Both Squander Two and the Devil have been discussing the joyous experience that is being English and living in Scotland. Squander Two gets the bizarre dichotomy of living in fear of physical attack for being English and loving the country for its people just about spot on. And, despite the recently publicised stories being pretty sickening:
In one incident, a seven-year-old boy was punched in the head while he played football with his father in Edinburgh. In another, a disabled man was dragged from his car in Aberdeen and given a black eye.
…I can’t actually believe that there’s been a huge upturn in anti-English feeling. It was already present when I studied there a decade or so ago. I never had any real trouble myself, although I was left under little doubt that this was purely a result of me having a Northern accent; I was “okay”, even if I was still “an English cunt.” And I accepted it (mostly). To quote Squander Two on the wearing of English football shirts in Scotland:
“Frankly, I can’t get my head around an Englishman who’s been in Scotland for twelve years being crazy enough to wear an England shirt. It’s suicide.”
He’s correct; you would have to be out of your mind, and I speak as someone who subsequently spent a decade in a nation whose cities were razed by the RAF within living memory. Walk down the street in an England shirt there and the worst that will happen is that people will approach you and tell you that they went to London on a weekend break last summer. After the fifth or so time it gets bloody irritating, but it is better than a kick in the head.
Thankfully, the English don’t seem to reciprocate the animosity of some of the more knuckle-dragging Scots in terms of violent behaviour towards our northern neighbours. But even the “witty banter” of my closest kilt-wearing friends would be considered unacceptably bigotted if an English person said it about almost any other nationality.
Almost any other nationality, as I discover when I find myself in middle England speaking a guttural central-European tongue on my mobile phone in public, carrying a copy of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in my hand or, wearing “fucking German” glasses.
I had the temerity to speak German on the phone to my girlfriend in the first clas carriage of a Newcastle - London train. For my sins, the horrible loudmothed Geordie woman opposite me (something in “PR”) described me as “German - you know what they’re like” to the person she was speaking to on her mobile.
Well, what can I say? You were clearly asking for it. Something in “PR”? Shudders.