In a pub, just because, someone told me that it was impossible to define what it is to be English. I am partly English, partly God knows what, but I do not accept that it is not possible. Here is my attempt.

To be English is to live within paradox. The national character is shaped by understatement and irony, yet also by a fierce pride in history and the figures who shaped it: Shakespeare and Darwin, Austen, Wilberforce and Churchill. Englishness professes a loathing of hypocrisy, while depending on indirection, politeness, double meanings, and the habit of saying less than is meant. It distrusts ideology, preferring pragmatism and "muddling through," yet carries a quiet conviction of its own exceptionality. It clings to the village green, the pub, the Sunday roast, the weather forecast, and to a tender compassion for animals, even as it remains a nation built on farming, hunting, and empire.

Englishness is a performance of opposites: reserve masking passion, modesty cloaking pride, irony guarding sincerity. It endures not through grand declarations but through rituals and habits, tea, queuing, bacon butties, eccentric clubs, wry humour, that allow belonging to be felt without needing to be stated. Its essence lies in this very contradiction: a nation that distrusts absolutes yet believes itself singular, that mocks pretension yet takes pride in greatness, that hides conviction behind understatement and makes the concealment itself a mark of identity.

And to be English is also to know your breakfast loyalties. You must not only be able to rate a full English, but concede that no one entirely trusts the Englishman who refuses one.