Sunday pictures with wife and grandson how to train your dragon pie chips in the car watching the waves hit the shore
All the suggestions have been either definitively English or Scottish and focused on a national charecteristic but one image that combines two of our nations is The Thin Red Line - an 1881 oil-on-canvas painting by Robert Gibb depicting the 93rd (Sutherland Highlanders) Regiment of Foot at the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854, during the Crimean War. The Welsh at Rorke's Drift lay claim to one of the most famous feat of arms in the long history of the British Army, and the sacrifice of the Ulster Division during the Battle of the Somme, while not inspring a famous work of art, or a fantastic film, is worthy of its own monument on the battlefield where so many lost their lives. This is not to ignore the support of sikhs and moslems in the British Army over two world wars, all colours and creeds have come together during our history. These men and women are not the preserve of a nationalist/populist section of our society but the collective memory of us, and our descendents. Every year we come together to remember them and i'm ashamed to think they would look at the behaviour of our society today as it splits amidst a crisis of our own making. An unnecessary state of affairs that will only be resolved by cool heads and compromise, not the heated rhetoric of self-serving interests . The question "what does it mean to be British" has not a simple answer, but raises another question in these turbulent times: "Do we really know what being British is?" I'm not sure we do anymore.