I’m afraid it’s terminal

Biscuit-dunking, tea-drinking animal lovers with a charitable nature who thrive on Radio 4, celebrity gossip and sarcastic sitcoms lampooning the middle classes – I’m sure if we’re truly honest, all of us can find at least one likeness in the stereotypical view of ‘Britishness’.

Most of Europe would include ‘an unending obsession with harking back to the war’ into the mix too. And they’d be right too, but for all the wrong reasons. We don’t still drive around with our headlights blacked out unless we’re driving a Ford Escort with a spoiler in Essex. With the possible exception of the more barmy parts of Surrey, we don’t huddle-down of an evening in our Anderson shelters with only a copy of The Daily Mail and half-a-packet of McVitie’s digestives.

It’s that optimistic feeling of Britishness that we’re trying to hold on to. That feeling of unity. Of digging for victory. Of having Corporal Jones running around shouting about how ‘they don’t like it up them’. Edmund Hilary, Winston Churchill, they all had that ‘make the best of things’ motto which sees our SAS survive in the desert for 4 weeks with only 2 sheets of toilet paper and a lemon. The British Bulldog – it’s ugly with no purpose or use, yet it defies natural selection with it’s stiff, if crooked, upper-lip.

And this week, every aspect of British spirit went on holiday. To be fair, it was probably the only thing which did manage to get away through Terminal 5.

A shiny new terminal for the 21st century. This was Buck Rogers meets Deep Space 9 meets the business-class traveller. Well, at least that was idea. What we actually got was Malcolm from Basingstoke trying to check-in passengers armed with only an Amstrad computer, a blunt quill and a 1978 copy of the British Rail Timetable.

40 years ago we’d have had passengers grouping together to pass the luggage onto the planes. Two middle-class gents called Roger and Graham would have designed a make-shift conveyor belt on the back of the Daily Telegraph for a dozen or so lower-class chaps in flat caps to make out of a few pipe-cleaners, a pair of lady’s stockings and a paper clip.

40 years ago staff would have dug a tunnel into the terminal to get around the glitches with the computers that stopped them ‘clocking in’, with men pushing the plane down the runway in asbestos underpants to avoid unsightly staining when the jet engines finally kick-in. And what’s more, the tunnel would have been dug by someone scared of confined spaces, and the guy checking passports would be almost blind. Of course, there’d be a plucky Yank on a motorcycle prancing around, but he’d probably get runover by Flight Commander Jock Stranthorpe-Bigglesorth-Smyde who’d be piloting the plane whilst delivering a passenger’s baby and solving 10 down on The Times cryptic crossword.

The problem is, we’ve become a nation of whiners, although some would say we always were. Yes we’ve always bemoaned the weather, but normally we’d be standing waist-deep in flood water wearing our grandfather’s fishing waders delivering cauliflowers and postage stamps to the elderly whilst we’re doing it. We’d say, ‘bit nippy out’, but more to challenge each other to carry on sunbathing on a deckchair on a snowy Brighton promenade than actually chastising Mother Nature.

Maybe Britishness isn’t completely lost, maybe it’s just a transition or teenage phase.

If Boris becomes Mayor, we’ll have plenty of training before the Olympics get here to turn ourselves back into James Garner and Richard Attenborough and to starch our upper-lips. The only problem is I can’t lose the feeling that, come 2012, we’ll all be standing by the side of the road tutting quietly under our breath and blaming Gordon Brown for the fact that 25% of the runners have been run-over by bendy-busses, 25% are lost because the signs weren’t put up in time or are in Polish, 15% have been injured by tripping over potholes and slipping up on discarded kebabs and bodily fluids left by the previous night’s revellers, whilst the remaining 35% are running naked because their suitcases have been sent to Milan as Terminal 5 still isn’t working quite right…