steepholm: (Default)
steepholm ([personal profile] steepholm) wrote2015-03-19 03:20 pm

A Place for Everything, A Time for Nothing

Recently the teatime quiz programme Two Tribes asked a contestant to say whether the proposition that "William Shakespeare was born in the United Kingdom" was true or false. The contestant answered "True", and that was accepted as obviously correct, but I was of course left spluttering about the Act of Union, and dismayed at the apparent lack of historical sense of anyone involved. It's not that I mind the contestant's being awarded the point, but some acknowledgement that the question was problematic or ambiguous would have helped settle my dinner.

That story, combined with the various reports on the latest genetic study of the people of Britain (which every paper appears to have reported in such a way as to confirm its particular prejudices and obsessions), issued in the following mongrel autobiography, combining geographical precision with temporal indifference.



"Two Tribes"

Meet my folks – we’re into ochre.
Meet my folks – we’re into beakers.
My people winter at Stonehenge.
Doesn’t everyone?

My tribe? Why, I’m
Of the Belgae.
I hail from the province of Britannia:
A citizen of the Empire, where I was born.

In the Kingdom of Wessex I had my birth,
In the Kingdom of England
In the Kingdom of Great Britain,
with and without,
with just a bit of,
Ireland
(and possibly France).
The EU is my native land.

Meet my folks – we’re into ochre.
Meet my folks – we’re into beakers.
My people winter at Stonehenge.
Doesn’t everyone?
lilliburlero: silhouette of two leaping figures against sunset, the caption "hubris! nemesis!" (hubris)

[personal profile] lilliburlero 2015-03-19 04:34 pm (UTC)(link)
I think I may have mentioned this before, but the collective fury of a pub quiz table comprised of one person from each of the nations of the UK at the proposition that Richard III was the last British monarch to die in battle is an awesome thing to see.

[identity profile] harvey-rrit.livejournal.com 2015-03-19 03:59 pm (UTC)(link)
George Washington was born in Virginia.

Virginia is in the United States of America.

George Washington was not born in the United States of America, and so much for Aristotle.

[identity profile] kalimac.livejournal.com 2015-03-19 06:38 pm (UTC)(link)
Shakespeare was born in the United Kingdom; it just wasn't called that at the time. Similarly, one could say that a given person of that era died of TB, even though that wasn't called that at the time either, or had a chromosomal abnormality, even though the concept of chromosomes, let alone their abnormalities, was even more unknown than that of a United Kingdom, which at least had been mooted as early as the Treaty of Greenwich in 1543.
sovay: (I Claudius)

[personal profile] sovay 2015-03-19 11:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Meet my folks – we’re into ochre.
Meet my folks – we’re into beakers.


Yay.

[identity profile] aryky.livejournal.com 2015-03-20 11:16 pm (UTC)(link)
The conversation in the comments here has reminded me of how my grandmother always used to say that her parents had emigrated from Austria-Hungary, whe of course what we wanted to know that she was deliberately obfuscating was that they had come from present-day Poland.