A piece of grit

Some British people never, ever go 'abroad' to Europe. Or as my half-Belgian'/half-American/British citizen friend with a wife from Hull would say: "some British people never visit The Mainland". I wouldn't put it past him to say 'visiting The Mainland' just to be contentious. But then that is what I like about him. The funniest thing is the way no one says anything in response, mostly we nod politely. When you grow up on an island called Great Britain it doesn't immediately occur to you that he is visiting somewhere else. It takes a while to process it. Saying I'm "visiting The Mainland" really does put us into perspective though. When I 'visit The Mainland' the first thing I notice is that the weirdest thing about living in my homeland, on this tiny island is that it is so bloody small. The ostentatiously named 'Great' Britain is a tiny piece of grit. I don't understand how we all fit onto our little piece of grit, or even why we love it so much with its diabolical sandwich shops and hairdressers that impair our vision. Most people who don't go into mainland Europe probably don't go because they can't afford it. Perhaps other people never visit The Mainland because they know they won't want to come back. I don't blame them really. It is easier not to have seen it than to know what you are missing.
I have lived on this piece of grit for 36 years now. Well, how have I done that? The most overused sentence in my head since my return from The Mainland is 'you should be grateful for what you've got, you are a spoiled brat, if you didn't have Democracy and Healthcare and clean water and sanitation then you'd have something to moan about'. Unfortunately for all the truth of this I am still sulking like a child denied a new toy. On the Italian Border it seemed so idyllic that I found myself saying "they must have their problems'. I mean, it can't all be Focaccia baked in a wood oven with sea salt and rosemary can it darling? (I can't tell you how good that was)
When I got back The Guardian had a piece in it about some Roma Gypsy girls who had drowned on the Italian Amalfi Coast. Their bodies had been washed up, corpses covered in towels and then abandoned while a couple observed them curiously and continued to put on suncream and eat their picnic. A couple of weeks on The Amalfi Coast has been on my wish-list for years, but I feel a bit uneasy about it now. In France they have terrible problems with Racism apparently, you name it, anywhere in the world there is something. When we finally got home on that dreadful snail of a train from The Old Smoke there were reports about Russia invading Georgia, President Mugabe being President Mugabe and endless other horrors. For two weeks we had only occasionally caught sight of a headline or two on a newspaper or on TV and we discovered that we'd won the Olympic cycling while drinking peppermint cordial and eating sorbet by the sea. Unfortunately because we were busy pretending not to be British we failed to celebrate wildly. Subsequently this has really hurt because we had pipped the French to the post when the medal was meant to be theirs.
It is moments like this when we are on The Mainland and we suddenly feel patriotic and terribly, terribly English or suddenly get a glimpse of the world's ugliness even in places of exquisite beauty that I try to remember when it takes me four days to dry my washing because of the endless rain.