Sunday 8th April

Just as a reserve I am writing this while still in England, so if you are reading this it will be because of poor or no internet access en France.   But it has caused me to look again at my Englishness, this central core of me, and why I feel so quintessentially English.   And yet it is almost impossible to put ones finger on what it is that makes us English; is it our diffidence, our wry sense of humour, our self-deprecation, the fact that we do not take ourselves too seriously, or as I suspect, that we know that we are actually blessed by living in the most wonderful country, so much so that we do not need to shout it from the highest hill, we do not even need to sing along to our national anthem – though we all know the words (to at least the chorus), it is more a quiet confidence that actually almost everyone else envies us.  Why else would we attract so many immigrants, not only economic but intellectual aspirants, who see Britain, (or really, as we all know, England) as a place to want to settle in and to bring their children up in.   And what a momentous decision that must be, when you look at all these brown and yellow face and begin to realise that for each of them, or their families at least, the decision was a momentous one.  I cannot begin to imagine the process of uprooting my home and possessions and going off to live in another country. Even when Edward and I had the house in Tuscany, it was always a holiday home, a place to escape to, and though we felt quite at home there, our real home always was and always will be England.