Time to be nasty
Oct 27th, 2006 | By admin | Category: Church of Ireland CommentThere is an American comedy film called ‘National Lampoon’s European Vacation’; in it an American family travel around Europe, spreading a trail of chaos and destruction wherever they go. In each city they visit they cause some grave misfortune to an English tourist played by Eric Idle, and each time the Englishman apologises, how careless of him to be in the way of their car when they ran him over, and so on.
Idle’s character is a caricature of Englishness, but it makes the point that there was a tradition …