Caitlin Moran - ’there's England, right there. Patois, Winehouse, custard; golden owls, brews and gurdwaras, and Betjeman keeping watch over the whole thing'

I sometimes wonder who I like best, out of Hyde, Lewis and Moran

This is Caitlin Moran in Saturday’s Times. You miss the context about brews and golden owls, but I didn’t feel I could post the whole article

This is still a fine, fine country. These 24 hours of travelling across it are like collecting unexpected joy. Heading back to London, at Wakefield station - Wakefield! the sexy future has arrived: the departures board is a full-colour screen with a BSL interpreter in the corner, casually signing “Doncaster” and “12.42”. The poisonous chimneys of the industrial north have been replaced by wind turbines and solar farms. The tribes we superseded would be astonished by how clever we became. How the smogs and the soot seem as ancient as Permian rock now.

Back at King’s Cross, and a teenage girl sings Back to Black with a Jamaican twang, at the piano, next to M&S - and there’s England, right there. Patois, Winehouse, custard; golden owls, brews and gurdwaras, and Betjeman keeping watch over the whole thing. JD Vance would be bewildered by these things. Or, crucially, blind to them.

He does not know what these things are when he sees them. How this is England.

England is still here. Of course it is.■