Agreed. And you made some very good points.

Don't trust me on the spelling of special woolly jumpers, Watson; I can't remember which is which. But I expect that you are more English than me. I do insist on being partly Scottish, which is another reason I get fed up with all the "Celtic Separateness" business, and indeed the constant blaming of the Wicked English for everything. A look at the historical facts tells a rather different story.

One of the reasons why ordinary people in England take little interest in their own traditional culture is that they have been taught for a very long time that they were masters of a great empire, and ought to aspire to higher things than that. What the hereditary rulers of the country failed to mention was that the ordinary people never were masters of any empire; they were just that empire's first colony. I've said that so often, and for so long, that I can't remember who said it originally; I don't think it was me. Might have been Eliza's dad, perhaps.

That empire treated working people in England just as badly as it did those in Scotland and Ireland, but they didn't, of course, have the Nationalist option to fall back on. By and large you had to play by the rules of the establishment and embrace its values if you wanted to get on; and those values included the bourgeois art-music model and an artificial "national" music, instead of all that yokel stuff.