Boards
Strip away the drums and trumpets (England-centric)
''It's a terrible arrogance to assume what people love about their culture is the flags, drums, pomp and circumstance...they're all anathema to me. Whereas there's that long, long, long beat of Englishness which can be very aggressive but on the whole is slightly melancholy, slightly rueful and in many important ways extraordinarily gentle.
That English condition has to do with a collection of things. Obviously, it's basically a human creation, as all culture is. But it's also geographical, the colour of the sky, the light, the temperature, and the temperamental island climate; the historical fact that England has not been invaded since 1066; an odd mixture of deference and genuine liberalism; and probably the greatest literature. All of which speaks in thousands of voices. Add the fact that everyone loves his or her native patch, sometimes dangerously so. Strip away things like nationalism and militarism and Empire, and those flags and drums and trumpets and so on, and you're still left with a considerable body of something to which, not uncritically, God forbid, you emotionally respond, in the same way as you acknowledge your own parents. '' ~ DENNIS POTTER