I don't often think about myself or the people around me in terms of ‘national identity’; for the most part I tend to think that's a term which gets used by the popular press to make a fuss about nothing a lot more than it gets used to do anything particularly useful. But in spite of this, just occasionally, I do notice something utterly and stereotypically English about myself.

For example, a few months ago I was crossing a zebra crossing in the Tesco car park near work, and a car came zooming towards me with its engine revving, apparently not having seen me. I dived out of the way; the car belatedly realised its error and screeched to a stop. I turned round and gestured my displeasure at the driver, who wound down his window and apologised, and then we went our separate ways. It was only afterwards that I realised exactly how I'd gestured: even in the heat of a nearly life-threatening moment, my instinctive means of expressing my displeasure had been to frown a bit and point downwards at the zebra crossing. And the best bit is that it worked: from the driver's reaction it was clear that this almost comically understated gesture had been more than adequate to convey the full force of what in a more forthright culture might have been translated from the local language as ‘look where you're going, you reckless idiot!’. If that isn't stereotypical Englishness then I don't know what is.