Everyone hates me because I'm English

As a white, middle-class male from Somerset, I know what it is to be a victim of bigotry. For example, I once triggered a race riot in Barnstaple simply for looking at a Devonian 'in a funny way'. Happy Days. Even so, I was unprepared for the torrent of bile and invective my racial background would induce over here in America.

To be honest, half the people here don't believe my accent anyway, they think I'm actually from New Jersey and just putting it on to impress women or something. It's only when I make some terrible social gaffe, like admitting that I've never had Jerky, or that I consider the bus a viable form of transport, that my heritage is truly considered genuine. Those who do believe that my passport is kosher fall into two camps of contempt, falling into broadly political groups of left and right. The right hate my subversive, pinko Anglo-Saxon principles (stuff like tolerance, pragmatism, freedom of speech etc). The left hate me because I refuse to apologise for my part in the atrocities of Britain's colonial past, a period of imperialism that ended 30 years before I was born.

I am not used to dealing with being hated for being English. Back in the Warm Bosom of My Motherland, I am instead hated for being an arrogant, insensitive, pompous little arsehole, which at least is a bit less impersonal.

I have to say, there are times when I have some sympathy with the raging xenophobia. From my vantage point in the mountains, it seems that the whole of England is currently in celebration for beating a bunch of convicts and barmen at a game of cricket, a game so tedious that only a bearded butcher from Kent could possibly have a life so void as to be interested in it. Baseball is pretty dull, but at least it has the merit of not taking five days to play. As far as I can tell we didn't even win the game, it was just that the weather stopped play long enough so that the convicts didn't have time to beat us.