The writer August Strindberg, going mad in Paris in the late 19th century, observed that you only really live completely in your country of origin. I agree with him. Wherever we live, wherever we move, there is for most of us a sense that only one country is your inherent business, that only one country’s complications are your own, that only one country is, with all the good and ill the word implies, family. No matter how frustrated you grow at where you grew up, you bridle at criticism of it by outsiders; no, you want to say, you don’t get it, you don’t know it, you don’t see.

An essay went viral this summer which seemed to encapsulate this misunderstanding — an account, seething with pessimism, of an American visitor’s recent visit to England. Its author, Joshua Treviño, toured round Albion, appalled by anti-colonial literature in the British Museum and same-sex green men at lights, seeing a country given from its people to a sinister “regime”. England, to Josh, was in violation of its own long traditions of liberty and freedom. I suspect the same man would have been able to grasp instantly how absurd it would be for a modern visitor to navigate the contemporary US judging everything they saw against whether the country was or was not satisfying the principles of Thomas Jefferson. Such a traveller would miss the essential localism of any political culture, and that ideas occur in dialogue with a place, not as a guide to them. That’s the essence of a bad traveller, to fail to get out of your head. 

I was in England this summer and for me it was beautiful. It was beautiful when I went into central London; it was beautiful when I went down to Brighton, and it was beautiful when I went up to Chester to see my parents for the weekend. It was certainly beautiful when I walked around my local park, watching great phalanxes of children charging across the sports fields and playing football there. Did you know London has over 3000 parks?

The country I travelled around didn’t seem ruined to me. It didn’t visibly seem to have gone to the dogs. I am in a good place to make this case for it because (a) I have been everywhere, but everywhere, in Europe as a tour guide and now live abroad, and (b) England has never been particularly kind to me in career terms. And yet I love it. Indeed, I would make the case that, given that few people would argue that this is a high point in the country’s historical fortunes, the fact that it remains such a good place to spend time is a powerful argument in its favour. When England is bad, as many would say in a summer of riots and recrimination, it’s still pretty good.

… there’s not much to match England’s geographic variety this side of the Alps

You can’t just be vague, though; nebulousness is the refuge of the fake patriot. What is it about England that is good? It’s alarmingly pretty for one, never more than in summer. Allowing that we’ve had hotter times of late, there seems no summer quite as balanced as the English, warm and sunny with a gentle breeze never far away. Scotland is too cold; Wales is too wet. But the English summer transforms the humblest London pavement café into a scene worthy of a plaza in Sienna. Buildings grim in winter become light and dappled; from the trains, you can see field after abundant field. Last summer I was on the Isle of Skye, and a few summers ago I was on the Isles of Scilly, and bear in mind this is all the same small place. Speaking as someone who’s spent much of their life living on the Great European Plain and is now safely housed in the bureaucratic flatlands of Belgium, there’s not much to match England’s geographic variety this side of the Alps.

The other aspect of England that I remark when returning from abroad is the way it embodies a lived multiculturalism like nowhere else. Oh, I’m sure Josh, our Spenglerian visitor, saw multiculturalism as further evidence of what he calls England’s “long defeat”. Actually, this multiculturalism is, by and large, evidence of English liberalism reaching its apotheosis. Having lived in a multicultural relationship for years, there was nowhere else than London than I’d rather have been — nowhere else where a Chinese woman dating a half-Welsh vaguely Jewish bloke from Nottingham would have seemed so utterly unremarkable, where the acceptance from friends and family might have been so immediate. 

It took me a long time to realize, as my ex-wife’s English perfected itself and her career ascent intensified, that she was the real Londoner — that the woman from Guilin, Guangxi who came to the UK to study was the one of us who suited the English capital’s working culture and attitudes. Somehow that’s the most English liberal thing of all, that the person who fits in most is the non-native. 

In the midst of divorce, at a time of heavy sadness, I felt nourished by this love of my country

Again and again I walked to the park this summer and saw those children play. Great streams of football-playing children, scions of the middle class, multiracial and multilingual and anchored in southwest English suburbia. And they didn’t seem too bad at football either. It all felt so far away from Trevino’s fantasy of a place stolen from its citizens.  

In the midst of divorce, at a time of heavy sadness, I felt nourished by this love of my country, and amused to read that Josh so clearly didn’t get the place. He was living in a world of online paranoia and not seeing the place around him. I loved this country, its landscapes, its languages and above all the social fabric its people created. In Greek love terms this was storge, the love for the community, a natural, deep affection. The same affection that you have for your spouse.

For those currently down on England, with their declinist vision of the country as something like a Caliphate run by a particularly petty HR department, I’d ask — where in reality would you prefer to be from? For me the answer this summer, and perhaps any other after, was clearly nowhere else.