By Jingo!

What a wonderful gift it is to be English. We go crazy for Wimbledon and for the past decade have harboured unusually realistic hopes of a champion from our shores. We love beating the Australians at absolutely anything but especially cricket, whatever the newly contrived format. We reassure ourselves that our football team is star-packed and capable of anything. For culture we attend the Proms, Glyndebourne and local productions of Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. We have Elgar to provide the soundtrack to our Englishness and Kipling to put it into words. We once ruled the world and are slowly coming to the realisation that is all in the past. We go all pagan for the summer solstice at Stonehenge and still crave a good broadsheet to keep abreast of world events. Embracing technology and keeping up with the world around us we have learnt to browse and tweet. Secretly, we all wish we had been to Eton or Harrow and to Cambridge or Oxford. I miss the England described by Waugh. The England which braved the new world in the aftermath of the Great War and braced itself for the onset of the next. The England which saw the ascent of Socialism and the demise of the stately home and its denizens. The England of true rustic beauty of Larkin, Laurie Lee and Thomas Hardy. Thank God, there'll always be an England and thank God for Vaughan Williams and Pimms and evensong. Blessed are the English for they shall bask in their great country - wherever they may be!