Cirque du Agincourt

Recently my wife Nicky informed me that she finds frustrating the Canadian habit of avoiding direct answers.  I’d never given it much thought, nor had I ever considered England, her home, to be a place full of assertive, Type-A personalities shooting from the hip.  As a nation aren’t they collectively known for being ineffective and evasive?  I don’t recall any scenes in “Notting Hill” where Hugh Grant stops stammering, bangs his fist down on a table and says “Dammit Julia, I am sick of being charmingly befuddled.  Get your kit off and bend over that sofa.”  Certainly in times past the British could be counted on to speak their mind; in his 1835 “Minute on Education”, Thomas Macauley expounded “[a] single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.  This was about the time that the empire had decided to “help” the Punjab by taking it over.  But in modern Britain?  Aside from Gordon Ramsay, who can be written off as an anomaly, and Simon Cowell, who is most certainly Satan, there was no evidence of this directness.  Then I recalled His Hughness’ 1995 arrest for the solicitation of a Los Angeles prostitute and I realized it had been there all the time!  Instead of making himself miserable by submerging his manly desires, getting a divorce or forcing his lovely wife Elizabeth Hurley to engage in lewd and no doubt un-Christian sexual acts, he found himself a hooker.  Rather than waffle about what to do, or worse, sulk, Hugh took the initiative and made sure that the sun wasn’t the last thing to go down on the British Empire.  That’s shooting from the hip – rule Britannia.