I'm seriously trying to see things from your point of view and can understand if you don't quite get our point of view. I mean, you can walk around most New World towns, villages, cities and countryside and never stumble on anything from your past older than a few hundred years. Compare that with this country (not to mention the rest of Europe) and there's no escape from places thousands of years old - ancient history is everywhere! Just to give you and example; I was waiting for my brother a couple of Saturdays back at Alton Priors village in Wiltshire - it was a really hot day so I went into the church to wait for him there. Alton Priors church is a tiny little place at the end of a leafy lane that can maybe seat a couple of dozen people at most. How old do you think it is? Well, it's Anglo-Saxon, and so about a thousand years old. Think about that for a moment.
My brother finally showed up looking grim and glum because England had just been kicked out of the World Cup. We drove out of Alton Priors past an Iron Age fort a couple of thousand years old; past West Kennet Long Barrow, five and a half thousand years old; Silbury, four and a half thousand years old, and into Avebury about 4000 years old. I'm sure you're not one of them but there are tourists from the New World(s) who see all this as rather quaint - well it ain't quaint it's Britain, and what you see is the result of thousands of years of people living, dreaming and building here. And if some of us get worked up about tossers climbing on stones, up Silbury, digging gravel pits or just the plain stupidity of the quangos here who can't seem to get anything right for places like Stonehenge and Silbury let alone smaller sites it's because we really do care for, and feel connected to, our past.
Hope that makes some sense. Whine over. Off to the Chelmsford Beer Festival to sample a few of more than 300 real ales (and that's something else the New Worlds need to work on - real ale ;-)
