In 1994 Will Self wrote a long essay about English culture: how has the nation changed since then? And do the old cherished ideas of Englishness bear any resemblance to reality?
Fish and chips … an inspired example of English praxis: Belgian fried potato mixed with Ashkenazi fried fish. Photograph: Martin Parr / Magnum
Nearly 20 years ago I wrote an essay for the Guardian on English culture – and by extension, Englishness. I entitled it "The Valley of the Corn Dollies". Returning to it and the consciousness it exhibits I am struck by the many obvious continuities – the sense I have of Englishness enduring – but also by the transformations that have taken place in England, and by extension within English identity, over the last two decades, and that were quite unforeseen by me. Not that in 1994 I was in the business of writing futurology, still, any attempt to fix a culture in time must pay due heed to the particular nature of its fluxions.
This lack of foresight is also matched by the essay's comparable lack of hindsight; I don't mean by this that it displays no concern with where the ideas and practices associated with Englishness may have come from, only that as its author I seem to have had little precise sense of their evolutionary timescale. This is understandable, I suppose; the concerns of a 32-year-old are, one hopes, different from those of a quinquagenarian. I say "one hopes", although the very adoption of the impersonal first person and the continuous present relocates the aspiration to a nebulous cultural realm, not this England at the beginning of this particular year: the 2014th of the Common Era.
In fact, the very assumption that generations are capable of individuation and of possessing their own geist is one that the last 20 years have ground away at, and I realise now that implicit in it were notions of the cultural primacy of the young. The impact of a rapidly ageing population on English culture (and by extension, Englishness) is something I will return to, but for now it will suffice to remark that while this phenomenon – the banking-up of the baby boomer generation into a grey market at the end of the consumerist conveyor belt – may be widespread in the so-called developed world, the impact it is having on England seems especially powerful given that Englishness itself is almost always conceived of in terms of gradual evolution rather than abrupt change.
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This lack of foresight is also matched by the essay's comparable lack of hindsight; I don't mean by this that it displays no concern with where the ideas and practices associated with Englishness may have come from, only that as its author I seem to have had little precise sense of their evolutionary timescale. This is understandable, I suppose; the concerns of a 32-year-old are, one hopes, different from those of a quinquagenarian. I say "one hopes", although the very adoption of the impersonal first person and the continuous present relocates the aspiration to a nebulous cultural realm, not this England at the beginning of this particular year: the 2014th of the Common Era.
In fact, the very assumption that generations are capable of individuation and of possessing their own geist is one that the last 20 years have ground away at, and I realise now that implicit in it were notions of the cultural primacy of the young. The impact of a rapidly ageing population on English culture (and by extension, Englishness) is something I will return to, but for now it will suffice to remark that while this phenomenon – the banking-up of the baby boomer generation into a grey market at the end of the consumerist conveyor belt – may be widespread in the so-called developed world, the impact it is having on England seems especially powerful given that Englishness itself is almost always conceived of in terms of gradual evolution rather than abrupt change.
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