Museum Hours

"Members of the subculture typically do not self-identify as hipsters, and the word hipster is often used as a pejorative to describe someone who is pretentious, overly trendy, and effete, or a stereotypical term, that has been reclaimed and redefined by some as a term of pride and group identity." The French have the great abbreviation BoBo for 'bourgeois bohemians'; people who oh so carefully cultivate the look of the bohemian whilst having a ton of cash and a well appointed pad in the Septieme. Clearly Paris is a particularly great place for this type of lifestyle but London isn't far behind and the spread of the hipster is a well observed phenomenon extending even to sleepy Highbury.  The cafe down the road is now hipster central in N5; hoardes of them hanging out inside or out, crowding the pavements and generally flaunting their hipsterdom.  I admit to finding this both amusing and annoying but it's a phenomenon which says a lot about what

No, not something from an apocalyptic drama in which the final girl/boy/other has to find the final remaining beacon of life as we knew it.  Far worse.  Proverbially, the last refuge of the scoundrel is patriotism. Except that I think the proverb is wrong. The real last refuge is nationalism;  a truly pernicious and harmful doctrine used as a cover all justification for all actions and ideas ('my country, right or wrong').   So what's the difference? It's been probed away at for decades; one of the most famous expositions being  Orwell's   The Lion and The Unicorn. For me the basic distinction is relatively clear but of fundamental importance for the current depressing set of exchanges around the place of the UK in the world and in particular in Europe.  Patriotism is fundamentally about why I like living here including the long standing mongrel nature of the country, far removed from all of the nativist nonsense and white identity