#NationalCuntDisco
Ignore the bloodlines and heritages of this blog’s writers. Let’s go jus soli for a minute. The 100 Worst People on Twitter is a text that could only have been born in England. There’s a smallness of the soul unique to this land. The bloodright of Albion is pettiness, chemtrails of cynicism and pessimism pumped out by Bakers’ Oven and Budgens. Indeed, what is The 100 Worst other than an online version of that most English of pastimes, the ineffectual letter to the local newspaper about the county council? The English are inherently terrible as both a people and as a concept. If being English means that you’ve won the lottery of life, then the lottery winner in question is Michael Carroll.
Catch the five-dollar word in the opening paragraph? “English”. Not “British”, “English”. Up until recently, there were three groups of people who used the word “British” with any regularity. Politicians who like to pretend that there is a sense of unity between the home nations. Americans who are too stupid to know that “English” and “British” aren’t interchangeable. And white nationalists.
However, patriotism is the last refuge of the viral marketer, and so a fourth entity has joined the party. @SoVeryBritish. And they don’t even have the redeeming feature of representing you in parliament, inventing reuben sandwich, or “Layla”.
@SoVeryBritish has achieved everything that a modern gimmick Twitter account wants. It’s got endless rip-offs currently circulating, it has led to endless Buzzfeed “tributes”, it has over 300k followers and it even has its own book deal. Now that HMV has gone bust, I’m not sure where they’re expecting to sell it. Maybe in the section you have by the counter at Matalan with all the “Ice Age” colouring books and the 2011 Shoot annuals?
This account is the sole work of one man who saw a gap in the marketplace for self-effacing English bullshit. His name is Rob Temple. Before a book deal allowed him to go freelance, he was a staff writer at one of those “funky” technology magazines that have the art direction of a copy of PC Format circa 1996. You know the type: front cover of some dead-eyed promotions girl wearing a non-revealing bikini and holding up a fucking HTC One or something. These are apparently the credentials that allow a man to set himself up as modern-day Wyndham Lewis.
The conceit behind @SoVeryBritish should be very recognisable to anyone from a minority community, an Anglicised version of those “you know you’re [x]” lists your mother prints off from the work email and gives you when you go round. @SoVeryBritish is meant to be a “you might be a redneck if…” for the British. The total population of this entire land. The Bucky-fuelled neds of Glasgow, the tricolor-burning Orangemen of Ulster, the suicidal depressives of Bridgend brought to tears by the simultaneous ends of the mining industry and Lostprophets. The British. Now let’s see what, apparently, all British people relate to.
- Watching sadly as someone presses the lift button you’ve clearly just pressed
… what? Why would this make you sad? I think most people get into a lift when they’re at work, coming home, or in some other situation where the body runs on autopilot. You don’t really “look” to see if someone else has pressed your button. Also, is he implying that they don’t have lifts in other countries? Because I think they do, there was that episode of Friends where Joey had to play a character who fell down a lift shaft. Maybe let’s try another one of these, see if Rob got it right on another occasion:
- Inviting someone to a party, then providing a list of reasons not to come in case they don’t fancy it
Does anyone do this? Really? I mean maybe it’s just that Rob Temple knows people will turn down his party invites because it means they’ll be stuck in a room with him going “you know what it’s like when you want to listen to The Archers but you accidentally set fire to your crumpets while wearing a top hat?” in their ear all evening.
I’m not going to go through each and every single tweet here. You get the idea. It’s not just that this has nothing to do with Britishness and nothing to do with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It’s that it doesn’t even have anything to do with an England that actually exists.
To me, this is the England of Tumblr. An England teenage American girls have created in their head, based around Harry Potter, Sherlock and Stephen Fry gif sets. It is worth noting that there are at least five non-ironic uses of the phrase “as English as Oscar Wilde” on the internet.
This mindset implies every single person in England exists on the autism spectrum and is incapable of reading any personal signals from another human. An England in which Victoria Coren would be kept permanently naked in stocks with David Mitchell forced at gunpoint to repeatedly breed her in order to birth a herrenvolk made entirely of fustiness and social anxiety issues.
Look at the picture Rob Temple put around as a promo photo to mark his book’s launch:
How does a country go from Montgomery to this in less than a century? To me, that’s the most repugnant use of an umbrella since Markov. Also, I’m pretty sure that they have razorblades in England. Use them.
The point to be made here is that I think people get what’s dangerous about these kind of things wrong. Yes, The Chap magazine’s balls should be nailbombed. Yes, “Keep Calm and Cupcakes Cupcakes Cupcakes” schtick is horrendous. But I don’t see this as a kind of creeping aggressive nationalism. I see it as a kind of failure of Englishness.
Rob Temple is basically a minstrel character, doing for England what Stepin Fetchit did for black Americans: profiting on presenting a non-dangerous, neutered view of them to the world. England takes its lumps on this blog, and deservedly so. But you people used to be great in at least once sense of the word. You used to be killers. You invented the concentration camps. Colonisation. Atrocities against religions and races. You were to be feared.
And now, Englishness is a Twitter feed that has “Feeling you’re having an out-of-body experience as you quietly watch someone making you the wrong sandwich” written on it instead. If Cetshwayo knew this was what was going to happen to his enemies in the future, he probably wouldn’t even have bothered fighting, he’d have felt so sorry for them.
England used to be dangerous. And now it’s a cartoon that invites the rest of the world to laugh at it. England is Frank Bruno. And this isn’t even the Frank Bruno of pantomime appearances and appearing on You Bet! This is the Frank Bruno of mental deterioration and wandering barefoot around the local roads under the psychotic belief that he’s Frankie Dettori.
Rob Temple? To be honest, the only temple I want now is a mosque. @SoVeryBritish has me praying desperately for sharia as soon as possible.
Sample tweets:
“Spending your life squeezing by people, yet never once completing the sentence: "Excuse me, sorry, do you mind if I just…”“
"Being prepared to argue to the death at any given moment over your correct method of making tea”
“Feeling very uneasy while honouring a request for three sugars”