You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.

Similarly, you can’t choose the nation you were born into – but there’s nothing that says you have to like it.

A couple of years ago, at the height of the ‘Brexit wars’, I declared that if Brexit ever happened, I would disown my nationality. I was fully expecting, today, to be eating my words – not because it didn’t happen, but because the futility of such a position would become overwhelming.

You can’t deny where you were born, and even if you do take different nationality, that place and your formative years there will continue to shape you throughout your life. Neither can you ignore the practicalities of the place where you live, which for personal and practical reasons will continue, for me, to be Great Britain.  It is not possible to ignore the requirements of one’s place of abode, so I will have little choice but to comply with the obligations of life this country.

Yet I am not going to eat my words – not out of pedantry, but because I find that they accurately reflect the reality of my life, and a process that has in fact been going on for many years. I find myself living in a country with whose regular culture, values and destiny I feel little affinity. All Brexit has done is to affirm that once and for all.

There were three defining points of my life in this respect: our childhood caravan holidays the length and breadth of the continent later followed up through Interrail; my deepening acquaintance from the mid-1980s with that most contradictory of European nations, Switzerland – and my multiple visits to the European Parliament, beginning at about the same time.

Even from those early days, I found poly-nationalism exciting and invigorating; never threatening in the way it seems a large segment of the British population still does. The discovery of new ways was liberating, not intimidating. Ever since I first broke bread round multinational tables, I knew this would be an important aspect of my life. It is one that Britain does not subscribe to even today; even much British “Europeanism” revels in a kind of novel exceptionalism that is anything but the real thing. (If you think Europeanism is all glossy cosmopolitanism, visit La France Profonde, or the Quartieri Spagnoli in Naples…)

My/our life today has little to do with mainstream British culture, and this is never more sharply evident than at Christmas. Being a typical British ‘bloke’ holds nothing for me. We gave up on TV decades ago, we are not interested in the mainstream music scene; we don’t do junk food, recreational shopping (seasonal or otherwise) or binge drinking. We do not dress in the scruffy, dishevelled way that is the national norm. Sport and soap operas leave us cold. But neither do we do the indulgent self-gratification of the “metropolitan elite”. Our lives are genuinely materially and culturally as influenced at least as much by what we know from elsewhere as anything from the U.K., but not for show, just for what we want and need to be.

Ever since those windows opened onto wider European life, I have increasingly doubted that the U.K. was anything like the exceptional place to live that its majority seems to think. For anyone who values civic and cultural life, even the equal dignity of all human lives, there are plenty of other places that achieve for their general citizenry a much better, and more enlightened, quality of life than this snobbery (and inverse-snobbery)-ridden one. For anyone who values cultural richness, much of the everyday experience of this country is a desert of cheapness, gimmick and disposability.

Mainstream British culture is saccharine: pulp fed to keep the masses quiet – and spending. This is a complacent nation, that would rather wallow in cloying sentiment than briskly address the realities of the age in which we live. Yet at the same time, there is little respect for real tradition or rootedness of the sort that still informs identities in many other countries – the majority here seem to prefer Disneyland, where a sanitised plastic version has replaced the real, earthy, ancient roots. This is a country that prefers to live a consumerist fantasy, while letting the many, many issues that are making it increasingly dysfunctional go unaddressed. That, after all, is the root cause of Brexit.

Covid has revealed the extent to which British civil and communal life has been withered by commercialism, commuting and long hours. The pressures have been the same everywhere – but some nations defended their cultural positions more vigorously than others. The British, having almost no other strong sense of who they are or what they stand for, simply caved in.

The effect of decades of post-Thatcherite individualism killed meaningful civil society in Britain, as has the resultant struggle for survival experienced by many as neo-liberalism cut away more and more of the civic and social infrastructure, flogging it to the private sector for a song. I struggle to identify with a country that treats its civic institutions in this way, that sees them as a source of private profit rather than collective pride and utility – and that avoids paying the taxes to sustain them. I experienced it at first hand in the lack of financial or healthcare support in my own moment of need in 2016 – and am seeing it again as it institutionally fails to cater adequately for elderly members of my own extended family in theirs.

These are real, not imagined, fractures of perspective and values over the dignity and experience of life, between the continent and the island; I see how real people fare elsewhere, and I know which I prefer. I’m not naïve enough to ignore the failures of other countries – indeed I am more confident in my views for having seen their grotty bits too – but my repeated and extended impression remains that those with whom we might reasonably compare  have not fallen as far; they still have more balanced lives and higher-minded ideals than most Britons; they have a stronger instinct to protect their social and civic infrastructure from predation and decline.

I know this country well; there is little of it I have never visited – unlike the “patriotic” part of the population that often scarcely seems to know any of it at all. As a geographer, I perhaps have more understanding of these islands’ natural marginality, in a way that the national culture chooses to ignore, let alone properly address.

This land has its natural assets, though that is hardly something its inhabitants can claim credit for – unlike their growing destruction. But from its bombastic and overblown capital, through the faceless “traditional” suburbs, to the desolation and decay of its more distant regions, I find there is little to admire about how the British live, or how they run their country. Its fabled pragmatism is in reality nothing more than an absence of higher ideals or imagination.

Inanity is now this nation’s defining characteristic – as most obviously seen in its inability to cope with the discipline required to deal with Covid. What worse indictment could there be of the nation than its track record on that score?

For me, ‘Europe’ has always been primarily a cultural matter: the embodiment (even if imagined, which in a sense is all culture ever is…) of a set of values that deliver a culturally rich, meaningful, and balanced society and life for as many as possible, that has never really existed in this country in my lifetime. At least, not if you do not belong to its ancient elite, or its new hangers-on, who have milked the country for all they can get.

The politics of Europe were simply the logical extension of a force which I had always hoped would shape this country for the better. I still think it did that – even though the mass of the population seems not to have noticed – and nowhere near as much as it could have, had it wholeheartedly embraced Europeanism as “just another European nation”.

This blog, and the Living Europe Facebook group have been founded on such values and beliefs. The blog title Sprezzatura was deliberately chosen for its connotations of a well-judged, authentic and original “good life” – but taken far beyond its origins in men’s style.

As with feelings about families and friendships, a modern sense of nationality cannot be commanded; thoughtful people see through the artifice which did that in the past. You have to earn loyalty, not demand it. In that respect, the end of 2020 marks the moment when this country decisively turned away from my own values and aspirations, needs and ideals. Why would it expect me to feel otherwise than as described above?

In that sense, I today am cutting any personal ‘interest’ I have in this country; I will do what is required to live here and nothing more – with the single exception of anything that may help to reverse the madness of its current direction. I shall ignore the chime of 11pm this evening; I will continue as before – but any personal ‘investment’ I might give to the place where I reside has now gone.

Despite my provincial English roots, I became a European, and this I shall remain, whatever the new political realities. Unlike the unavoidable practicalities, identity-loyalty cannot be commanded, only earned.