ohohoh! i saw this passage just now in fitzgerald, which i had read some years ago, quoted by a.s. byatt in the preface to a volume of english short stories, as a definition of englishness, though i hadn't known then where it came from.




eddie (this is edmund knox they're talking about) liked rugby well enough and accepted its routine, though he particularly enjoyed the moments when it was interrupted. one midday a boy threw a squash ball which exactly struck the hands of the great clock that set the time for the whole school, and stopped it. masters and boys, drawing their watches out of their pockets as they hurried across the yard, to compare the false with the true, were thrown into utter confusion. it turned out that the boy, who confessed at once, had been practising the shot for two years. the bodger called this "un-english." eddie did not agree. the patient, self-contained, self-imposed pursuit of an entirely personal solution seemed to him most characteristically english.

-- penelope fitzgerald, the knox brothers