Being British (and living abroad)

The latest British Social Attitudes survey, reported in today's Guardian, concludes that 'less than half of the public say that "British" is the best or only way to describe themselves'. They point out that 'the proportion of the British public who say British is the best or only way to describe their national identity has declined from 52% to 44% in just 10 years since 1996.'

Few other countries in the world face such muddled confusions over the distinctiveness of their national identity. For example, trying to explain this to Japanese people (Japan being the country where I'm currently resident) is relatively easy in terms of the distinction between England, Britain and the UK, but gets very complicated when they try and comprehend what that actually means. Historically speaking, Japan maintained a long period of isolation from the rest of the world and still retains some of this isolationist mindset even in today's globalised world, seeing themselves as racially and culturally very distinct from other peoples.

It's easy to look at Japan in that way. There are four main islands - Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku - plus the Okinawan archipelago to the south of the main islands. All of these are defined as 'Japan' and people here define themselves as belonging to that identity, even if they might be more likely these days to holiday in Hawaii than Okinawa and still find others within the nation as substantially distinct from themselves.

Nevertheless, it's still quite an easy thing to define the nation of Japan. When it comes to the UK, that's much more difficult. The United Kingdom consists of four states (?) - England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Great Britain/Britain consists of three - England, Scotland and Wales. If we look at the individual components of that union, what are they - countries, states, nations, regions?

It's no wonder that people in the 'British Isles' have long struggled with defining their own identity and are now turning to a more regionally distinct sense of self.

To take the example of myself, I was born in England of English parents, then schooled and raised in Wales. I later returned to England to study and live. In Wales, I felt English and back in England, I often felt Welsh (at least at first). This was quite confusing in a number of different situations throughout my life. Now, I live in Japan and continue to reshape and redefine my sense of identity.

Last year, the BBC detailed another survey titled 'Brits Abroad', this time by the Institute for Public Policy Research, which found that 'an estimated 5.5m British people (people born in the UK and registered as British citizens) live permanently abroad – almost one in 10 of the UK population.' The IPPR found that 'there are more Brits living abroad than there are foreign born people living in the UK'.

What makes such a large number of people leave the place that they were born in? They (we) are mostly not forced out as refugees of war or through persecution. Perhaps one of the consequences of being born into such a cultural mix-up as Britain leads one to be both less rooted in one particular sense of self and also more inclined to explore other places. Of course, some of the reality as well is to escape from crap trains and crap weather!

As a teenager, I explored the British Isles with my family and made emotional connections to much of the rest of the country. As a young man in my twenties, being just 'British' was not quite enough, so I decided that I needed my thinking to be broader and pitched my sense of self at becoming more 'European'. Through visits and experiences in France, Germany, Holland, the Czech Republic and Greece (amongst a few others), I hit that aim and in my head I was no longer simply British, but now European. In tune perhaps with these changing times, by my thirties, one continent was no longer enough and I left Europe in search of a more international or global mindset. I moved to Japan, and travelled to China, Korea, Tanzania, Nepal and the UAE.

We have a series of different identities to contend with in our lifetimes.

• The personal identity and our individual sense of self (Who am I? What am I? What do I want to be?).
• The local identity (our place in our own community).
• The national identity (what it means to be a citizen of the country on our passport).
• The global identity.

This last one, is the one that it hardest. It involves seeing oneself not just as an individual, a member of a family, community or nation, but as a member of the same species as everyone else on the planet. All humans have the same basic needs - food, shelter, warmth, community, stimulation, freedom from fear and persecution, etc. Culturally, there are infinite varieties on these basics, but essentially they are the same and so are we.

It is the acknowledgement of these simple facts and the recognition of each of us as being part of the same family that, I think, provides the key to our ongoing survival as a species. The nation state model has been effective in a number of ways yet has also proved to be disastrously divisive and the cause of much of our history's warfaring.

If we are to avoid the threats from state proliferation of weapons and militarism, the twin terrors of deprivation and terrorism, and the global threat of human-caused climate change, then we all need to start thinking more about all other people as brothers and sisters of the same family as ourselves.

Perhaps only then does mankind have a future.

The Death Of The Godfather

It is with a great sadness (but with characteristic style on his part to do it on Christmas Day) that I post about the death of James Brown, the 'hardest working man in show business', 'the Godfather Of Soul', 'Soul Brother Number One'...

Music has lost one of it's last standing true legends. A seminal force in soul, funk, gospel and rhythm & blues, plus a major influence on most modern music, such as hip-hop and electronic music, he was also an astonishing performer whose onstage presence and style inspired many others. Even in my own live shows, I have stolen a few moves from the man and worked them into my live character (although I could never claim to be as funky as he was!).

His BBC obituary can be found here and the Wikipedia entry is here.

Back in 2000, the summer following my redundancy from my job, James was due to play at the Essential Festival on the outskirts of Brighton. Naturally, the meagre redundancy package I'd received from my retail post had gone by then (mostly on a trip to Paris in the spring) and I was beginning to scrape by on what I got for dole money - never a great deal at the best of times.

When I heard that Brother James was coming to town, I knew that I simply had to be there. How often does somebody like him play in your own backyard? Perhaps once in a lifetime. The downer was, there was simply no way of scraping the pennies together to come up with a means of paying for a ticket.

Luckily for me, I work pretty hard at keeping up good friendships. To my great surprise, my best pal from my college days came through for me and bought me a ticket as a birthday present.

The meaning of true friendship = 'being an enabler, helping to hit a dream'.


We all trooped along to see James live and it was exactly as you'd expect from a James Brown show. He was the showman. He did his best known songs. He wore his costumes. His band was tight as hell. He had an energy that shouldn't have been there at his age. His stage presence put so many other younger performers completely to shame. He even did his 'falling on the floor and being covered in his cape only to shake it off and get it on again' routine.

Of course, a cynic could easily have described it as some sort of soul nostalgia cabaret but I felt that JB's energy, conviction and respect for the audience shone through and rode roughshod over such barbs. After one of his shows, you feel exhausted yourself, as if what he puts in takes away some of your own energy too.

Below is a compilation of clips from his live career (and my first video posting too). Dig the man...

Almost at the end of the year

I've battled with the question for about 6 years now - should I use Windows or Mac? When I got my first desktop back in 2000, I just couldn't quite make my mind up and after asking many people and taking much advice, I just plumped for a Windows PC. It seemed the easiest option and I took the populist route, the one that seemed to have the most software and was most commonly used - a universal standard.

The question has come back to me time and time again since then.

Last week, I finally made the switch and am now the proud owner of a new OS X iMac, as depicted here. What a revelation it is! My clunky old Windows laptop was running along at 30GB and was about four years old, so it's admittedly not a great deal of comparison, but this is really shifting up a gear (or ten). It's going to take a while to get my head around everything - data migration, reconfiguring mail systems, adjusting to a US keyboard, etc - but each new window is a voyage of discovery at the moment and it's clearly transformed my own operational capabilities. I'm now up from 30GB to 250GB, with a massively enhanced processing power and a big smile whenever I turn the computer on.

Because Microsoft are such a huge beast and such a target for rage from frustrated users due to alleged predatory practices and their operating systems notorious weaknesses with things like susceptibilities to viruses, it's a great pleasure to make the switch.

One thing to be slightly aware of, however, is the likeliness of becoming a Mac bore. Aesthetically, they look so much nicer than most (both on screen and the machine itself) that they tend to be among the more fetishised of machines. Also, there is quite a communal, membership feel to being a Mac user which can tend to waffling on about it. I'll try my best to keep clear of that!

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Averaging about one posting a month on this, what with all the other range of commitments that I seem to have running at the moment, so as I'm actually sitting in front of this and writing, I'll use the chance to try out a new style - condensing a few thoughts, news and opinions into one entry and see how that goes.

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I've finished updating all the albums in my 'Global Image Gallery' for this year. Most recently dealt with include a series of new pictures in the 'Images Of Britain' album, updates too for 'Tokyo' and 'Tokyo City Views' and a personal favourite (which the selected picture is taken from), an album of images taken from a jaunt to the wonderful city of Kyoto back in the spring of this year.

As usual, follow the links contained here to view the albums themselves and if it's the first time to visit Sony Imagestation, I have some login information that you can use contained within a previous post.

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A couple of other thoughts to end this post with. The death of Chile's former military dictator Augusto Pinochet comes around the same time as the publication and release of the Iraq Study Group report. The recent overviews of Pinochet's time recall the number of people killed or 'disappeared' during his tenure over the country - listed at roughly 3000 people.

What a magic number that seems to be! Around 3000 killed in the 9/11 attacks and the ongoing death toll of US soldiers in Iraq is edging ever closer to 3000 too.

Add all these three figures together and you don't come anywhere near the obscenity of the scale of the body count amongst the Iraqi people.

Some perspective needed here, I think.

America spoke......the beginning of the end?.....

I tend to keep myself so up to my eyes in it these days that general blog postings are a little difficult to squeeze into the schedule. Sometimes, however, something happens that simply has to have comment passed upon it. I'm not going to go into a lengthy diatribe here and I'll leave this link-free too, as there's enough else out there (particularly in the blogosphere) for people to find out more if they so wish. However, events of the past few days are ones that cannot go uncommented upon.

Growing up under the shadow cast by Reagan's White House, it felt like that period would never end (time goes much more slowly when you're a child). Particularly vividly remembered are his closeness to Thatcher (whom I loathed) and the mortal fear of the bomb that ran through the playgrounds of my youth. Following him, the first Bush got a stab at the top job, and although I was a little older and understood more about international politics by then, it still felt as if the Reagan era had simply been extended by another four years instead of coming to an end.

Then Clinton took over. There are many criticisms that can be and still are levelled at him (Iraq, Yugoslavia, etc) but the fact was that to me and many others, the world felt safer in his hands. This was particularly the case as Clinton didn't look like he was abusing his position, although America was clearly the most powerful country in the world and most other nations swayed to America's breezes. Even though the Republicans gained control of both Houses only two years into his presidency, he was still able to come out of his tenure looking relatively clean. Not a Johnson, a Nixon, a Reagan, a Bush.

In 2000 the nightmare returned. Of course, I was much older then and understood that much more again about US and international politics, plus had actually lived in America too (three months in Florida, prior to the Gingrich wave), so had a different approach to things. However, when Bush Jnr. took the election, I knew that the world was about to enter another Dark Age. I told my mother on the telephone that there would be another war coming (I didn't quite count on how many there would be!) and I began to pay very close attention to the activities of the Bushies.

The history I'm sure we all know - rejecting Kyoto, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, etc - so there's little point in picking at it here. Taking a broader brush stroke over it, the entire world has been taken in a terrifying and unprecedented direction by the hooligans squatting the White House for the past six years. America has become a global pariah in a way that it never had done before, even with the range of 'foreign policy' initiatives (Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iran-Contra, to name a few) it had taken prior to the latest set of misadventures.

Finally, within the past few days, the brakes have been put on. The Democrats have won back the House of Representatives for the first time since 1994, some media are reporting that they may even have taken the Senate too, and the first really major scalp of the Dark Side has been claimed by the forces of Progress with the resignation of chief architect of the Iraq disaster, Donald Rumsfeld. A scapegoat perhaps in the face of overwhelming pressure, but a vital first step all the same.

What happens next is really anyone's guess. It's kind of an open playing field again, to some extents. Congressional hearings would seem likely. Rejection at national and international level of an extreme right wing agenda finally seems inevitable. Impeachment may be less likely as the Democrats really have their work cut out for them if they're going to pull something positive from the wreckage, and they may want to be careful over the enemies they make now.

One thing's for sure, the dark, dark days of the absolute power of the Bush Administration that were ushered in during the dawn of the 21st Century have drawn to a close. One has to conclude that from here on in, it can't possibly get any worse (I'll eat my words on that if I have to, but please excuse me the gamble!) and the world now has at the very least, a little breathing space to collectively sit down, think about all that's happened and try to find better ways forward.

After all, it's not getting any cooler on Planet Earth and I think most of us would like to have something to pass on to our kids (and theirs...and theirs...and theirs...and theirs...)