The Blade Journal

I am a piece of English scum.

So said an irate elderly gentleman in Borders on Friday. I was leafing through a copy of The Tablet, a Catholic magazine devoted to religion in public life, when he poked me and started screaming that I was not allowing his access to the magazine rack. I was doing no such thing, and calmly asked him whether this was a very nice way of carrying out social interaction. He went plum purple, started screaming, and said the following:

“YOU PIECE OF ENGLISH SCUM”

“I HAVE BEEN DEALING WITH PIECES OF ENGLISH SCUM LIKE YOU MY WHOLE LIFE”

By this point, I was so utterly serene; so utterly chuffed, that I just stood there beaming. This man, by the sound of it very English, but probably with Celtic ancestry that gave him a chip on his shoulder, had called me ENGLISH, which I AM. YES!

I was wearing a red poppy. This may have prompted his response to my wishing him a jolly weekend: He turned on his heal, and shouted out, with a hiss after each word:

“GO BACK TO DUNKIRK”.

By now I was more than serene. I had been retroactively placed into England’s finest hour. I was now on a ship to Dunkirk, rescuing our Island Story, thanks to his perplexing insults.

So I stood there, put my copy of The Tablet down, turned on my heal, and went on my way rejoicing.

The Europhile, ever more pathological in his wish to dissolve Albion, responded thusly to me:

“You are not English. No such nationality exists. You are British and European. Look at your passport.”

I responded:
“English first.
British second.
Israeli third.
American fourth.
African fifth.
Never European- the continent of gleeful gas-chambers and unproductive economies.”

The Europhile responded:

“Blah, blah, blah…Same old mantra: ‘European economies are stagnant, Britain’s is dynamic’, blah, blah. Have you consulted the Economist’s ‘World in 2007′? Let us take a look: Britain’s GDP per head is $42,500. Sweden’s is $49,000, the Netherlands’ is $45,000 (so is Finland’s and Austria’s). Belgium’s is $43,000, whilst Denmark’s and Ireland’s exceeds $50,000. Norway clocks in at a whopping $81,000. France and Germany, for all their supposed troubles, aren’t doing too badly either. Germany has a GDP p.h. of $40,000 and France’s is $41,000. If Britain is doing so well, why isn’t our economy like Norway’s? For comparison, America’s GDP p.h. is $46,000, Australia’s is $36,000, whilst Japan’s is $41,000 - all pretty similar to the European mainstream, wouldn’t you say?”

I responded:

“ “Norway clocks in at a whopping $81,000″

Tell me something:

IS NORWAY IN THE EU ???????????????????

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 4:03 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.