There are some articles that leave you with more questions than answers, and the Guardian’s “The rise of Britishcore: 100 experiences that define and unite modern Britons” is one of them. It leaves you with questions like “what is this shite” and “no, really, what the hell is this shite”?

Recently, the Guardian’s Dylan B Jones informs us, “Britishcore” has been a social media trend that embraces “the naffest bits of British culture”. “Contrary to our reputation as reserved, rosy-cheeked rationalists,” Jones claims, “We’re actually pretty weird.”

Uh oh.

Yes, according to Jones, experiences that “define and unite modern Britons” include “Getting into a physical fight over which is better: Scampi Fries or Bacon Fries” and “Referring to Buckingham Palace as ‘Bucky P’ or ‘Bucko Pal’.” Needless to say, if you call Buckingham Palace “Bucky P” you deserve to be turned into bacon fries.

Jones’s list of alleged Britishisms is so bad — so monumentally unfunny and annoying in its strained wackiness — that like some sort of news media equivalent of Caligula or Battlefield Earth it invites different bemused interpretations. 

Is it a take-off of ageing British wackiness? Possibly, but some entries, like “Being able to quote every episode of Peep Show” or “Having zero understanding of American football”, are so direct that it’s hard to see the parodic intent. 

Is it bad on purpose? As an attempt to harvest hate clicks? Perhaps. Well done, if so. 

Me, I like to think of it as a devastating portrayal of English singlehood in one’s mid-thirties. “A Dr Oetker pizza, a couple of cold ones and a nice bit of University Challenge” isn’t just unfunny — it chilled my blood. When I got to “Filling the top shelf of your fridge door with sauce sachets from Nando’s and sauce pots from Maccies” I experienced something like claustrophobia. I’m sorry God! Forgive me! I don’t want to die with a head full of noughties cultural detritus!

In fairness to Mr Jones, he did not invent “Britishcore”. According to other articles, in the Guardian and elsewhere, TikTok users have indeed been celebrating the proud mundanity of, say, consuming a Greggs sausage roll. If I know one thing about TikTok trends, it’s that they represent deep, lasting cultural commitments.

One trend has been to embrace symbols of Britishness while emptying them of any of their old cultural and political significance

This all feels like an inadvertent piss-take of one of the defining themes of British twenty-first century life. Different converging trends in British cultural discourse have, in recent decades, attempted to construct a model of Britishness which has only the faintest connection to pre-World War Two life. The Empire has to be consigned to the scrapyard of history, of course, but even the greatest fruits of British cultural and intellectual history, from Shakespeare to Darwin, are seen as dubious sources of pride and identity because of their location in a more ethnically and culturally exclusive time.

One trend has been to embrace symbols of Britishness while emptying them of any of their old cultural and political significance. One anonymous critic has called the tendency of the Blairite establishment to dress itself up in the regalia of tradition — ennobling if not sanctifying its institutional dominance — “the posh turn”.

Another trend has been the attempt to define a sort of attitudinal Britishness. If my blood pressure was unusually low, I would turn to the Twitter account @soverybritish. Here, one learns that British people are chronically repressed and terminally sexless neurotics. Hey, a lot of us are. But we are also the people of James Cook, David Livingstone and Captain Scott. “Instead of a step counter on my phone, I want a tut counter,” squeals @soverybritish, “I bet I easily break 10,000 tuts a day.” This is like admitting that you have chronic flatulence. It’s not your fault — but it’s not something to celebrate, it’s something to deal with. 

The Guardian’s hipster nostalgist “Britishcore” might have more references to “six bottles of Smirnoff Ice” and Wetherspoons than the twee stylings of @soverybritish but they both emanate from the same ahistorical and deculturated impulse towards drowning oneself in a lukewarm bath of generational epiphenomena. 

Both hail eccentricity as perhaps the ultimate British virtue — and British history is full of eccentrics, but they were not just eccentrics. Francis Younghusband, who travelled daringly if somewhat quixotically across the Far East and Southern Asia before inventing his own kind of patchwork spiritualism, was an eccentric. Being afraid to phone the hotel reception desk, like @soverybritish, or calling Sainsbury’s “Sainy B”, like the Guardian’s Dylan Jones, is not eccentric. It is just irritating.

Perhaps “Britishcore” represents the nadir of attempts to conjure up a national identity which has no actual reference points before, say, the lifetime of Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. God, I hope so. Outright oikophobia is preferable to this sort of glassy-eyed cultural opportunism.