A couple of days ago The Daily Mash pointed out another threat to our British way of life: this time to the way we insult someone with our fingers. Once again our national individuality is being eroded not by the cheese-eating surrender monkeys across the Channel but by Uncle Sam.
Not that the continentals are entirely free from blame when it comes to transforming our culture for the worse. In the Fifties when I accompanied my grandfather, and around 30,000 other folk, to watch Bristol City get regularly thrashed at Ashton Gate, footballers' wages were capped at £10 a week. They were all local lads, many of whom played cricket for Gloucestershire during football's close season. And on the rare occasion when one of them scored a goal his team mates congratulated him with a manly handshake rather than the whole team leaping on each other's back in a gay bacchanalia ripped from the pages of Petronius. Such effete behaviour, characteristic of the continental teams we occasionally saw on Pathé Pictorial, would have been viewed with contempt by the British.
A lost world. It's no longer axiomatic that you support your local team; as the old chestnut has it: 'How do you confuse a Man United fan? Show him a map of Manchester'. In any case the players are no longer local, in the wealthier teams few are even British. Unless your club is financed by a multi-billionaire - again they are usually foreign - your chances of being promoted to the 'Premiership' are slight, and remaining there permanently zero. The FA Cup, far from being the highlight of the footballing year, holds as much interest for a big four manager as the next-door-neighbour's holiday snaps.
Ludicrous displays of 'spontaneous' euphoria when a team mate hits the back of the net arrived here decades ago, eventually spreading to cricket and rugby. The former has tried to make itself interesting by dressing its players in garish baby-grows plastered with advertisements and introducing one day games for the benefit of those with a chronic attention-span deficit. Although cricket could never be interesting, its white-robed officiants enacting their archaic ritual once had a certain æsthetic appeal akin to the now-defunct Latin mass. Somehow I don't think sledging, spot-fixing and clothes even the late Jimmy Saville would have found a trifle vulgar have the same cachet. Rugby Union, is no longer the amateur game for oafs played by gentlemen, rather a game for oafs played by cads. As with cricket it desperately matters 'whether you win or lose' for, like Wimbledon, it's become part of a culture which seeks to monetise every human activity.
I'm not writing with any particular sense of nostalgia, other than that of the elderly for a time when they were young. I'm not particularly interested in sport, and even if I were, I would no longer wish to stand shivering in Ashton Gate's Uncovered End, long since replaced by the Atyeo Stand. Rather, I'm reflecting on the way in which globalised capitalism has fundamentally altered British culture. Most football fans no longer trudge to the nearest stadium to support their local team, whose retired players were often the landlord of the pub you drank in or ran the nearby bike shop. Rather they slump on the sofa and gawp at the eleven multi-millionaire mercenaries employed by whichever team at the top of the Premiership they've decided to support. The disappearance of the wage-cap decades ago removed any chance of their local team ever joining that elite group.
Sport is merely one symptom of the all-pervasive influence of globalisation. The 'independent' Britain able to shape its own destiny is a myth. And the sooner the EDL, the BNP, and their more sophisticated fellow travellers in the Tory party wake up to the fact the better.
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