England

I am English.

I was born English, I am still English, and I will die English; whether it`s in England or not. Wrapped in an English flag, covered in little Union Jack pins and tea towels, reading Shakespeare and doused in English chip fat, probably. Or whatever it is they want to do to prove that I am, in fact, still English.

This does not mean, however, that I know the slightest thing about England.

"You`re English," my American friend told me the other day. She tells me this all the time in case I forget, although her inability to understand a single word of what I`m saying makes it a really unecessary point to make.
"I am, yes," I replied.
"Great. Can you cover my final High School class for me in July and do something about England?"
"Umm," I said, because - and I`m going to be perfectly honest, here - High School students scare the bejesus out of me. My kids are all under 14 years old - still vaguely under the impression that I`m an educated adult - while these ones are old enough to know that I don`t know what I`m talking about.
"Please. You owe me."
And so, because I do actually owe her about six, I agreed: assuming that she meant I would be standing at the back of the class, using a British accent occasionally and perhaps saying the word potato repeatedly (that`s what my American friends make me do, for kicks).
"An hour PowerPoint presentation on England should do it," she concluded happily; "and then an hour of English games."
I stared at her in silence for a minute or two.
"A PowerPoint presentation?" I eventually managed to repeat.
"Yup. Cheers!"
And then my friend ran away before I could tell her I didn`t and would never owe her a favour that big.

I did not get into teaching so that I could do PowerPoint presentations; I did plenty of them when I worked in PR, and - contrary to popular belief - I don`t actually like the sound of my own voice, continuously and without interruption, for an entire hour. Whether the subject is how to improve brand management for Homebase or an entire country, compressed for the digestion of 18 year old foreigners, I do not enjoy standing up in front of a room full of strangers and watching them fall asleep in front of me: proving, if there was ever a doubt, that what I`m saying really isn`t rendered interesting by my dynamic and charismatic personality. Either that, or what I`m saying is rendered uninteresting by the exact opposite.

A presentation about England, though, presents another kind of problem: what the hell does it mean? What is English? What is England? I`m English, and I have no idea. And neither, apparently, does anyone else.

"Harry Potter," was the unanimous answer.
"As a fictional character he doesn`t exist; as an idea, book or brand he`s JK Rowling`s, not her nationality. What else?"
"Fish and chips."
"Fish and chips are eaten everywhere in the world; they`re just called by different names."
"Tea."
"Which comes from China."
"Red buses."
"That`s just London, not England."
"David Beckham."
"Lives in America."
"The Beatles."
"Dead, mostly, and unheard of here anyway."
"Other music?"
"The only music they have heard of is American."
"What`s the most popular food?"
"Curry. Which is Indian."
"Ok, what about places of interest?"
"Like what?"
"London. Bristol. Manchester. Umm... the Norfolk Fens."
"Big cities and then a big patch without them."
"Stone Henge."
"Big rocks."
"God, you`re being negative."
"Not really; I`m just trying to work out what is not going to make an 18 year old Japanese boy with no interest whatsoever in England not fall asleep for an hour."
"You could wear a low cut top. You`re British too, you know. That would count."

The point is: England is not to the English what it is to the rest of the world. When I think of home, I don`t think of fish and chips and cream teas and knives and forks, no matter what my friends here think to the contrary (the Nichinan impression of me goes something like: "Ooooh well helloooo there, would you lark I nice cup of teeeeeaaaaaa deaaarr and perhaps a few ccrrrrummpppeetts wiiittthh jaaaaammmmm and a sit down with the Queen?"). When I think of England, I think of my family and the bars I like and my dad`s tuna and mushroom pie and the smell in Waitrose once the bread has been cooked and that little space in the local park where I sit with a cigarette and the sound of the airing cupboard in my bedroom and the sound of Oxford Circus at 7.30 in the morning when you`re on your way to work. Not: David Beckham, The Queen and JK Rowling. And - while England is different to each and every single English person - I doubt very much whether "Stone Henge and Paul McCartney" are what anyone English thinks about when they`re away from home, or how they would like to be represented to the rest of the world.

I can`t avoid it, unfortunately: a debate on what Nationality is, and how it means something different to everyone, isn`t what I`m being asked to do, and certainly won`t be appreciated by 45 teenagers with a basic grip of the language I`m using.

I`m English. I was born English, I am still English, and I will die English. But it doesn`t mean I have any idea what it means to be any of those things, other than that I was born on the same island as a whole bunch of other people. We are so multicultural that there is no `England`; not as a concept, not as a nicely outlined PowerPoint presentation. And we are not just multicultural: we are a nation full of separate people to whome `home` means something entirely different. And all I can do is try and explain that, tell them about JK Rowling, red buses and fish and chips and follow it all with a nice game of British Bulldog. Which is, incidentally, played here too, but under a different name.

Either that, or I`m going to have to wear a really, really low cut top. And perhaps enter the classroom, wearing a crown on my head and eating a hot buttered crumpet.