A big football tournament is a great time for thinking deep thoughts. Who are we? What does it mean today to be English? Am I also British? European? I’m pretty sure I’m not Welsh and I’m faintly sad that Gareth Bale is.
We all want to know where our identity lies and so we like to categorise each other. It makes us feel secure. If I can say something definite about you, it helps me to work out who and what I am. Sometimes, that’s easy. Or at least we think it is: Chris Evans, DJ. Toby Jones, Actor. Tom Odell, singer-songwriter. Nadiya Hussein, baker (and idol to my daughter Miriam, who says hi, by the way)
But when we come to look at ourselves the picture gets muddier, because we think, ‘well, my life is richer and more complex than a single label can ever suggest’. I’m a Teaching Curator, but does that make me a teacher or a curator? Or a university lecturer? Or am I mostly a Dad? Or a Christian? Or a Dulwich Hamlet fan?
And once we start to see how complicated we are, everyone else looks less straightforward too.
But a big football tournament is also a great time for simplifying things. We are English or Welsh, Irish or Northern Irish, German, Italian or Albanian. That’s it. And we paint our faces, wave the flag, wear the shirt.
This can be good. National identities bind us, reflecting our communities and our histories. Alternatively, having a profession or a faith can locate us safely in a shifting world.
But I reckon that it spells trouble when we invest too heavily in those things and somehow imagine that any one of them can represent everything we are or, worse, everything someone else is.
Jo Cox’s life was invested in the opposite. At Save the Children, at Oxfam and as an MP, she worked believing in the complexity of identity – you can be a Yorkshirewoman and a Gujurati. She held to the infinite potential of every individual, and our collective responsibility to enable them to achieve it.
St Paul wrote that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female. In other words, God doesn’t care about our nationality or religious affiliation, our economic or political status. He doesn’t care about our gender or orientation. He cares about us, whatever and whoever we are. He loves us in all our rich, complicated, indecipherable individuality.
So I believe that when we feel the urge to box someone in to a particular identity, it’s worth remembering that none of it matters. Nation, class, party, religion, sexuality. None of it. What matters is that we are who we are.
But I still wish Gareth Bale was English.
Another Friday, with the studio even fuller than usual: Toby Jones, Nadia Hussein, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, aka the cast of the Ghostbusters remake.
When I was a boy, I was in a tv series with Toby Jones’s dad, Freddie Jones. He was very kind to me.
After the show, Nadia Hussein tweeted my daughter Miriam, which made her immensely happy. That was kind too.