Quote Originally Posted by Gandalf View Post
You can respect the things that you like such as cuisine, but it is also healthy to have an innate resistance to the elements that upset you.

I regard myself as an estranged Englishman. I love my country, but I also despise it. It is hard to reconcile those polarities.

I am looking forward to my trip home, but I know in a matter of weeks once my food rush is done, the cost of the rail service service, a sight of the monthly bills, and the daily news will start to bug me and I will be ready to leave again.

Not everyone is hurrying to live in the UK, least of all an awful abundance of English people.
Spot on. There is good and bad in everything. Unfortunately the bad has started to accumulate and that fed into Brexit, the rise of UKIP, massive wealth inequality, different rules for different people etc. I think it is a very patriotic thing to point out the flaws because in your heart you do only want the right thing. I think some of my earlier posting on topics like this fed into the growing zeitgeist. What I felt was by no means an anomaly. It is what many people also thought too. I look at Tommy Robinson and no way is 99% of the public against him. Maybe the extremists and some of the radical neo Marxist left, but ordinary people are really not. This feeling really took me by surprise on my trip home. I didn't quite realize how angry people are. I saw that it was actually me that had calmed down on a lot of things and I saw that I had actually turned a bit soft.