Jeremy Clarkson made me giggle again. He might be to the right of Genghis Kahn politically speaking, but he is a funny chappy. This is what he had to say about Britain:

Perhaps you’re saying that you’re proud to be British? But what does this mean exactly; what are you proud of? Our provincial town centres with their Styrofoam carpets or those pastry-faced people who work in petrol stations; our National Health Service, our trains, our cricket team, our roads, our government, our wobbly bridges, our Millennium Dome, Rover, our Hutton inquiry, the British Library, British Airways, Britart, our education system, Will Young — what? 

Had we been around between 1850 and 1875, when Britain was the workshop and the engine of the world, then maybe you could wake up every morning and bask in the hope and the glory and the pomp and the circumstance. Maybe then you could have put a sign in your garden saying, “Support our troops and Lord Palmerston”.  But now?

All we have is our world-renowned sense of humour and I’m sorry, good though it is, I’m not going to spend £500 on a flagpole to celebrate Richard Curtis’s dab hand with a metaphor.