The Big City

A post from Giles on Other Machines about an apparent lack of German interest in the World Cup has reminded me of how frequently I favour Germany over my own corner of the UK. It is amazing how the English don’t realise that if it wasn’t for Germany we’d be the obvious candidates for their role in the world of stereotypical characters. We deride their humour as bitter or obscure while ours is more so. We joke about their desire for order while obsessively trying to clear our streets of ‘anti-social’ behaviour, our government going so far as having a policy of trying to make people more respectful. We dream of excelling in those fields where Germany excels: Engineering, architecture, design, football. We care about the same things. As Giles says in his blog, on the surface England and Germany look very similar. That’s because we are very similar in our aspirations and our values.

One of the big differences is that people in Germany have come to terms with their history much more effectively than we have. Your rarely hear people in Germany going on about how great their country was in the past because they’ve been made to face up to it. But Churchill was voted the greatest Briton of all time in 2002 and any discussion of the British Empire is likely to include right-wingers like Andrew Roberts who argue that we should dwell on the merits and not the failures of our empire.

This is what I prefer about Germany. They have been there, seen that, they’ve got the brown-shirt. They are in a better position to understand thuggery, nationalism and mass-hysteria because they accept that they’ve been there. The English, in the main, don’t and that’s what makes English nationalism so objectionable.

The Bavarian toy-maker who got the contract for making “Goleo”, the bare-bottomed 2006 world-cup mascot has now gone bust because nobody was buying. Whether the reason was a healthy disinterest in the World cup or an unhealthy dislike of the fact that the mascot was a lion and not an eagle it is hard to tell. I just wish that I could go the rest of the summer without seeing one more white van sporting a pair of Chinese-made flags. Maybe it’s not too late to get a summer job in the Playmobil factory.

Tomorrow: I Love Traffic Wardens.