Go almost anywhere in the world and you’ll find a British Ex-Pat community. A group of people who at some point in their lives decided that living in the UK wasn’t for them and they’d like to start a new life in a new country with an exciting new culture.
Except that it rarely works out like that. It’s far more common that they take a little bubble of British culture with them and completely ignore any local culture that they find in their new home. The interesting thing is that this bubble of British culture is a snapshot of the UK as it was when they left. They seem to become completely isolated from any changes in the culture back in the UK. And of course the UK now bears very little resemblance the UK of even thirty years ago. We’ve moved on. Things have changed. I’ve visited ex-pat communities in many countries and it always seems like I’m stepping back in time by a good fifty or sixty years.
And then there’s the Daily Mail. The newspaper for ex-pats who haven’t even bothered to leave the county. It seems to be read by people who have created a little “ex-pat bubble” around themselves and try to ignore the changes in the UK over the last few decades. It’s probably the British newspaper that I despise the most.
Today the Mail launches a campaign to save Britain. It’s based around their knee-jerk reaction to the possibility that the UK might one day join the Euro but they are making it a wider isue than that. They are complaining about everything that is chipping away at the Britain (they’d probably say “England”) that they want to live in. The Britain of village greens, bobbies on bicycles and a compliant underclass who know their place and doff their flat caps as their betters drive past in a Bentley.
Of course this Britain doesn’t exist any more. It’s been gone for decades. But the Daily Mail readers either don’t know this or won’t accept that it’s true. They have turned their dormitory towns in the home counties into ex-pat communities no less out of touch than the ones Africa or the Caribbean.
They’re in for a rude awakening. And the sooner it comes, the better.
I can relate to some of what you’re saying here. In my case though, I married a merkan. So when we moved to the US I couldn’t really escape the local culture. That’s not to say that I don’t have my own personal ‘bubble of British culture’ – it’s just been mixed with merkan culture (which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it I supppose) :-)I understand your point about feeling slightly isolated. I left England in 1995 and even though it’s only been 8 years it’s beginning to feel a teeny bit odd when I go back. I can’t quite put my finger on *what* is different – it’s just different…
Learn to spell – it’s ‘expat’ – without a hyphen. That said, spelling it with a hyphen and pronouncing it with the stress on the second syllable is a shibboleth for the kind of semi-literate expatriates you’d find on the Spanish Costas. The kind of people who, decades before, would have emigrated to Southern Rhodesia.