I recently saw a comment by someone who said he had voted Remain “in order to get his country back”. At which point, I will hasten to say that this is not another post about Brexit. Well, not really: it’s about culture.

His point, though, was that Britain as he saw it was an open culture, that has always happily assimilated others into its own domestic life, from Jamaican music to Indian food and Italian coffee – and he saw Brexit as representing a return to an intolerant, mono-cultural past.

This set me thinking about the traditional cultures of Britain. I use the plural because even before the migrations of the Twentieth Century, these islands were always home to more than one, for all that Victorian paternalism might have tried to pretend otherwise.

I have always felt a tension in my own life between the progressive, modernist, internationalist outlook that this blog generally advocates, and my culturally more conservative side. Many of the good things I discuss here are in a cultural sense quite conservative. For example, I see no good reason to mess with traditional cuisines, when the original dishes are fine in their own right, and have stood the test of time. They did that for a reason – and more often than not, those who tamper with them rarely come up with anything as good as a finely-produced original. This applies to other cultural expressions from literacy to dress, too: fusion normally fails.

The same issue crops up in my musical tastes. In particular, the apparently conservative world of traditional music in which I’m active hardly sits well with internationalised modernist tastes. I find that conscious attempts to modernise the tradition are rarely as good as the original. Many traditional musicians these days are writing their own tunes, supposedly in the traditional idiom – but more often than not, they are little more than clever but instantly forgettable riffs, with none of the structure and character of ‘real’ traditional tunes. They derive from the blandness of pop music which is those people’s default cultural reference, rather than the inherited instincts of the traditional proper.

But the more I think about this, the less of a real conflict I see. The main point about tradition is not that it is old-fashioned, so much as timeless – and therefore there is no reason why it should not be as relevant in the present as any in past era.

While it is undoubtedly true that tradition changes over time, it tends to do so by a process of accretional, almost imperceptible evolution, rather than the attempts of radical individuals to turn things on their head. It is probably these characteristics, the perceived continuity and familiarity that give traditional things the comfort that appeals to many. (Maybe there is a lesson here for those who would push European integration too fast…) The problem is, it gets confused with a kind of stubborn, stuck-in-the-mud-ness that refuses ever to move forward. The Scots have the concept of the ‘carrying stream’: the cultural river that flows out of the past, through the present and into the future, linking the then, the now and the next into a continuum of shared identity.

Here is where the wider significance of this becomes apparent: I make a distinction between folk music (which I tend not to like) and traditional music (which I often do). This may seem to be splitting hairs – but the latter is a timeless musical form, whereas the former is a confection, an imagined past that was reconstructed from the 1960s onwards, to replace true traditions that had been allowed (or forced) to die out. One is deeply authentic, and the other is just an arcane form of popular commercial music. This is the difference between ‘real’ culture and a manufactured facsimile.

When it comes to “getting our country back”, it is not as simple as it sounds: for all that the British claim to love tradition, much of what they actually like is not, in my books, traditional at all: it, too was manufactured. We see new-build houses being described as traditional, when they are actually a facsimile collision of Victorian, Edwardian and even later references. In developer-speak, the brash little villas of the 1930s are now “traditional”. No they are not: traditional houses were not industrially constructed of mass-produced red brick and pebbledash for a start, let alone steel girders. Even if we go back further, much of what is perceived as English tradition was in fact the product of upper class Victorian imaginations. Many of our so-called traditions date no further back than that, even if they were in some ways romanticised re-interpretations of medieval times. Real traditions were not for the most part bourgeois, and were often crueller than the fey character of much modern ‘folk’ music . Proper traditional music is complex, sometimes dark and even raucous, far from the twee modern perception.

Here is the root of the English identity crisis: by sanitising and then annihilating true English traditions, bourgeois Victorians and their successors arguably severed the connection between the ordinary people of this country and their real identity. They imposed a ‘respectable’ replacement which required conformism rather than active participation, and which lost its emotional connection to the people and their terroir. Once that root had been cut, English culture lost its ability to stand up to outside influences. This is perhaps one of the reasons why, in the 20th Century, American culture made such inroads (obviously, the shared language was another). It perhaps explains why modern English culture has had to cast around so widely for other influences to give it some substance: it has lost all of its own. It may explain why a certain sort of English person is so in love with the cultures of the continent: it is a distinctiveness they perceive they lack themselves.

And it may also explain why, even in very recent times, the English in particular have struggled with the multiculturalism bought by both immigration and membership of the European Union. When one’s own culture is weak to the point of invisibility, the arrival of other, strong cultures might seem like more of a threat than it would otherwise be.

I am not by any means defending monoculturalism; I love the experience of other cultures. But I love their distinctiveness as well as their interface. Cultural exchange is fine, but finest of all if done on equal terms. And part of the English problem is perhaps that much of the population has no genuine ownership of, or even perception of, its own cultural identity. What is perceived as being English is largely imposed upper class mores of which they have little real possession; what most actually have instead is anonymous, transatlantic commercial pap.

I think it is no coincidence that those parts of Britain that are most pro-European are those with the strongest cultural identities of their own. In the case of our big cities, that is because multiculturalism already is the culture, while in Scotland and Ireland the culture is now so resurgent, that the perceived threat from in-comers is perhaps lessened. (It is also worth noting, however, that this situation was not achieved without a struggle to be free of the same bourgeois English impositions.)

And it is also no coincidence that these are British cultures that I identify most strongly with, even though I have no roots in those areas. They offer me a form of Britishness that is frankly more distinctive, dynamic and vibrant than my own invisible English one. It’s worth noting that Scottish and Irish music is hugely popular right across the continent, and further.

So I’m really not sure about the gent who wanted to “get his (multicultural) nation back”. I sympathise with his feelings – but I also believe that the whole experience would have been happier and less confrontational had the ordinary identity of these islands, and England in particular, not been diluted almost to the point of extinction in the first place.

The current prime minister described citizens of the world as being citizens of nowhere. The reason that she is wrong is that for many of them, internationalised modernity is quite capable of co-existing with a traditional identity that anchors their outward-looking present in a secure historical and geographical sense of self. What she missed about Europeanisation, as do Brexiters generally, is that it is not about the abolition of distinct cultural identities so much as their meeting, as equals, to celebrate their distinctiveness and their commonalities.

It is only people who have no secure identity of their own to begin with, who will feel threatened by this.

Another year recently added to the personal clock. A relative sent me the birthday card shown above.

It prompted a train of thought about how people behave in contemporary society – and what, if anything, constitutes the way they ‘should’ behave.  I feel I increasingly rejoice in what I suspect is the (sole?) benefit of ageing – greater experience and better judgment – but I suspect others just think I’m old before my time….

Etiquette maybe an old-fashioned word – but in many ways it is still relevant. There are just as many expectations around how people ‘should’ conduct themselves in society as ever there were – it is just that they are different ones. It is now expected that people will be ‘studiedly’ casual in everything they do. If you are not, you are at best un-cool, and at worst, out-cast. But this is just as much a ‘social pose’ as any other approach – one that involves playing the child.

At the risk of taking the birthday card too seriously, the caption claims that we are forever children inside. When I was a child, my mother taught me, “If in trouble, go to an adult for help”. Having now been an adult for far longer than I was a child, I can appreciate both the sense and the naivety in that comment: one might expect adults to have more control and a clearer perspective on the world, and to know how to sort out its difficulties. In truth, it is often not so.

There is no point at which we suddenly start feeling ‘grown up’. In fact, that sensation is probably more often experienced by those who aren’t. If there is a definable watershed, it perhaps comes in one’s mid-twenties, at which point one’s brain is finally biologically mature – but even then, there is no sensation of crossing a Rubicon, more of a gradual consolidation of one’s sense of self. And all too often, biological maturity seems to precipitate an urge to act the child once again, even before second childhood arrives…

We are confronted by a society that widely seems to want us to deny our adulthood. Everything from the way the media communicates to the way retailers promote their products now aims at our ‘inner child’. Much advertising targets an immature inability to resist gratification, to spoil ourselves, to give in to temptation in a way that one might have hoped a fully-formed adult would be able to override. Real adults exercise discrimination and restraint – don’t they?

The media too, seems to treat people as though they are inexpert, narcissistic children, endlessly seeking the next infotainment buzz. It tends to assume powers of understanding, analysis and attention that are more childlike than adult. Hence the term ‘kidult’ has become an important moniker of our time.

Some years ago, I took a party of colleagues to meet their counterparts in our partner-school in Switzerland. The Swiss head teacher treated us to lunch at a rather chic riverside restaurant in Basel. The Swiss turned up in their habitual understated, smart-casual wear for what was a partly-professional occasion, and some of the British managed to look not totally dishevelled too. But one character from our party appeared wearing open sandals, shabby cargo shorts, and an un-tucked, un-ironed lightweight check shirt that barely concealed his more-than-ample midriff.

He and I both chose a first-course that looked appealing: scallops. But when they arrived, they proved unexpectedly challenging, as they were raw. In order to maintain ‘form’, I struggled through a dish that was undoubtedly fashionable, but not actually to my liking – but my colleague turned his nose up, pushed the plate aside in the way a child might do – and ordered yet another beer. In the following days, the same individual also proved inept at engaging with the other social aspects of the visit in the grown-up way that is still the norm in Switzerland. The impression that this individual created, I later learned, was somewhat incredulous. It might not have been a big deal – except he was our headmaster.

You might be wondering what on earth this has with a blog called Sprezzatura about living well.

When it comes to good living, beauty can only be in the eye of the beholder – and yet a degree of wider social consensus still forms around what is desirable and what is not. Living well is, to some extent, about ‘form’.

This goes for personal behaviour as much as anything else. Some of this is social pressure, some of it genuine aesthetics at work. It is also true, I believe, that maturity brings with it the ability to appreciate things that one found inaccessible as a child; wine and classical music are examples that come to mind. Many of the ‘good things in life’ demand a degree of experience that allows one to refine one’s taste, a maturity of judgement that children simply don’t have. The ability to scrutinise and assess requires both a perspective born of experience and a level of objectivity that also hopefully comes with maturity. That consensus around the ‘good things’ might be deemed to be an unwanted social imposition – but I believe the things that comprise it are there for a reason: they are indeed widely found to be good.

It is no doubt true, however, that expectations are not the same everywhere: my boss’ error was in part his misjudgement of the differences between Swiss and British norms – though why he failed to get this right when others had done so might be more complex. Likewise, dressing the ‘full Italian’ in Britain is likely to attract unhelpful attention simply because the norms are different, and peer-pressure still counts.

Where the ‘truth’ might lie on this is even more difficult. On the one hand, I think that claiming that modern British society is a free-for-all for self-expression is disingenuous. It is just that the conventions are now those of kidults who have never in their heads actually got beyond twelve years of age. Expertise has been rejected in favour of ignorance in everything from dining to national politics; childishness has trumped mature judgment.

On the other hand, I think that birthday card is correct: inside, we are still the same people we have always been, it’s just that we adapt to society’s rules. In that sense, one could argue that allowing our inner child to escape is actually social progress: it frees people from the straight-jacket of needless, imposed social convention. But the pressures to conform are still there, only the criteria are now turned on their heads: anyone who chooses to behave differently risks being seen, however harmlessly, as stodgy, old-fashioned, eccentric, or ‘taking themselves too seriously’. The effort required to learn to speak and write well, think well, eat well, dress well – and generally live well – is something to mock, rather than admire.

What has actually happened is that one social convention has been replaced by another. Moreover, those influencing this have good reasons for doing so: by definition, kidults lack the developed critical faculties of fully-formed adults. They are more egocentric, less able to defer gratification, more prone to emotional outbursts – and less likely to have fully-formed views of their own. They are also more easily manipulated by others.

All of which suits those in society who have most to gain from keeping the bulk of the population in the state of uncritical self-indulgence in which they will spend the most and vote for who and what they are told.

Michael Bywater once wrote that caring for one’s outward presentation (and inner substance) is not vain; it is a form of respect for the others whom one encounters – to which I might add also for oneself – and the diverse situations and roles that we assume as adults. It acknowledges that this world is capable of delivering sublime experiences that require effort to appreciate – but it also presents us with difficulties and challenges, the best response to which is not a childish hissy-fit. What may seem to be fundamentally a trivial matter does have more serious implications – as my boss showed when he blew his credibility at that Swiss restaurant.

More worryingly, hissy-fits seem increasingly to be the way in which our serious matters are conducted too. I experienced this myself in the workplace, in the juvenile way those who discredited me resorted to dirty, childish tricks to get their way. A relative of mine is currently experiencing the same spiteful, childish treatment – because she had the professional maturity report some blatant malpractice. The same has infected our politics – from the inability of those in Parliament to make adult decisions (they seem to think that running the nation is just some sort of game for the uber-privileged) to the sheer spite in the behaviour of some throwing their toys out of the pram – and never was an analogy more apt – on both sides of the Brexit debate.

Whatever happened to the ability to run our affairs in a measured, mature way?

I doubt there is a simple answer to this; it is surely true that people should be able to live (within reason) as they choose. If that involves kidding themselves that they are Peter Pan, then so be it. When it comes to dealing with the life in the round, the ability to connect with one’s inner child may not be a problem – but an inability to connect with one’s inner adult most definitely is.