Will Self's view of Englishness - revised in 2014

How has England changed since 1994?

Twenty years ago Will Self wrote a long essay about English culture: how has the nation changed since then? And do the old cherished ideas of Englishness bear any resemblance to reality?
• Read Will Self's original 1994 article

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• • Will Self
  • The Guardian, Friday 17 January 2014 13.30 GMT
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Fish and chips … an inspired example of English praxis: Belgian fried potato mixed with Ashkenazi fried fish. Photograph: Martin Parr / Magnum

Nearly 20 years ago I wrote an essay for the Guardian on English culture– and by extension, Englishness. I entitled it "The Valley of the Corn Dollies". Returning to it and the consciousness it exhibits I am struck by the many obvious continuities – the sense I have of Englishness enduring – but also by the transformations that have taken place in England, and by extension within English identity, over the last two decades, and that were quite unforeseen by me. Not that in 1994 I was in the business of writing futurology, still, any attempt to fix a culture in time must pay due heed to the particular nature of its fluxions. This lack of foresight is also matched by the essay's comparable lack of hindsight; I don't mean by this that it displays no concern with where the ideas and practices associated with Englishness may have come from, only that as its author I seem to have had little precise sense of their evolutionary timescale. This is understandable, I suppose; the concerns of a 32-year-old are, one hopes, different from those of a quinquagenarian. I say "one hopes", although the very adoption of the impersonal first person and the continuous present relocates the aspiration to a nebulous cultural realm, not this England at the beginning of this particular year: the 2014th of the Common Era.

Will Self's view of English Culture (1994)

Will Self: The Valley of the Corn Dollies

First published in the Guardian 20 years ago, Will Self's essay argued that, far from being in decline, English culture was changing for the better. This is the form in which it appeared in August 1994

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• • Will Self
  • The Guardian, Friday 17 January 2014 13.30 GMT

A still from Derek Jarman's The Last of England.

We were standing on the beach at Sizewell in Suffolk – my dad and I. To our right the Kubla Khan dome of the fast-breeder reactor hall gleamed in the wan sunlight. Daddy was expounding. Foolishly I had provided him with an opportunity - I'd admitted that I was writing an article on the state of English culture.

'Mmm . . . English culture. Well . . .' he paused, rocking on his heels, a great dolmen of a man. 'In about 1981 I had to give a lecture at the embassy in Tokyo on the subject of English culture.'

'Oh really.' I was underwhelmed. 'And what did you have to say about it?'

'Funny thing is I can't remember . . . Shall we go and get a pint?'

Not exactly an epiphanic moment but the truth is that the mention of the words 'English culture' prompts more bathetic lines, from more disparate individuals, than anything else I have ever hit on. At times I began to feel that the term 'English culture' might conceivably be an oxymoron, or worse, as flimsy a journalistic pretext as Hunter S Thompson's search for 'the American Dream' in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.