Why are the English embarrassed about St George’s Day?

Apr 23, 2024 by Jill

by Eliot Wilson, Spectator:

How should the English celebrate St George’s Day? England is a country with plenty to boast about, but doing so is somehow not particularly English. The result is that 23 April is usually a day that passes most of us by. It’s a pity.

Embarrassed, we often seek expressions of Englishness in the sheepish and the mimsy. Egg and chips, rain coming on, mustn’t grumble, you’ve got to laugh, fancy a cuppa, watching the footy, how we love queueing. Thirty years ago, John Major was mocked for speaking of ‘the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. His invocation of George Orwell’s ‘Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’ was thought more outdated still. So now we parody ourselves rather than be beaten to the punch.

That, in itself, is very English, redolent of the country of the reflexive ‘sorry’. But we can do better than that on this St George’s Day.

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