A Commonplace Book

In which we reflect on themes introduced in these pages.

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England’s flag of St. George adorned everything that could be worn, driven or decorated during this summer’s quadrennial World Cup tournament in Germany. All those supporting England, raise your hand![/caption]

The world is a place on which England is found.
G.K. Chesterton

You have to get your priorities right. Women are around all the time but World Cups come only every four years.
Peter Osgood

Nature hating a vacuum like the average English mind, it has hastened to fill it with football.
Theodore Dalrymple

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the highlands, wherever I go.
Robert Burns

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Thomas Carlyle

If you lead a country like Britain, a strong country, a country which has taken a lead in world affairs in good times and bad, a country that is always reliable, then you have to have a touch of iron about you.
Margaret Thatcher

In England, we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of 50 years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.
H.G. Wells

Why is the sky blue? Because if it was green, an Englishman wouldn’t know where to stop mowing.
Jack Harper

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Our borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.

……….

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hand and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!
Rudyard Kipling
“The Glory of the Garden”