"Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me", or so sang Morrissey, but not so for me. Last night I dreamt that I went to a small suburban house party in Manchester and the only guest was Sir Anthony Eden.
There is no real conundrum as to why; he was evidently a manifestation of Blighty, a moustachioed Albion incarnate. Strange though, that someone of my background should choose a patrician Tory Prime Minister as the avatar of England. Why would I identify with a version of Britain that has been long since extinguished by Mrs Thatcher, and never really existed outside the corridors of Eton and the misguided heads of patriotic dreamers anyway?
Perhaps enough of us dreamt of this vision for it to thread into the Jungian tapestry. Has it now taken its place alongside King Arthur, St George and decent train services in the file marked "Mythical England"? Perhaps this idealised Anglia is itself a kind of Eden. Semantics and Miltonic religiosity melding in my unconscious mind?
Enough of this now though. We leave tomorrow for Hong Kong. I wonder if the presence of Mythical England is stronger in a former colony, or whether the Chinese took charge of the metaphysical Hong Kong as well as the concrete in 1997. WIll I dream of Eden or Mao?
We shall see.
Adieu Mon Patrie,
SPL
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3 comments:
The only thing England is at the forefront of is decline. Maybe the "colonies" exist as reflections of fragments of what England could have been, if it wasn't so preoccupied with its vision of itself as the great coloniser, the pith-helmeted conqueror of an empire on which the sun never sets. That and the crap weather and the crap food, of course.
Do I know you sir? Where do you hail from? Are you capable of detecting irony? You seem a tad dim witted, and your comments are a little confused and nonsensical (isn't lumping all of the colonies together a continuation of the imperialsim you accuse me of? they did, as you point out, cover a third of globe, and are far from homogenous) but for the term "pith-helmeted" I slaute you! Carry on.
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