Britain and the undiscovered country

On memory, mourning, and the stories we tell ourselves

I get up from my desk, make a coffee, and pause for a moment. I’ve just finished reading a Times article about Britain — another bleak dispatch from the country I still think of as home, though I haven’t lived there in years.

As I sit back down and start drafting a pointed comment, I find myself wondering: am I still trying to understand what’s happening to Britain, or have I just become another voice in the chorus of decline?

I left the UK in my early 20s. I’ve spent more of my adult life abroad than in the country of my birth. But somehow, I never quite let go of it. I follow British politics more closely than many who still live there. It’s the backdrop to my thinking, the reference point for my worries, the place I still argue with in my head — as only someone who loves a place ever really does.

I sometimes write about the country here on Substack, lamenting some fresh absurdity ushered in by the managerial class. Look at us, I say — a nation that gave the world the Industrial Revolution, yet can’t build a railway without it dissolving into farce. Politicians so captured by fashionable causes elsewhere, they fail to confront the far uglier truths emerging in their own towns.

But lately I’ve begun to ask who this commentary is really for. The concerns are real, the facts often indisputable. But always wary of confirmation bias in others, I’ve started to wonder if I’ve fallen prey to it myself; if the version of Britain I see online — chaotic, unserious, unravelling — is less a reflection of the country, and more a projection of what I’ve come to fear about it.

Matt Goodwin’s viral lament doesn’t help. It’s one of the most compelling doom dispatches in recent memory. A first-person fugue of urban disillusionment, it follows one man’s journey through the capital via delayed trains, overpriced beer, ambient hostility, and the slow detachment of a city from the nation it once represented.

Then came David Aaronovitch’s parody — arch, amused, and sharply observed. It reimagined Goodwin as a nostalgic crank, muttering about Pret A Manger and Bulgarian street cleaners while failing to notice the vibrant, modern city around him. The piece was clever, and often very funny. But for all its wit, it never really engaged with the underlying anxieties — the sense of fragmentation, of something quietly unravelling — that give Goodwin’s piece its emotional charge. And in that way, it felt like a familiar reflex: the urge to mock rather than reckon, to reduce discomfort to a punchline rather than take it seriously.

And yet, in his roundabout way, Aaronovitch lands a point. Because the Goodwin-style critique can, at times, collapse into caricature. When every delay, every accent, every grievance is framed as further proof of national decay, you begin to wonder whether he’s describing reality or dramatising it. When every anecdote becomes narrative, every irritation a symbol of civilisational loss, the line between observation and fatalism starts to blur.

That, I think, is the deeper problem. It’s not just that Britain is struggling. It’s that we’ve built a cottage industry around confirming it. Twitter threads and op-eds, all orbiting the same refrain: the institutions are broken, the cities are fracturing, the kids are lost.

I don’t doubt the truth of these claims. But repeat them often enough, and it becomes self-fulfilling — not because it’s false, but because it leaves no room to act. If decline is inevitable, what’s left but commentary? If everything’s already lost, what’s the point of rebuilding?

Which brings me back to my desk, a thousand miles away, scrolling through another article about Britain’s decline.

My first son was fascinated by Britain, though he wasn’t born there. He carried the passport with an almost comic sense of pride, like a golden ticket. When we last arranged a visit, he’d prepared a list of all the things he wanted to see and do — camping in the countryside, a boat ride on the Thames, a visit to the Shard. That trip never happened. The country remained, for him, not quite real — imagined more than known.

As for my remaining son, I suspect he may one day make Britain his home. I want the country to recover for him, not just materially, but spiritually. To rediscover a sense of seriousness, shared values, and civic pride — all the things that still make it, even now, an island of quiet decency and kindness in a troubled world. The good is still there. It just doesn’t always surface through the noise.

Hamlet called death the undiscovered country, the place from which no traveller returns. And perhaps that’s what this feels like, in a quieter way. Not the death of a loved one, this time, but the slow fading of a country I once thought I knew. Still recognisable in outline, but different in substance. Harder to reach, but not yet lost from view.

Two years ago, I suffered the kind of loss that rearranges the world. Since then, I’ve found myself mourning other things, too. Maybe that’s what this is: a passing phase, a kind of displaced grief. The fear I’m losing grip on something I love — and the more I try to hold on, the more it slips away.