A bog load of books have been printed recently claiming Britain is a failed state (Torsten Bell, Ian Dunt and James O’Brien are the chief doom merchants). In a way of course they are right – the big state could do with a trim, new personnel and a wholesale reduction in activities. But in the most important way, these books are all spectacularly wrong. In terms of daily pleasures, Britain is brilliant at tonnes of stuff. So today, while we are all feeling gloomy after the Spanish victory on Sunday, I decided to conduct a poll (ask my chums) about what makes this country great:
1 Amazon deliveries and other utilities. School shorts, a violin string, a present for an aunt, a flower delivery, a Pharoah’s costume, dog food – just some of the orders made on Amazon in the last couple of days. All of them served to get out of a scrape. It was my son who remembered that, when younger, he thought Amazon was a utility much like electricity, gas and water that “just came to the house” whenever you needed it. And in a way Amazon is a utility; a miracle of logistics. So, let’s applaud all those chaps who maintain our gas pipes, drive the Amazon vans, sit puzzled in front of the BT broadband boxes, for most of Britain hums along pretty smoothly. (And if you start grumbling about sewage, I remember having to wait until the water stopped running brown before drinking in the 1980s, which is possibly why I am never ill.)
2 Coffee shops. Like vets and garden centres, coffee shops are always busy. The coffee is mostly frothy and strong and on these bitter July days, they are warm inside. Britain does a divine coffee shop. It is the biggest regret of my life I didn’t open one in 1996 instead of going to university. My friends and I mooned around together saying, “I wish there was a coffee shop like the one in Neighbours” – our local market town instead had one greasy spoon and about six tearooms. If we had done so in 1996 we would have stolen a thunder on Starbucks which opened its first U.K. store in 1998. Silly, silly me, but what a brilliant thing for our country.
3 Aldi, Lidl, Costco etc. During lockdown we planted potatoes, a dreary activity that brought no pleasure. The day we harvested our crop, a half wheelbarrow worth, I went to Aldi and saw the same amount of potatoes for sale for 45p. It was a warning about the importance of industrial farming and also a reminder that budget supermarkets do more than any Government initiative in supporting those on limited budgets. In Aldi today, you can buy a 1kg bag of white rice for 52p, a 1kg bag of porridge for 90p and 1kg of carrots for 65p.
4 Children’s sports clubs. Across the country there are hundreds of thousands of volunteers who organise a network of terrific sports clubs for millions of children: football, rugby, gym, cricket. Men in tracksuits and hangovers on a Sunday morning clapping their hands and encouraging excitable children. Women with timers and clipboard at the netball courts or athletics tracks organising teams and races and lift shares. Seed funding may once have come from a Government pot but for the most part these worthwhile sports clubs are run on a shoe string with subs, charity events, summer sizzler raffles and heaps of goodwill.
5 Clothes. They are now beautiful and reasonably priced. It’s possible to buy 100% cotton Oxford shirts in Primark for £8.99 and a pair of chinos for £9.99. It’s all very well moaning about fast fashion, but thank goodness the days of women wearing only tweed skirts and twin sets are over. It’s possible to dress beautifully from shopping with the lovely Indian chap on the market and in the supermarket clothes aisle.
6 The English Wine Industry. While drinking recently in the Raimes Wine Barn with a senior civil servant he observed that the English Wine Industry had sprung up without any Government initiative or strategy. “And thank goodness for that, if we’d got involved we’d have ballsed the whole thing up and made them plant vines in the North for purposes of levelling up.” There are now nearly 1,000 vineyards across Britain – and how very beautiful they are. Well done everyone involved. And let this be a lesson to Government: don’t try to pick winners because it turns out the Great British public (apart from me and the coffee shop business) is brilliant at running things very well on their own.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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