The superior English Mind (Jenny and her shotgun)

Brexiting. A series on being English. # 04

The superior English Mind (Jenny and her shotgun)

Nothing enrages conservative English people more than the idea that other people in the world may know better. The notion is scoffed at, laughed about, ridiculed. To an Englishman who considers himself well-educated (Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen and wanna-bees) that is simply inconceivable.
This conviction is ingrained so deeply in the English mind that 'a foreigner' is being considered an inferior being, just by the mere fact that he or she has not been born and raised in England proper. Anyone familiar with Agatha Christie's Poirot detective stories remembers how the English invariably put Poirot away as "a foreigner" and therefore, ipso facto, a person who, by his nature, is incapable of understanding what is going on.
During my studies in England, I stayed with some students in a country house run by an old lady who, in her younger and more vulnerable years, had been raised in India. There, she had learned to fend for herself and had become a good shot.