Tonight, Erling Haaland and Harry Kane should be playing together, not against each other. Partially because Haaland is a Yorkshireman, born in Leeds, and this Nordic stuff is just an affectation, but also because England and Norway should not be different countries.
With our combined control over the North Sea, we’d have fish and oil beyond our wildest dreams
Back in 1066, as one is reminded by the big French cloth now sojourning at the British Museum, history took a wrong turning. Harald Hardrada should have bested Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge. Had he then stuffed Billie the Conqueror down in Hastings, a millennium of Anglo-Norwegian unity could and should have beckoned. Bye-bye tedious feudalism and the grumpy, ungrateful, self-satisfied Frogs; hello social democracy with liberal markets and blonde bombshells.
Gone would have been all this silly French loan words that clog up their dictionaries. Gone would have been our national neuroses about work, hustle and class, replaced with a comforting, if slightly chilly, bath of mandatory long holidays, shorter working hours, and sunny out-door living. With our combined control over the North Sea, we’d have fish and oil beyond our wildest dreams, living standards so high as to compensate for the pints and tabs sin-taxed into unaffordability. Rather than waste centuries in interminable wars with the French, we could have enjoyed a comfortable history of pottering around Scandinavia, occasionally pillaging the Danes and the Scots.
