What's So Great About Britain Then?

Britain was a rainy, windswept island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of continental Europe but today in 1707 the Scots joined up with Wales and England and we became known as Great Britain but still remained a rainy, windswept island in the North Atlantic.
Before any Scots make jokes about how it was them who made us Great, it referred to the increased size of Britain rather than how magnificent it was now we had bagpipes and haggis in the mix but over time the 'Great' in our name has become more of the how distinguished and illustrious us Brits are rather than the additional 30,078 square miles tagged onto the top end of England but other nations may wonder just what is so Great about us Brits, well let me explain.

The seaside. All countries that have a coastline have a seaside and most have piers but it was us Brits who came up with the idea of the Pleasure pier, some of which were built while Napoleon was still stomping around Europe and Beethoven was just finishing his 6th Symphony and was starting work on his 7th.

Sport. We gave the World football, rugby, cricket, field hockey, squash, tennis, badminton, darts, snooker, golf, rowing, boxing, curling, horse racing and something called Bandy whatever the hell that is. Sure the rest of the World are now better than us at all of them without us Brits, they wouldn't have the sports to be better than us at.

Comedy. If there is one thing us Brits excel at, it's having a strange sense of humour and the sarcastic, self-deprecating sense of humour can be an acquired taste i agree but we laugh at things which are funny, unfunny, tragic or just downright stupid which is why we have shows such as Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses, The Young Ones, Allo' Allo', Monty Python and Father Ted to mock pretty much everything from religion to War to Interstellar Space.

The BBC. The oldest national broadcasting organisation in the world and easily the best thing you could spend 46p a day on for no annoying ad breaks.  

Music. Yes we have not only come up with bands such as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Sex Pistols, Muse, Black Sabbath and ELO but we do have a knack of coming up with some amazing guitar players also so pluck your g-string proudly Slash, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, Ritchie Blackmore, Mark Knopfler, Matt Bellamy, Johnny Marr and Tony Iommi to name a few.  

Chocolate. I don't know what everyone else does to their chocolate but wow you are bad at it.  

Inventions. We can turn on the light bulb in the living room and watch the television while drinking some cool beer from the refrigerator or go on a computer on the World Wide Web to watch trains or discover the theory of evolution or Gravity and explain it on the telephone in the English language thanks to British inventors.

Punk. Without British bands like the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Clash, Buzzcocks and The Stranglers to inspire later generations, today's music would be...well...even worse.

Rhyming Slang. Only the Brits could take a perfectly normal thing, find something that rhymes with it and then shorten it even more so we could ask about your plates and not mean your kitchenware, your boat and not mean the ones with oars, your Gregory and not mean your relative and mention Bristol's and Hampton's and not mean in any geographical way whatsover.

So Britain has many faults, the food, our politicians, the right wing numpties and our not so pleasant history of slavery and empire but there are a few things we can point at and say, yeah, maybe we are not so bad after all .