Kindly doom / Britain’s fatal good manners |
One of the guilty pleasures of the patriotic British travel writer is encountering yet another country, city or island that we invaded, occupied, colonised or just menaced into submission with a couple of gunboats. For example, did you know we casually took out Uruguay back in the day? It’s true – we demolished the walls of Montevideo in 1807, during the Battle of the River Plate, as I discovered on my first visit there last year.
I’ve had the same experience all over. The Maldives. Kefalonia. The Colombian coast (we were so punchy and piratical half the Colombian nobility decamped 200 km inland). Also, Menorca, the Faroes, Haiti, Iceland, Bolivia (our economic colonisation is the reason women in La Paz wear bowler hats). Indeed, we British were, for centuries, so brilliantly but brutally aggressive I suspect that, if it hadn’t been for the drink holding us back, we’d have colonised the moon in 1892.
In this light, I am about to make a paradoxical observation. Just as travel has taught me that the British, in their pomp, were overwhelmingly and successfully aggressive, so I am able to look at the British from abroad and see that, in their own home island, the greatest characteristic of the British is quite the opposite of aggression: it is their amiability.
By amiability, I mean this: tolerant, politely cheerful, hard to anger, gently humorous, eager to live and let live. Indeed, as our imperial horizons have dwindled to our own pretty but drizzly island, I’d argue that these characteristics have become more obvious, in comparison to other nations, which have different virtues.
Of course, I’m not the........