I sometimes wish England could boast some more impressive flora and fauna. Instead of our native foxes, who are often very dignified but very scraggy can we not make a swap deal with the Phillipines?

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/619479/2/istockphoto_619479_fox_in_english_country_garden.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/%3Fid%3D619479%26refnum%3D463590&h=285&w=380&sz=74&hl=en&start=1&sig2=VsM5gBy-mtROGpi2X4EHiQ&um=1&tbnid=yTNVkqiIufeMzM:&tbnh=92&tbnw=123&ei=nJYkR5yBKJKc0gS6qKHBDg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dthe%2Benglish%2Bfox%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rls%3DHPIB,HPIB:2007-12,HPIB:en%26sa%3DN

Come on, it could be like football stickers. Our fox for your tarsier monkey? Obviously it would go to a good home right in the sticker album (or captivity pen) of the British landcape. Imagine encountering this little critter on a nice brisk wildlife walk.

Clearly we don’t have the ecosystem for such a cutsey little creature to survive but just this once can’t we just accept the horrendous facts of global warming and hope that our climate comes in line with that of the tropics? If we imagine just for a second what other wonderful creatures we could provide a home for:

Doesn’t this guy remind you slightly of a certain British PM currently in power?

Wow! You are describing an experience I have regular pain with in leiu of my particular transmogrification over my teen years. First there was the provisional driving licence at the age of 16, with a army style crew cut, then there was the real drivers licence that came at a time I had particularly long hair but still used the same old picture. Then fast forward four years, I still have the same picture on the ID but a completely different facial outlook (more weighty, more pale). Even my friends find it difficult to accept that this picture on my driving licence is me and they have scrutinised my face many times over, ‘you were so ugly’ they echo, perhaps I still I am.

Never has anything dominated the lives of OAPS, housewives and students alike as much as that of television soap operas. Here in England our most popular soap operas receive a large proportion of viewing figures, transform a lot of disparate people into immobile coach potatoes and wreak havoc on our perceptions of society. The blur between reality and fiction is sometimes an all too confusing juxtaposition for certain innocents in our society. These are the people that spit and shout abuse at actors playing particular villains when they go about the everyday, the people that fail to realize that it’s all just an act.

Eastenders; set in the (obvious) East End of London along with Coronation Street (Manchester) and Emmerdale (Yorkshire) command the weekly prime time slots (between 7-9pm). Then there are those shows heavily indebted to the student armies; Hollyoaks (Cheshire) and Neighbours (Melbourne!). Neighbours aside, what these shows all give us is a particular sense of ‘Englishness’ wrapped up into thirty minute decompressions.  Coronation Street takes us on a swooping tour of suburban Manchester life, full of industrialized factories, cobbled streets, terraced houses and the occasional scene of domestic violence or two. Eastenders being its racier counterpart shows all the grime of inner city life in our nation’s capital in a rather bleak or nihilistic way. Nothing good or any prolonged period of happiness really seems to befall the characters in this show, the seeming continual onslaught of calamities and life crisis seem enough to drive even the most hardened individual to the pits of utter despair.

Then there is Emmerdale which for some strange reason has a massive Finnish following. Obviously rural small village life has seeming familiarity with the Scandinavian audience, but are they well prepared enough for some of the more crazy storylines this show has had to endure in the past: plane crashes, fires, suprising demolitions?  Studying the English soap opera is a fascinating way of analyzing the ways we choose to portray these parts of England; unfortunately for us reality falls away in the need to attract large viewing figures.