There’s a St George’s Cross in my flat. Red on white, the flag of England, and I’ve had it for years. Every time I bring it out, someone clocks it and does a little double take. Like they’ve caught me doing something I shouldn’t. A flicker of “Oh, are you one of those?” across their face before they can stop it.
That reaction tells you everything about where we’ve ended up.
Somewhere along the line, the English flag became a thing you had to explain. A thing that came with a disclaimer attached. You can’t just like it any more. You have to qualify it, justify it, prove you’re not the worst version of the person they’re imagining. And I find that genuinely sad, because it wasn’t always this way. The flag didn’t arrive preloaded with all that baggage. We let it get taken. And the good thing about something being taken is that you’re always allowed to take it back.
I grew up in Great Yarmouth. A place that gets written off a lot. Post-industrial, post-seaside, post-Reform UK, abandoned by London, full of people just getting on with it. My mum ran a business. A hairdresser’s and a clothes shop. She worked hard, my mum. Hardest-working women I’ve ever known and my biggest inspiration in life. We weren’t rich but we were stable.
