As a Scot, to ask 'What is Englishness?

We listened to an excellent radio 4 play about the Profumo scandal. I was about 14 at the time, and more interested in youth club, boys, hair and horses at the time. I've read about it since then, but the play was good at setting the social and political scene. I accept we still have hypocrisy but the laws on homosexuality, and social attitudes to the status of men and women, gays and lesbians is much healthier.

I don't think the 60's were a very good time to be homosexual. Or a battered spouse. Or an abused child. I don't look back to any time in the past through rose-tinted spectacles - even though they were good years for me personally.

When we were children in the 40s and 50s, we used to go by car from Ayrshire to Fife for our annual summer holiday at Granny's, passing through Barrhead on the way. It was home to Shanks's sanitary ware factory and was therefore known to our family as 'potty town'.

annodomini Aw, I can understand that. There is a calmness that I feel when I go to places like that. It IS like going home. x

Joan Neilston?! I grew up just outside of Uplawmoor from the age of 11 to 17! Neilston was our local town! This is bizarre...

Barrhead is a working class but perfectly respectable town near to but a little south of the city. Barrhead is actually very close to the suburb I grew up in, Newton Mearns, which is more middle/upper class. About 10mins drive of that. I say upper class as there are always those who think they are the bees knees, if you know what I mean.

Neilston is similar to Barrhead.

Sherwood is a brilliant suburb, just 3 mins closer to the city than we are and I know the cop shop you are talking about! Very safe street! I actually had to go to that cop shop for my finger prints for my perm res visa.

Runcorn I also know very well as I work for the largest property company in that area and we cover Runcorn! Great suburb with the train station straight to the city if you want it.

Brittain St I pass daily. Just next to the train station in Oxley.

Oh my goodness. Such a small world indeed! xxxxxxx

Ciamar a tha thu, Gaol mo cridhe, My DD2 is also a Glaswegian living in Queensland and it sounds as if, even although you are so far away from your Mum, like my DD and I, the strong bond we have cancels out any distance.

Have a wonderful Christmas with your family. Slainte

I too am nostalgic about the 60's Joan. Everything was fab, we had our whole lives ahead of us and the world was waiting to be explored. A heady time indeed and a great time to be alive.

Talking of small worlds, I live on the south side of Glasgow, not too far from your brother and I also have a daughter, Glaswegian, living in OZ!

Once, in Kenya, I was sitting outside a café at the coast, sipping coconut juice through a straw, when a German tourist came up and asked me in German if it tasted good. "Ndio," I answered in Swahili - "Yes".

Yes, Nightowl I long for times past too - the 1960s was a terrific time - partly because I was young, but also because it was!

We do see it in a rosy way though - just ask the former East Germans about 'Ostalgia' - ie longing for the communist East German past.

I live only 45 miles from where I was born, but I still feel 'exiled'. Stupid, I know when so many of you have moved across the world. However, many of the things you are all saying, about not knowing where you belong, ring true for me even though the distance is very short. I often feel homesick for Yorkshire but I know there is nothing there for me now, which makes me realise it is not a place I long for, but a time. That time is gone.

* Maggiemaybe * That is so funny! But understandable. I was ill once in Vienna and went to the university hospital (free to students). The medics knew I was English and used English but I was so ill that I answered in German without thinking!

There is a lot we don't know about language acquisition and use, but knowing more than one language is good for the brain, and is now believed to ward off dementia.

Margaret you said: It becomes quite sad in the end really. If I now won the lottery I would not know where to build my second home in England and actually I realise that I no longer want to go there. I would miss my house in Germany too much. That doesn't make me German. My personal history makes that impossible.

These could be my words, substituting Australia.

It becomes quite sad in the end really. If I now won the lottery I would not know where to build my second home in England and actually I realise that I no longer want to go there. I would miss my house in Germany too much. That doesn't make me German. My personal history makes that impossible.

Anyway I now have two GCs starting grammar school and they have both proudly told the class and their English teachers that they have an English Grandmother. My own children felt it set them apart and tried to keep it secret. I am English and will remain so, like all the other people who live in a foreign country - we make the best of it and sometimes the best is better than it would have been if we had stayed at home.

Joan, after I'd been in Hamburg for a few months, I was called for interview at the Luxemburg Palais de Justice, for a post as an English/French interpreter which I'd applied for over a year previously. I was interviewed in French by a very imposing panel of civil servants, who looked more and more puzzled as I answered every question in fluent German.

annodomini Lucky for me I don't follow sport, except cycling sometimes. I was glad when the Australian Cadel Evans did well, and equally glad when the English Bradley Wiggins did well.

However, with the Ashes, I have to admit that even though I don't watch the action, I did feel a bit of quiet smug self-satisfaction that England won!! It drives the locals to distraction, which makes me laugh a bit.

Margaret I'd only been in Vienna few months, the time I came home to meet my fiance's family. I'd lived there a while before, 1965-1966, and had become fluent in German, Anyway, in that few months working there in early 1967 I'd spoken no English at all. It takes a few days or a couple of weeks to get back into Yorkshire English: when I met his family I hadn't reached that stage - my English was still accentless, so I was branded a snob. The fact I'd been doing a big translation for the WHO didn't help - that sounded like a snob job.

It is so very easy to upset people when you've lived abroad - you not only sound different, you see things differently. I would imagine people are more broad minded now though, as England is so multicultural compared with back in the 60s.

Here is the Norman Tebbitt test! Joan, which side do you support in an Ashes series? My NZ sister has become such a Kiwi that she even supports the All Blacks against Scotland. Traitor! She had the nerve to take me to task for supporting England (and any of the other Home nations) against the ABs.

Yes, I agree Margaret - once you have made that journey, and stayed for a while in your new country, nothing is ever the same again. You are not quite local, but don't quite belong back home.

joan a bit of sensible German philosophy.
Die Fremde wird nicht Heimat, aber die Heimat fremd.

ABOAD WILL NEVER QUITE BE HOME, BUT HOME WILL BECOME STRANGE/FOREIGN

To understand this you have to appreciate the word Heimat which is almost untranslatable. It is so heavy with emotional meaning.

I am sure that is what everybody misses when they go abroad but being abroad changes us! Because we change we are sometimes treated by friends and family at home as being foreign. especially in political arguments.
I remember my brother saying to me 'You Germans!' as we were discussing the Common Market as it was then. I felt very hurt by this but it warned me that I was no longer regarded as quite so English as those who live there permanently.

The language is important and now with Satellite dishes and internet we can indulge as much as we want. I missed it painfully in the beginning.

GaolMoCridhe My brother lived in Neilston where he brought up his kids, who are effectively Scottish now, with Scottish accents, though one lives in the USA, and the other stayed in Scotland but married a Dutchman. Now my brother is retired, they've moved to Barrhead. I've never been, so I've no idea what these places are like.

My sister married a Scot from Edinburgh, though he spent his teenage years in Leicestershire. They live in France now. I married a fellow Yorkie, and we ended up in Australia. It is funny how multicultural we have all become, from our mono-cultural origins in a West Yorkshire mill town. I've also lived in Vienna and NZ.

Here in Queensland, we live in Dinmore: we've one married son in Sherwood, just round the corner from the cop shop there, and the other living in Runcorn with his gorgeous Cantonese fiancee. We've got a Chinese/Australian wedding coming up next year.

Gosh - I hadn't realised what a mix we all are!!

I have a friend from Oxley - well, she's from Watford really, but lived on Britain Street with her first husband. She married again and lived Northside, but now lives on her own near Oxley - in Durack.

Small world eh?

Daniel Defoe would be proud of us!

There's a village churchyard in Leicestershire where a large number of my ancestors are buried in a big family tomb and I would like to go back sometime and commune with them; but when I cross the Border into Scotland, I really know I'm going home - my accent changes noticeably.

Not for me AlieOxon.
My home is where I am from and that is what I miss.
Why would I miss ancestors that I do not know?

Could you explain why you feel a kinship to countries that you have never been to? It's a really interesting thought and one which I would love to hear more about.

I've always wondered where I belong.
Since I have researched my family history, I feel that it's the people I have come from, not the places, that matter - I think about them and feel the real romance of my family stories.

Thank you for that link to the poem! I have always considered myself a mongrel.

I enjoyed the Defoe poem, Joan and am surprised that it was unfamiliar. If such perceptions were true 400 years ago, how much more true are they now!

Joan I thought you may be in Perth as there are so many Brits there! We live in Oxley so really not far from you at all. My OH is from the western suburbs (Chapel Hill) so we are not too close, but not too far from his parents. It works wonderfully. We are in the middle for both of us for work.

I work in Sunnybank and tonight at 6.30 I had to drive to Toowong to look at a property. I was driving over the Captain Cook Bridge on the Pacific Highway and all of the city lights were on and I just thought, "Isn't this a wonderful city to live in!" It's brilliant!

It's so funny that one of your brothers lives in Glasgow.....! I'm from the south side if he is around there? I hope he is happy there.

Best to you.
xxx

I live not all that far from you, GaolMoCridhe, in the eastern side of Ipswich!

Funnily enough, one of my brothers lives in - Glasgow!!

Joan What a lovely post! I agree with everything you feel. And you are definitely a polite English lady in answering Agus' genuine question.

I'm a 35yr old Glaswegian living in Brisbane and I totally 'get' what you are saying. You miss where you just belong and I do find it tiresome being an immigrant of sorts. Sometimes I just want to blend in.

Although I receive lovely comments about my accent daily (I work in property so meet a lot of people) and thankfully do not get too many questions as to why I am here (as you will know, there are gazillions of Brits here so it's quite normal to meet them daily if you're an Aussie) as it does get tiresome, I do miss the humour of home and just slotting in. I find myself looking up Scottish comedians on YouTube every couple of months for a taste of home and a good giggle.

I miss many things from home, but nothing as much as my Mum.

My Mum in Law is English and her 4 grown up children all grew up here with an Aussie Dad, so she and I have a wonderful little British 'thing' that makes my settlement much easier. I'm very lucky to have that.

I've only been here 18 months (my partner is from here obviously), but have lived all over the world for the last 10 years, but I do love it. But it is true, there is no place like home, and I can't wait to go home for Christmas, especially to see my Mammy.

All the best to you, wherever in this big land you are.