressure of a tourist, desperate to see as much as he can before he leaves. It's a nice position to be in. But I wouldn't have thought to write about it: a sign I might be starting to take it for granted.

I began with breakfast with my wife at Doughnut Plant on W 23rd Street. This place must be amazing because I don't even really like doughnuts that much. It was her recommendation and (not unusually) she was very right. At 8am on a Sunday, the place was beautifully quiet and the Meyer Lemon Yeast doughnut was absolutely delicious: the perfect glaze cracked as I took a bite, like paper-thin ice on a half-frozen pond. The dough was light and sweet and, to my relief, I realised it was a 'made with' not a 'made from' situation with regard to the yeast. I'm not the greatest coffee-drinker in the world either, but I was able to gulp down their Valrhona Mocha effortlessly, like it was spring water. Not a bad way to start the day.

And then she had to go to work (oh dear) and I had to while away the day until she would be finished. I had made a rough plan which I quickly threw out of the window. Very slowly I made my way to the USS Intrepid, moored at Pier 86, 12th Avenue and 46th Street. It's a WWII aircraft carrier that served at (possibly) the biggest sea battle ever: Leyte Gulf. Today it houses all sorts of military aircraft, as well as a Concorde and the space shuttle Enterprise. There's also a Cold War submarine, USS Growler, that was armed with nuclear cruise missiles and told to sit off the coast of the USSR. I viewed stopping here as tidying up - my boys had already seen it all without me on a previous visit so I had the perfect excuse to whiz around for an hour by myself.

Aircraft carriers are impressive things but I think I enjoyed the submarine most of all. America is good for subs: we've seen the USS Pampanito in San Francisco, HA.19 in Fredericksburg, and U-505 in Chicago. This one was very good: full of old school dials and switches, things that have been designed to go demonstrably 'clunk' when they are pressed - quite an important feature when one is messing about with nuclear missiles. The thing I really liked about Growler was that it provided a technological snapshot. Intrepid served for decades and was refitted again and again, masking her original capabilities, whereas Growler, commissioned in '58 and out of service by '64, was made obsolete almost immediately by the advent of Polaris missiles.

Enterprise, the first space shuttle (built for atmospheric test flights only) is still under wraps following Hurricane Sandy, but we've seen her already at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) back in 2010. (Washington now has Discovery, whilst Mission Control Houston only gets a dodgy mock up handed down from the Kennedy Space Center, which has Atlantis. Don't get me started.) And then Concorde. I had never seen one up close before. Certainly never flown on one. (Let's be honest, the closest I've got is this.) It's a beautiful machine, surprisingly small and delicate but with incredible, alien-looking sweeps and flourishes. It still looks futuristic, like something Derrick Meddings would have dreamed up for Gerry Anderson. On another day, with more (or less) time to spare, I'd have poked my nose around inside, but I was keen to move on.

I've been around the Metropolitan Museum of Art before. Or at least, I've spent some hours inside it and seen some of the enormous and amazing collection. But I knew I hadn't even scratched the surface. I seized the opportunity of a long afternoon to try and get some more of it under my belt. I'm not going to give you a gallery-by-gallery account of everything I saw, but I spent the time well. Even better, there are still rooms and rooms of stuff to go back and see in the future.

I surprised myself by enjoying the period furniture, mainly because the Met does such a good job of contextualising it. They recreate whole rooms and salons, brilliantly evoking the whole culture and not just showing a table or a chest of drawers. I don't know why this should be, but the experience is rather more pleasant here than it is plodding around actual stately piles in England. Perhaps because there is none of that stuffy resentment of a home being made available for viewings, the peasantry being allowed to gawp at how their betters live. Recreated inside a New York art museum, these spaces are appropriated for an international public and largely shorn of the divisive nature of class. The paintings are good too and, being alone, I was able to zoom along, only bothering with the ones that compelled me to stop and stare, which is by far the best way to deal with an enormous collection.

But when I do eventually bring the kids here, the first room I will take them to is the armoury. It's not an intimidatingly large exhibit, but there are some very nice pieces and, although they have a bloodthirsty purpose, they do qualify as works of art in their own right. If you don't believe me, check out the hilts on the rapiers next time you're passing through because they are as swish as you like.

And then, like always, Henry VIII turns up. Twice.

Henry VIII is unavoidable. He is the gouty uxoricidal axle around which English history spins. Every thing that happens before leads to and is neatly drawn together by his reign; every thing that comes after starts with him. So I wasn't surprised to bump into him in Manhattan at all. He materialised in the form of two suits of armour, each made for him at a different point in his life. Before we look at them, let's just spend a moment exploring a long held theory of mine: Henry VIII has a lot in common with Elvis.

Both kings, obviously, and also musicians: Henry was accomplished with the lute, a 'talented player of the virginals' (Frankie Howerd face) and composed tunes, but probably not 'Greensleeves'. Elvis built Graceland and hung out with Richard Nixon; Henry built Hampton Court and Nonsuch and wrestled with the king of France. But there's more - two beautiful-looking young men, full of talent and vitality who let it all go to their heads and their waistlines and became all fat and rubbish.

So this is essentially Henry VIII's '68 Comeback Special suit of armour:

 

And this is his rhinestone onesie, dead-on-a-toilet suit of armour. 

Not convinced? Here's the clincher: Henry's last words were (allegedly) "Monks, monks, monks!". If that doesn't make you think of this, then I don't know what else to say.

Anyway, I have become rather sidetracked. I started writing this because I wanted to mention how nice it was just to be in New York. Nice to be somewhere full of people, mostly young, mostly impossibly fashionable and beautiful, all going about their Sunday in the winter sunshine, either citizens of the world idly gawping at the skyline or native New Yorkers heads down, pacing purposefully. Nice to be somewhere cold too, with everyone wearing hats and coats. I had forgotten, living in Houston as I do, that there is a simple pleasure to be had sitting in a bar or coffee shop and watching people as they step through the door, their skin red and rosy, their frozen faces breaking into smiles as they see their friends, their eyes alive with the anticipation of warmth and comfort and, just maybe, a Meyer Lemon Yeast doughnut.

Saint George

St. George by Raphael

I grew up in a little town in a little country. Nothing ever happened in Salisbury whilst I was a child and it never appeared on the local news, let alone the national headlines. It had no minor football team to stage an improbable fairy-tale cup run. It never featured in TV dramas. Neither Antiques Roadshow nor Songs of Praise ever seemed to call. In short I had no way to tell if the rest of the country knew we existed at all. It might even have been that we didn't exist, and just received programming from a real world that carried on happily without us. Finally, when I was twelve or thirteen, a boy in my class won a Blue Peter badge. He went to London, to BBC Television Centre, and we could actually see him on the screen. Here at last was corroboration: I did live in the same dimension as all those other places on the television. Salisbury was real after all.

But even to this day I am completely thrown when I meet people who have heard of Salisbury. And if they say that they've been there it's all I can do not to scoff out loud, as if they're claiming to have somehow inveigled their way through the magic forcefield that shields us from the mortal realm.

All of which is a silly way of raising two ideas: 1) that one's home always looks different from the outside; 2) that we don't give any thought to what it looks like from the outside until we are forced to. Realisation can dawn in an instant or take years to seep in. And it can happen to a species as easily as it can to an individual, as the Apollo 8 mission proved in 1968 (left).

I've been looking at England from the outside now for many years - in fact, rather like a NASA probe, I seem to be moving further away - and an exterior picture has been gradually forming, as if the data were being beamed in from the depths of space, pixel by pixel.

But alongside the slow drip-feed of first Welsh and then American views on England, there have been sudden instances of insight. I've mentioned living in Wales before, but I must reiterate that I barely considered myself English before I moved there: I was British, of course, as was - I thought - everyone else. This was a long time ago - before Devolution - but I was left in no doubt, even by loving friends, that I was English and different, that in the past I had been the oppressor and that even in the present, on match day at least, I was still the enemy.

The English have no cultural memory of being oppressed. In a pinch, we might huff about the Norman Yoke but that is merely to clutch at the flimsiest of straws. And if ever we do wish to empathise with our downtrodden Saxon forebears, there's no way we'd be willing to give up all that we gained from the Conquest. No, we've never been oppressed but we still relish the way that the Plantagenet kings laid about them with sword and fire, crushing Welsh, Scots, Irish, French and even Saracens. It is these kings that we emulate when we send out our footballers wearing the three lions of Richard I; and when we fly the flag of St. George it is because of Edward III, who venerated courtly ideas of chivalry whilst he was cementing an English empire.

In England if we do admit to any of this then we are aren't prepared to see ourselves as the villains of the piece. We see Medieval battles, bashing the Scots or Welsh, as a bit of fun, like beating them at rugby perhaps. 'And look, they still have their own languages, don't they?' we might say, as if this mitigated against the centuries when children would be beaten, or worse, for letting slip a word of their mother tongue. The English were never required to face up to what we had done - there were never any recriminations. As Wales, Ireland and even Scotland were absorbed into this new United Kingdom of Britain, past grievances were swept under the carpet as we set about being beastly to the rest of the world.

It's an important distinction because I think we are much more aware of, upset by, and feel more guilty about what the British Empire did. The implications are still unwinding, all around the world, and we are involved in an ongoing series of complicated calculations, trying to see if our legacy can't be worked to be morally neutral. Yes, slavery, we think: terrible. But on the other hand, you know, Wilberforce and all that! We cling to the idea that we ended slavery thirty years before the USA because it makes us feel superior and less racist. Yes, India, we hmmm. Some bad things happened, but look we left peacefully and India's now a burgeoning superpower, the largest democracy in the world! Okay, we invented concentration camps, but we're not as bad as the Nazis!

The Second World War is seen as a huge make-weight when we're trying to get the scales to balance. Whatever terrible evil things we did, we think, the war against Nazism was a fire that scourged us of our empire and left Britain diminished but redeemed. As an historical narrative it is neat and tidy, but it is something we tell ourselves. I don't think it's how we're viewed in Kenya, or India, or America.

The view from the US is naturally shaped by the War of Independence. Britain, and especially England, is seen as a rump. Quaint, sure, but redundant. And it doesn't help that there's so much confusion about what exactly constitutes the UK, Great Britain, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland or the British Isles. In terms of political power, 'English' and 'England' are used for everything. As a result, 'English' and 'British' are used pretty much synonymously: to be English is to be British, and vice versa.

But culturally, as soon as one identifies oneself as Irish or Scottish, or even Welsh, one is distinct, not English and therefore not British. Tartan, Loch Ness and Braveheart are not British, they are Scottish. Tom Jones and male voice choirs are Welsh. St. Patrick despite being Romano-British and growing up in Wales, is the most Irishy thing ever.

I'm not complaining. Celtic Britain has its own distinct flavour and has excelled at marketing itself and its culture to the outside world. The English, happy to wave the Union Flag, have never felt the need to cultivate their own individual character.

We need to think about how we're seen from the outside. Even more so because of the looming possibility of Scottish independence. If it were to happen, the divorce would be messy and protracted; everything we share would be carved up over many years. But one thing England would certainly retain is the negative association with British imperialism. As far as the rest of the world would be concerned, Scotland would be left floaty-light, new and shiny and free from centuries of subjugation. And England, that old bully, would be merely more shrivelled, more decrepit, with its blood red cross and its fondness for chain mail armour.

This has turned in to a long rant but, as I say, we need to start thinking about how we're seen from the outside. Last week I read this excellent article by Greg Jenner - it passionately puts the case that St. George is a pretty useless rallying figure for a modern England. I think it is the case that our Englishness, because of Britain, because of empire, has long been a internal matter, something that we only thought about in terms of looking inwards. That won't do.

Brilliantly, St. Patrick's Day has been turned into a rolling global party. It may be, for most people, nothing more than an excuse for a beer but it is undeniably a world-wide phenomenon, a massive celebration and a big win for Irishness. In fact, its promotion has been a deliberate policy of the Irish government for twenty years with (thanks Wikipedia) four specific aims:

• To offer a national festival that ranks amongst all of the greatest celebration in the world
• To create energy and excitement throughout Ireland via innovation, creativity, grassroots involvement, and marketing activity
• To provide the opportunity and motivation for people of Irish descent (and those who sometimes wish they were Irish) to attend and join in the imaginative and expressive celebrations
• To project, internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country with wide appeal.

I love that, especially 'those who sometimes wish they were Irish'. As an Englishman I look at those words with envy - who would ever aspire to being English? For a start, we're never going to be able to compete with the Irish when it comes to getting the world drunk with us. But if we possibly could, we should take those aims and try to emulate them. After all, we must have something special, something uniquely English, that the world would be happy to cherish with us? And of course, we do. As Mr Jenner and a great many other people have pointed out through the years, we have Shakespeare.

We needn't do much more than rename St. George's Day, (April 23rd, non-English people) as Shakepeare's Birthday. It's so convenient! (No, there's no evidence that he was actually born on that day but it is very likely and we are a lot less fussy about the 'Englishness' of a Palestinian Christian martyr who we currently share with Georgia, Portugal and host of other places.) But we can keep the flag, sure, why not. George can stay patron saint if you like because that's entirely meaningless anyway. But we should start celebrating Shakespeare on April 23rd. It's distinct. It's marketable. His works are glorious and rich and almost endlessly open to interpretation and exploration. Funny, sad, exciting; English history or universal human drama - it's all there. And best of all, it wouldn't just be happening on village greens and in Norman churches. It could be everywhere; English is spoken by over a billion people, more than any other language. Wheel out the ambassadors and the High Commissioners! Unleash the heralds and their fanfares! Put on a show and celebrate our most significant contribution to world culture.

If nothing else it would be chance to future-proof England. Scotland might go its own way. Anglicanism and monarchy, which we have set such store by for so long, might not last. Symbols lose their usefulness or become sullied. Too often English patriotism is an ugly, intolerant beast, mired in ignorance and the born from the fear that we are no longer the power we once were. To hell with that. Shakespeare offers us an England for all ages, for all the world, and something to look back at fondly, proudly, when we are far from home.

Twitter 2 - 2 England

Flanders & Swann

Definitely cheating with this one - but then, the whole eight disc thing has gone out the window already, hasn't it? So I don't actually have any compunction in calling up for my next selection, Kirsty, the two live albums of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann - At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat.

Growing up, my musical influences missed these chaps. I knew of some of the songs, but I didn't know how they were connected, or who they were by, and I was wholly unaware of the concept of musical comedy - or should that be comedic music?

I did sort of come into contact with them, or come under their influence at least. My school friend Chris was definitely au fait with Flanders & Swann and he and I spent a long time collaborating on our own songs as a result. I can't in all honesty say that I knew we were emulating anyone, however, when we rattled off such classics as "I Had a Drawing Pin" and "The Mole Song". As far as I was concerned it was just what we did. Sadly, no recordings survive from this period.

So having unknowingly stumbled into the environs of Flanders & Swann, I unknowingly stumbled away again. It wasn't until after I left university that I re-encountered them, and when I did, it was through my wife.

Very early on, early enough that we were both still trying to simultaneously impress and size up the other, we got onto the subject of the laws of Thermodynamics, this being exactly the sort of thing that two arts graduates talk about in such a situation. I got excited, but only really because the Second Law is referenced heavily in the final Tom Baker Doctor Who story 'Logopolis' and consequently I felt confident enough that I could bluff my way through a conversation on the subject.

What happened next stunned and delighted me: this strange woman started to sing and click her fingers. Nobody sang. I had never had anyone sing at me in the middle of a conversation before. And she was singing a song about.. well, it was this:

So that was that.

The years that followed saw us do a lot of motorway driving and those two CDs got listened to an awful lot as we went. It turned out I had been missing out on quite a lot. They are wonderful performances. Funny, clever, even moving, they are an unambiguously English slice of mid twentieth century wit.

Here a few of the stand out tracks.

The Hippopotamus Song. I won't link to it here. It is easily their most famous song. It's also the one I have tired of most as it is the one I have sung so often (probably hundreds of times); for several years now it has been the 'bedtime song' that I have had to sing to my children. I'm letting the tradition slide a little now but I'm sure I've got many more renditions left to do...

The Slow Train. Exquisite and not at all funny, it is a lament for passing of the local railway stations and branch lines following the Beeching reforms of the early Sixties. Rather like film footage from before the First World War, it presents a picture of a England that has now vanished, overrode by modernity.

Which brings me to my last pick. "I don't know if you've ever thought of this," intones Michael Flanders, "but England hasn't really got a national song." He's right - God Save the Queen/King is really a British anthem - and, having dismissed other contenders (Jerusalem?), the pair offer this modest ditty.

Typical English understatement indeed. Nothing so perfectly captures the dilemma of English nationalism, torn as we are between an instinctive contempt for vulgar jingoism (at once both beneath our dignity and a shameful reminder of our past crimes) and our inherent and private conviction that we really are best after all. What rotters we are.

I've often wondered if there is an existing song that could be pressed into use as an English national song. The criteria are challenging, but if I think of any I'll mention them in passing. In the meantime I think we can agree that it shouldn't be this one.

Old England

More differences. British rain is soft, gentle and pervasive. As I sit and write this, there is a fine tracery of silver drops on the window, a delicate curtain of light. That doesn't happen in Houston where the summer storms unleash a rushing fury of fat wet bullets onto road and roof.

Of course the difference I can't get over with America is that it is just so new: shiny and young. Like a young adult, it is perhaps sometimes too earnest, too eager, when British sensibilities might tend to dry reticence.

I'm happy to think of us as a nation of fuddy-duddies and whilst we have been catching up with family and friends I have been revelling in the dusty dotage of England.

Last week we were in Leicestershire where we visited the house where Lady Jane Grey grew up - now a stately ruin set amongst parkland, overrun by peacocks and deer. We also went to the site of the Battle of Bosworth, which is where I took the picture at the top.

Billed by the visitors' centre as the 'second most important battle in English history' with the tag-line 'Two Kings, One Day', Bosworth, fought in 1485, was the decisive battle in the Wars of the Roses - a dynastic struggle for the crown between generations of rival heirs that took up all of the fifteenth century.

The Plantagenet ruling family splintered into Yorkists (white rose) and Lancastrians (red rose) who fought, usurped and executed each other into extinction until, at Bosworth, the last Plantagenet king (maligned Richard III) was defeated and killed by an upstart princeling called Henry Tudor.

It may be five-hundred years ago, but this is all desperately recent stuff. Henry became Henry VII and after him came Henry VIII and he is essentially the central knot of English history, what with the Split from Rome and everything. To this day there remains a fierce rivalry between the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, even if it is now limited largely to football and cricket matches.

Ooh, look! Speaking of cricket, here is some real village cricket being played on a real village green. Yesterday we went to dangle great-grandchildren in front of my grandfather who lives in a little village on the Wiltshire/Hampshire border. His house is right on the green and so were these chaps (albeit inbetween showers). I took W out to have a look and found myself having to explain not just cricket, but greens and even villages. There were maybe fifteen or twenty people watching and most of them were players. At the end of each over, the scorer hoisted up a board of numbers above his head and pointed it at us for us to see, waiting until I'd nodded or waved before he turned away. It was achingly quiet, only the sounds of the game and the breeze in the trees could be heard.

The cricket is quite new compared with the Tudors - organised village games only began in the seventeenth century - but the green and the thatched cottages around it present a scene which is older than England itself: for over a thousand years people have lived like this.

It's bewildering. But I'm about to head off for a pub lunch in Salisbury - if that can't help me find some perspective, nothing can.

St. David's Day

It turns out I am in an abusive relationship – with Texas. Our new home has showered us with friendship, generosity and hospitality and in return we are flaunting our sense of belonging… to Wales: red rugby shirts are being pressed into service for the national day. It’s a little like moving in with a new girlfriend and then throwing a party for your ex-wife’s birthday. Possibly. And as we are actually English, wilfully commemorating another nation’s holiday might seem like the height of churlishness. But to top it all, we wouldn’t dream of doing anything for St David’s Day if we were in Britain, let alone Wales itself. What’s going on?

Britishness is complicated, but more so for the English than for the other nations. The received wisdom would appear to be that, having had a thousand years or more in which to define themselves as being Not English, the Welsh, Scots and Irish contrived individual cultural identities in the 19th century, a period that saw the invention of, amongst other things, the kilt, and druids. The truth is that it is the English – or rather the Anglo Saxons – which defined themselves as being Not Celtic. The Welsh word ‘Cymry’, which those Celts took to describe themselves in post-Roman Britain, has some link to ‘community’ and means ‘fellow countrymen’. They called us ‘Saesneg’: the Saxons. The English word ‘Welsh’ comes from the Saxon description of the same people: ‘walha’, meaning ‘foreigners’ or ‘aliens’. The Welsh called themselves ‘Us’. We called them ‘Them’.

A 1,000 year old grudge match.

For some, these lines of demarcation are set in stone. But for us, personally, things have become a little blurred. Growing up in the ‘80s I had no real idea that I was English. As far as I knew, I was British; we were all British and any internal distinctions were negligible. When the rubgy came on, matches against the other Home Nations were just appetisers for the game that really mattered: playing France. It was only when I found myself suddenly living in Wales that I discovered that I was English – because the Welsh told me I was in no uncertain times. Rugby in Wales is a religion – no other sporting team in the world (apart from, possibly, the cricket teams of India and Pakistan) is so fervently and passionately supported. And the game that really matters to them is the match against England. Being English in Wales in February and March is to run the gauntlet, to live inside a crucible of ardent Welshness. Everyone is set against you – your colleagues, neighbours, random little old ladies: they are Cymry and you are not. Even Nature is on their side as the parks and verges explode with daffodils and the fields fill with leeks and lambs.

God help you if they actually win that game of rugby.

It’s fair to say that the thirteen years I spent in Wales reinforced my sense of English identity. But somewhere in the middle of all this our boys were born. You can argue that there’s not a drop of Welsh blood in either of them, but you can’t deny they have a claim on Welshness. They were obviously born in Wales. William (you can tell we thought he was English at the time) was born in Cardiff, but Christopher was born up Caerphilly Mountain which meant we had to drive to Ystrad Mynach to register him. If that doesn’t make you Welsh I don’t know what does. And of course they arrived at the end of February and the beginning of March respectively, just either side of St David’s Day. Critically – and this is the acid test – they qualify to play for Wales.

Undeniably, they have claim on a Welsh heritage even if we, their parents, do not. Whilst we lived there, it was easy enough for the schools to nurture this on our behalf. But now we are in America, there’s a definite sense that it is our job to ensure that they have access to this Welshness if they so wish. Some of my attempts at this have been laughable – does making them watch Ivor the Engine count? – but William got packed off to school in his jersey this morning, just like all the boys (and some of the girls) in Cardiff. It feels odd that it matters and I worry, in case I am actually doing this for my benefit and not his.

Weirdly, because this is also the time of year for Rodeo, Friday was ‘Dress Western’ day at school, which means that all the boys and girls wore they ‘duds’, i.e. dressed as cowboys. In a sense, this is just the Texan version of St David’s Day, and Rodeo is just the equivalent of rugby. Instead of daffodils, we have blue bonnets, or will in a few weeks. But there’s something missing here. Why does the Reliant Stadium full of Texans not feel more like the Millennium Stadium full of Welsh people? The difference, I think, is that to be English here is nothing more than a passing novelty in a nation of people that nearly all started off as something else. And our role in the creation of America is largely meaningless 200 years later on. Whereas in Wales, to be English is to be the thing that they are not, the very opposite of Cymry and our role in shaping and defining Them from the outside is still at the centre of our relationship with each other, after over a thousand years. Strangely, perhaps, I think this makes Wales an easier place to love but, then, we are back to abusive relationships aren't we?

Happy St David's Day to all our Welsh friends and, er, family. You'll be simultaneously appalled and delighted to know that I was cheering you all on against Scotland and France but not, of course, against England - better luck next year!