I'm always amused by people who claim that the English 'lack self identity', 'don't know who they are' etc etc. I have never felt the slightest concern or doubt that I am English, and that I know exactly what it means. The trouble is that it is so hard to articulate. These proud, certain Scots and Welsh now, compared with whom we're so uncertain.... take away the common factor that we spent many happy years kicking them, and what have you got?

The Irish owe a deep and abiding debt to the British. Without anti-British bitterness, seen in such delicious profusion on this thread, their culture would dissolve into kitch and cliche. Ancestral hatred gives being Irish a kind of grandeur that that it would not otherwise have.