What's In A Name?

Thoughts on Fascists and Freedom Fries

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet."

~ Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Romeo and Juliet

Stratford Upon Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, photographed by me, 17 Feb 25

Allow me some Shakespeare please, I’m writing from his birthplace. Stratford-upon-Avon is a quintessentially English place, full of tea shops, statues of the Great Bard, quotes carved into plinths, wonky Elizabethan beams, and nostalgia for a time that exists in our imaginations.

I find it impossible to enter the English countryside with a single consciousness. Instead, I see a landscape of rolling fields, farms and hedgerows, parish churches and Tudor thatch, which I find peaceful and pretty.

But I also see the dramatic rendition of the role we need this landscape to play. A story which has no existence in objective fact. It’s nostalgia, a performance of memory, an imaginary England past - homogenous, mono-cultural, which I find violent and dishonest.

I’m finding polite ways of saying people imagine places like this as monuments to a bygone era in which everyone was white. Even here in the Cotswolds, tourists in search of ye olde England might slink off to the numerous curry houses, kebab shops and Chinese takeaways, some of which occupy those historic, wonky Tudor buildings. But they still believe real England was, and always will be, frozen in a time immemorial of perfect, pre-globalised, Anglo-Saxon whiteness.

I’m not writing about all the ways that is factual nonsense. Not today, anyway (but please watch my video on the brilliant book The Great White Bard by Farah Karim-Cooper which spells it out.

I’m quoting Shakespeare because I too am asking, what’s in a name?

Breezily changing a name

One of my oldest friends