We set out to read, against our better judgement, an article in the Independent about the Scottish "writer" Andrew O'Hagan today. As a couple of us have met O'Hagan in Glasgow in recent years and found him to be a boring anti-English (but English obsessed) bigot and a bit of an all round twat we did not set out to read the article with any degree of enthusiasm.
Even more so as it appeared to be one of those mind blowingly waffly efforts, designed to be relished by a fortunate (?) few.
A certain amount of preliminary skimming ensued and it was during this that we happened upon:
I was reminded of this the other day when Dairy Crest confirmed their commitment to John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten, late of the Sex Pistols) as the public profile of English butter, even in the face of economic downturn.
Sometimes, locked in our padded cell at WENAP towers, we imagine that everybody must be aware of the struggle to put England and the English back on the map. But, it seems, that DJ Taylor is not even aware of the fact that Country Life Butter was being relaunched as Country Life BRITISH butter with Johnny Rotten as the "acceptable" face of British national pride.
Now, if Andrew O'Hagan is going to witter on about his perceptions of his English relatives when he was nine years old (mentally, he's now about fourteen) and DJ Taylor isn't even aware that the whole point of the John Lydon Country Life Butter ads was to help to expunge the foul taste of Englishness from that product and that Englishness is actually being wiped from the UK, then we think the article only really deserves a skim.
One great thing that has come from Tim Berner-Lee's wondrous 1989 invention the World Wide Web and its implementation in the early 1990s: there are now a lot more relevant and down to earth things to read than the academic verbal botty burps of the likes of O'Hagan and Taylor.
And ain't we glad?
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