The picturesque town centre has a sense of grandeur to it, and you can feel that this was, once, an incredibly prosperous place. Real del Monte is a pretty, charming town. Further exploration found the building to be a slightly tatty five-a-side football pitch, literally the home of Mexican football, but currently hosting a casual Sunday morning kickabout. One of the first things that caught my eye was a small, tiled sign on the side of an otherwise unassuming building claiming that here marked the birthplace of football in Mexico, and calling it an English inheritance. We piled out of the car at the bottom of this lovely little town, stacked up on top of itself in the manner that so many of these Mexican mountain towns in Hidalgo are, and began trudging up the cobbled streets. Which is essentially a really long-winded, overly complicated and unnecessary intro into a trip I took last year to Real del Monte, a small ex-mining town in the mountains around Mexico City, where they are renowned across Mexico for their Cornish pasties.Īfter a long, hot drive, dodging the Mexico City Marathon runners as we escaped the city and twisting and turning our way through a set of pretty rugged mountain roads, we ended up in Real del Monte. And despite my revulsion of nationalism as a political force, being abroad does make me nostalgic for weird things from home that I miss, and bizarrely delighted when I encounter ‘English’ things in unexpected places. Partially, I’ll admit, because we kept conquering large portions of said world, subjugating the locals and forcing them to listen to the reverberations, but still. Britain as a whole is great (not Great), with a fantastically mongrel history that has produced a patchwork culture that reverberates around the world. England is an endlessly fascinating, bizarre and contradictory country. Defending London as the greatest city in the world is a hill I would die on. The briefest glance at history exposes it as a philosophy based on power structure, fear of ‘the other’, and lies about who we are, rather than anything good, useful or true. Nationalism is something I’ve always found baffling. Which does rather balls up my little rant about the inherent stupidity and nonsense that underpins nationalism. Closing borders, tracking citizens through technology, hacking phones…these measures, while draconian, are suddenly seen as positive, or at least unavoidable. It’s just that faced with a crisis of this magnitude, so many of the actions that nationalist governments would love to do in the normal course of things have become…acceptable, or even necessary. Welsh independence! You really know you’ve screwed the pooch when Wales decides it is better off untethered (or the pig, I guess *looks meaningfully at David Cameron’s suspiciously locked shepherd’s hut*…).īut this is all now something quaint, an old-fashioned concern about issues from a different time (although of course the repercussions remain just as serious, and nothing has changed when it comes to the fact that ultimately the most vulnerable people in society are going to suffer). The littlest of Little Englanders had taken a vice-like grip on the prevailing narrative about what it means to be British, and the backlash seemed to be a resurgence of Scottish nationalism, a resumption of soul-searching about the nature of Ireland, and even talk of Welsh independence. So my initial thoughts had centred around nationalism, and how it seemed to be taking hold across the world, and back at home in the UK. At a time when Brexit was pretty much the biggest thing on the radar of me and my immediate circle, and the new Tory government with a mandate to do all sorts of things that I am deeply uncomfortable with was the most concerning. I started writing this blog in a different time.
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