By contrast, my Irish provo nationalist uncle, Paddy O'Puddlecote, tends to sit in his braces and dirty wing collar shirt these days, supping warm Murphys and bemoaning the 'fecking English'. He's been a right bitter bastard since the 80s ended.
To explain, here is a map of Britain around about 1995.
Look at that. Proud, upstanding, full of life. Unbeatable.
Paddy O'Puddlecote blew up shopping centres; destroyed pubs in suburbia; bombed regiments and horses close to Buck House; raised merry hell in London on a regular basis. But the British people refused to buckle. We carried on as before, determined to make sure the bastards would never win. Our lives would not be compromised by a bunch of hideous psychopathic lunatics.
Our strength and resilience was respected throughout the world. Paddy hated that.
Here is the same country in 2010.
See what's missing? Yep. A spine.
The brave and colourful vigour and resistance has been replaced by an anaemic fearful cowardice, led by a cabal of uniformed dickheads and governed by the superlatively risk-averse.
Al-Dicka is ecstatic. All he has to do these days is fire a few ranty e-mails around, get some beardy lunatic to badly set fire to his shoes and the country goes into meltdown, gibbering in the corner like an extra from Carrie.
The result being that Mrs P & the girl go to the Natural History Museum on a Sunday with a picnic, and the forks they had packed for their pasta are confiscated.
Terrorists 1, Britain 0. And multiply that by a large factor for just today, then square and cube it for the other 362 days of the museum's operation, before escalating it to encompass every place to which the public are admitted. Nationwide.
And tourists - especially Germans today, apparently - laugh their socks off.
'Security' were very apologetic about it, being British and all, and the forks were logged as 'cutlery' on the slip which Mrs P was given to reclaim them on exiting. But Al-Dicka has succeeded in doing what Paddy O'P could only have dreamed of. Our enjoyment of life is now curtailed by the threat of something which will almost certainly never happen.
If Al-Dicka ever bothered to get off his prayer mat, he would probably be packing a fucking big bomb. I doubt very much whether he'd bother running around a museum screaming 'death to the infidel' while waving a kitchen fork.
Meanwhile at the Oval, Mr P and the boy watched an astoundingly inept Captain's performance after having our own lunch scrutinised at length on entry in case a bloke in shorts and his 9 year old kid had packed a glass bottle!
Seriously.
Now, I've been going to cricket for over 30 years and have never, I mean never, seen any crowd disturbance at all. Let alone when the ground was less than 10% full with dayglo-coated stewards and staff close to outnumbering spectators. Yet, as Glamorgan hit the winning runs, a 'response team' turned up to intently watch Welsh fans who were whooping from a far corner of the Peter May stand.
The terrorists have won, they have disrupted our lives and are pissing themselves. And hooligans have also won, as the innocent are treated with utmost suspicion. In fact, everyone wins except the law-abiding.
Still, mustn't grumble now our great nation has deemed it acceptable to take photos of our kids at sports day, eh?
