There are the Americans on one side (we're thinking of the ones queuing up for the tour bus), we agree, then us, then the Europeans. We're in the middle: not as softly spoken as the Europeans, to be sure, not as intellectual – for the Europeans are intellectual, perpetually intellectual, all of them, but not as loudly spoken as the Americans, not as forward, not as bright, for the Americans are bright, we're agreed.
What does it mean to be British?, we muse. We're neither of the new world or of the old world, neither one or the other. We lack confidence; we lack tradition. We can neither make a new world nor live altogether in an old one. This country … Rats running over rats, we agree. Cynicism and opportunism, we agree. And where are we in all this? At the bottom, we agree. At the very bottom, and full of sourness and resentment.
Didn't W. have the chance to live in Strasbourg? Couldn't he have stayed on there, long past the 6 months he actually spent there? It was his Britishness that prevented it, W. says. He was too British! The boulevards were too quiet for him. The streets too civilised … Above all, it was the humour.
They don't hate themselves, he says of the Europeans. They don't despise themselves, not like us. We despise ourselves, and that's our humour. It'll come to nothing: that's what our humour says. Don't even begin.
The Americans don't hate themselves, of course. Neither do they love themselves, not Americans. They're full of newness, the salt is in their hair, their deck shoes on, and they're facing the future with their caps worn backwards. If only we could be as young as them, as innocent, we say over our morning beers.
Here we are, on the way to oblivion, and there they are, all fresh and new. Here we are, drinking steadily, drinking to reach the other side of the day, and there they are, free of alcohol, free of anything but their freedom, the sun dazzling us from their white teeth.
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