It was a quiet Sunday morning – the kind where the world seems to exhale – yet the table beside me was in uproar. A group of self-proclaimed patriots, almost certainly Reform voters, were railing against the state of the country. The NHS was finished, the economy beyond repair, the culture lost.
You’d think from spending five minutes listening to them that they were talking about a failed state rather than the same country they professed to love more than life itself. Between the lamentations about “woke agendas” and the mandatory grumbling about immigration, there was one clear message: Britain, apparently, is broken.
And yet, as I left the café and stepped into the pale November sun, the scene told a very different story.
The first scent of roast beef drifted from a nearby pub, carrying with it the unmistakable promise of Yorkshire pudding and gravy. Down the lane, the church bells were warming up for the noon service. I wandered past Tudor beams and Victorian shopfronts, each a quiet testament to endurance. Children were kicking a ball on the green; someone’s dog was making friends it shouldn’t; and a busker, valiantly out of tune, was mangling “Wonderwall” to the delight of no one and the amusement of everyone.
This – this ordinary, imperfect, quietly magnificent country – is Britain. And Britain, whatever the professional patriots say, is brilliant.
It’s brilliant not because it’s flawless, but because it’s resilient. It’s a nation that has been reinventing itself for centuries: from the industrial revolution to the cultural one; from punk to the NHS; from Shakespeare to Stormzy. We are a country that can queue for hours, apologise when someone else bumps into us, and still produce world-class scientists, poets, and comedians who make the absurdity of it all bearable.
The loudest voices declaring that “Britain has gone to the dogs” seem to forget that they are the ones holding the lead. They wrap themselves in the flag while complaining endlessly about the place it represents. For people so passionate about “taking their country back,” they don’t seem to enjoy actually living in it very much.
But here’s the thing: patriotism doesn’t have to shout. It doesn’t need slogans or fury or nostalgia for a Britain that never really existed. It can be found in the smell of a Sunday roast, in the echo of church bells, in the kindness of strangers on a rainy bus. It’s found in the quiet pride of knowing that, despite everything – despite Brexit, bureaucracy, and the British weather – we are still a country of ideas, humour, and heart.
So no, I don’t care what the patriots say. Britain isn’t broken. It’s brilliant. It always has been – and, if we’d all stop shouting long enough to notice, it still is.