Come Dine with Me… unless you’re British
London is a city that has erected grandiose buildings, crystal skyscrapers and installed bright lights to convince itself it has successfully emancipated itself from the rest of the country. The monuments, the high-brow cultural centres, and the luxury stores have given the tools for Albion folk to appropriate cultural epithets that are foreign to them. The richness of modern British culture is exemplified by the ease with which foreign influences are embedded within society. We have proclaimed tea as being the bedrock of our culture as if the leaves grew in the highlands of our Isles rather than in the hot climates of the faraway cultures we brutally colonised. A survey of British people’s choice for national dish will unashamedly (and proudly) point to a variety of curries, as if the chillies, paneer and coconut milk were products driven from the soil and cattle of Somerset farms, rather than ransacked from the heat of south Asian territories. Jungle and Garage music are cited as the epitome of UK music; the visual aesthetics that accompany the genres will focus on the urban centres of the country’s cities, as if the rhythms and cadence of the music are a representation of wet autumns and gloomy winters and not a bi-product of the caribbean dichotomy of going through hell in paradise-like settings. Despite the inherent tensions, UK culture is rich, vivid, and the sole reason the country hasn’t…