It has been a long time since I posted the farewell to Malaysia blog. It has taken ten weeks back in Britain to be settled in sufficiently to post another blog. The house we hoped would be ready by November is still a building site and although every day a little something is done, there is still a lot to do. For instance, build a kitchen, a bathroom, rid the place of dangling electrics, holes in walls, and the boxes of our worldly goods that are currently piled up for the builders to clamber upon.

At present we are camped out in the attic with a microwave and a kettle. Luckily we have an inflatable bed. The bed we bought was delivered with half of it missing. In fact, a surprising number of components of things are missing. You can buy a desk, but only the top is delivered, the legs are out of stock. You can buy bathroom fittings so long as you don’t want a basin. They too are out of stock. And you can buy a car, but it won’t be delivered until next year. In the UK, the stocks of everything seem to be low to none existent. There was even a panic over petrol shortages for a couple of weeks. And you would imagine that come winter they pile bottles of cough medicine high, but nope, that too was out of stock.

Some blame everything on Brexit and some blame everything on Covid! And some blame everything on Boris Johnson, our rather strange Prime Minister. He seems to have a habit of making jokes referencing Latin quotations, an inability to comb his hair and innumerable children via a variety of what must be short-sighted women. He has been called the British Trump, though unlike the Blessed Donald, few would actually call him stupid or ignorant. He is a rather fine writer of amusing newspaper columns, and a great spinner of tall tails and optimistic if batty speeches: a man who can be rather persuasive, especially if you are a young woman with daddy issues and easily impressed by his impressions of Peppa Pig’s motor car. But he is a man of vision rather than practical governance, and his vision, some might say owes a lot to Boys Own Adventure stories and very little to do with anything approaching the planet most of us live on. Maybe that’s why he got the job? He’s Santa Claus, a nice fantasy that we all want to believe in, but in the end we know it ain’t Santa but some grumpy old geezer in a fat suit working to pocket as much corporate entity cash as possible, not to mention help his elves get their hands in the till as well.

The United Kingdom in short, is going through a weird period. And the first thing that strikes us, after ten weeks here, is that Malaysia’s idiocracy of a government is no better or worse than the UK’s. In fact, one begins to think that Malaysia might actually be doing things a bit better. Their politicians certainly manage to steal more in broad daylight than the British politicians. The scandalous purchase of expensive curtains for Boris’s apartment in No.10 Downing Street and a rather boozy Christmas party during last year’s dismal covid lockdown, seem rather insipid in comparison to a few billion dollars of public funds turning up in the private bank accounts of Najib Razak and the mysterious deaths of people investigating such occurrences. And then there’s the disposing of a body of an inconvenient mistress via hand-grenades, which seems a tad more scandalous than Boris’s many children, exes, and current baby momma. Boris is a strangely British phenomena, an endearing blundering scoundrel, the sort of man the British Empire was founded upon. Thus the attitudes of many of Britain’s ex-colonies becomes all the more understandable. To paraphrase a character in the film, “Trainspotting”, “The English are wankers. We, on the other hand were colonized by wankers! Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonized by. We were ruled by effete assholes. It’s a shite state of affairs to be in.”

Before Malaysia, I lived in Hong Kong for twenty-four years and am now enviously looking upon the Instagrams of my Hong Kong friends still living the glamorous cocktail party life that I enjoyed. At least, I did before I realised I was thirty years older than everyone else in the room. That’s when I began to feel less like George Clooney, silver fox, and more like Rolf Harris, dodgy old geezer with a wobble board. Hong Kong requires perpetual youth and when either one’s actual age, or the government there stamp it out, the place begins to lose its interest. Hong Kong has now descended into a dismal dictatorship where yelling “Hong Kong Add Oil!” during a football match can get you eight years in jail. Such slogans are considered calls for independence and that is treason! So the adventurous are now leaving Hong Kong to those resigned to their situation and heading to the UK among other western democracies. They are coming to a country that has a government apologising for its inadequacies and failings regarding the cladding of public housing with dangerous inflammable material that caused hundreds of deaths. An apology deemed inadequate, though short of a public flogging of cheapskate council officials, nothing can stave off the criticism. The present Hong Kong government, after an inquiry into a disastrous ferry collision killing thirty-nine people, announced they would not publish the findings citing privacy issues, in other words, to hell with you all, we know best and the less you know the better.

Britain as you can see still does Freedom better than anywhere else. Or at least better than China! I can declare myself the Sultan of Independent Grayzonia, and nobody would bat an eyelid, so long as I put my household waste into the correct coloured plastic bags for recycling. This is Englishness! But even for me it is taking a bit of time to get used to, assuming I will ever want to, but the joys of being free to say and think whatever one wants out loud in public without getting arrested are not to be underestimated.

That said, there does seem to be some totalitarian double-thinkery creeping through the UK, especially if you read the kind of newspapers that love to seize upon every absurdity of the “Woke Left” and their “Cancel Culture”. The latest being the banning of the use of the word “Mother” as sexist. Mother and child are now Caregiver and Child. And said child can be breast fed by a person of whatever gender they care to identify as. The cervix and the penis are no longer determinants of “Sexual Identity” and woe betides anyone who suggests otherwise. What started off as a movement for equal rights for women has morphed into something that can have the most radical feminist university lecturer sacked for creating an “unsafe” atmosphere for transgender students by suggesting that the “wimmin” need a safe place where they can be sure that people who merely claim to “identify” as women do not creep in for nefarious reasons.

The obsession with these issues appears to have destroyed the chances of the Labour party ever to replace Boris and his till dipping cronies. Still nobody has explained how a less than usable app for track and tracing covid victims cost billions. But Boris, it has to be noted, operates in the flirt zone all the time and thus gains considerable secret kudos among the many who in public condemn him. How else does he get away with it? We know he’s shite, but damn, he’s Prime Minister and living the dream! What does that say about all the other politicians? The Britain one finds in those old British films of the mid-twentieth century was all about muddling through in the face of impending revolutionary change and it is hard not to notice that the place has not changed all that much and is always on the brink but never over the edge, despite said revolutionary change. The old aristocracies get wiped out, but somehow pop up in some oddly transfigured way.

I went to the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond the other day. I used to go Forty-six years ago when it was no more than a tiny room above the Orange Tree Pub, but has now moved across the road into a larger venue. I mention this because a Terrence Rattigan play was playing, a very entertaining one at that, and its final lines had a rather conceited French captain conceding defeat in his efforts to seduce the fiancé of the less than passionate English hero (ish) of the piece. He exclaimed with horror that somehow the British had “muddled” through again! The hero, though merely an ordinary seaman in the British navy, was actually a Lord with dilapidated loss making estates, supported by substantial rental property holdings in London.

As newspaper reviews of 2021 said, this farce of 1943 seemed strangely fresh. And I suspect that the 1943 audience was probably a lot more tuned into the camp potential of a sailor who picks up drunken American lieutenants and shares a bed with them than we give them credit for. Not to mention the third act bedroom threesome of rivals for the hand of the innocent marriageable gal, as opposed to the sexually rampant unmarriageable gold digger. In 2021 of course, there is no nudging and winking. Certain things have changed. The implications of “nancified” Lords, as one character was described, somehow passes by without so much as a schoolboy snigger nowadays. And as for the casting of a black American, one suspects that 1943’s audience might not have stood for it, or perhaps they would? The UK’s culture wars have always been more nuanced than is customarily assumed. British townsfolk were disgusted by the segregation of African American servicemen stationed in their area and refused to bar them from dance venues and pubs when the US army demanded that they do so. We talk about diversity whereas then they spoke about decency!

The upside of contemporary Britain that strikes a person who has lived as a white minority for thirty years in countries that have no qualms about legal and constitutional discrimination against white men, is that Britain has embraced its Asian and African components, though, granted, somewhat haphazardly. The fondness of the Brits for Chicken Tikka Masala may be overstated but it has been taken as a symbol of cultural absorption. There is a fair amount of genetic absorption going on too. Every family straddles several racial and cultural clusters, even though some may have explained the surprising complexion of their children as side effects from fake tanning lotions while pregnant, as a joke made by a Bafta award winning multi-racial comedy team from Brentford has it. Many Asian cultures would consider this “contamination”, but the English have always enjoyed adopting foreign words, foreign fashions, and foreign ideas and have a love of the exotic and exquisite, as a quick visit to George IVth’s Brighton Pavilion or Clive of India’s Powys Castle would attest, and of course they love both the outrage and turning it all into a Donald McGill saucy seaside postcard of the 1940’s and 50’s. In short, the UK does not really change that much, or that is, it is always changing, but somehow remaining the same. It is now ruled with a barmy mix of medieval mystery and, as inventors of the World Wide Web, instead of Dickensian bureaucracy and moral superiority over everyone not British, one has substituted digital inflexibility and moral superiority over each other! No official phone call can be made without hours of listening to options and announcements before you can ever get to anyone you can talk to and then of course something is bound to offend you, especially if the government has anything to do with it. Outrage is now so cool.

The gadget obsessed, opinionated, and tattooed British of today would probably still be recognisable to the Romans, whose remains are with the use of modern technology being rediscovered in surprisingly large quantities. Within an inch of the plough, large impressive mosaics left over from Roman villas are turning up all over the place. Which suggests that the British Isles were always full of rather creatively energetic chaps.

The name Britain is derived from a celtic word for tattoos and it seems the ancient British skills in tattooing transferred itself to mosaic making for their Roman overlords and that has probably morphed into a love of pixels, puzzles and just mixing it all up to see what happens. The subsequent anglo-saxons and Vikings were, as it has been discovered from DNA analyses, less invader, and more just mucked in, shacked up with the locals and then bashed each other about until the Normans knocked everyone’s heads together, invented the British class system, and began building in stone again. It would seem from then on the Norman toffs and Saxon plebs, have never really stopped arguing or competing with each other. Europeans always marvelled at the short life span of British Royalty and how difficult it was to rule a fractious and notoriously drunken population. When the printing press was thrown into this stew the British satirist knew no boundaries. Add the Internet and everyone becomes a satirist, just not necessarily very good ones. James Gilray and William Hogarth still have the present day variants beat for sheer exuberant mockery of British politics and society. One can see for oneself at the current Tate Britain exhibition of Hogarth’s work, complete with fanciful woke commentaries that seem to forbid you from enjoying the work for its depiction of Black slave boys, then fashionable among the Sugar Barons of the period, and other afro-Caribbean characters that were Londoners in the 18th Century. Which rather misses the point of Satire, which is to expose society to criticism! This was the UK gearing up to take on vested interest around the world and abolish slavery not a celebration of drunken debauchery and expoitation. There were no safe zones in this world. Liberty, Fraternity and Egalite’ were about to be unleashed upon the world and nobody had to indulge in such toxic attitudes such as positivity.

The fact that there are more races living in London and more languages spoken than in any other place on the planet does suggest that George Bernard Shaw’s assessment of London as the Capital of the World, still holds. And welcoming, or not, London has been constantly open to refugees from whatever tyranny or fantasy tyranny the world has produced. Where other cultures and nations seem to collapse in the face of an influx of outsiders or powerful rising states, one cannot help feel that the increasing power of Britain’s Asian immigrants will somehow drag England with them to whatever destination they have. After all, England has never been that fond of being European. Come to think of it, once William the Conqueror had conquered, several boatloads of Anglo-Saxons left and went to fight for the Byzantine emperor and settled on the Black Sea coast. A love of the foreign and exotic, and a habit of bringing it all back, seems to have been with the British forever. And as one British Indian commentator, Sanjay Patel, writes “we’re here because you were there.” And a look at the component of the present government and the strong possibility of a Prime Minister from an Asian background, indicates the manner in which the UK just surfs ahead of whatever cultural or immigrant wave that pulses through the ether, or at least bounces over the English Channel in rubber boats braving the icy cold murky waters.

So here I am after having been there for thirty years, not so much alienated, but seeing the place from a different perspective than I left it with, and itching to explore and understand, for like Sathnam Sanghera who wrote Empireland, cringing at the casual stereotyping of him despite being born and bred in Wolverhampton, I cringed at the assumption that after twenty years in Hong Kong, I was just some fly by night gweilo with no appreciation of things Chinese. For that matter my six years in Malaysia, a land of three distinct cultures that appear to be pulling away from each other in the face of a current fad for Islamic exclusivity, has made me less critical of the UK which bravely airs all such festering wounds openly, and when I walked down Oxford Street and saw the Christmas lights coming on, I could hear and see a man dressed in traditional muslim clothes, loudspeaker in hand, belting out the evening prayer. And not far up the road a man of sub-Saharan ancestry yelling out how Jesus was among us. Meanwhile the rest shopped, admired the lights, and the bonhomie of Christmas time, ignoring any religious connotations, believing religion to be the source of evil in the world, but at the same time, a time honoured tradition. And be damned anyone who ventures to replace Merry Christmas with Happy Holidays. But, if you want to be really British, this is Yule Time, and the ancient gods the gaily-decorated Pine Tree harkens back to, lurk behind the hard-nosed atheism of the Brit.

In short, I do not know whether it is good to be back, but back I am, and the mad world of the UK just demands a long hard look. There is an exhibition on the world of the Beano at Sommerset House called, The Art of Breaking the Rules. https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/beano-art-of-breaking-the-rules
I must go and see this. As one reviewer put it, it is “a primary coloured dreamland of the shared British Unconscious.” So it must be worth a look, mustn’t it?

And while I have your attention, why not head over to my YouTube Channel and check out our Round Trip of Malaysia and our documentaries on the founding of Johor Bahru and the History of the Johor Sultans. You can also hit the vlogs we've done covering our return to the UK. Please Like, Share, and Subscribe. We plan to embark upon a series of history tours of the UK, starting off with a history of the East Saxons, in Essex. We thought we would start there because, well, we have only just moved to Essex and thought we would explore the place, concentrating on its Saxon origins. After that, our plan is to do a complete round tour of the UK looking into local histories. So Subscribe so that you can be informed when new series and Vlogs emerge.

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