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Before starting my piece about the here's a short preamble.

You know, I've got a friend. A very decent person. Extremely nice character.

She lives in Woodford.

Once she was invited to the Royal Society of Physics by her friend, who was going to deliver an inaugural lecture.

The invitation promised a wonderful dinner (grilled foie gras, poached quince, honey-marinated moules and balsamic jelly, roasted Orkney scallops, and amaretti biscuits). It also announced the title of the lecture, which was something like: "Fluid-dynamically coupled solid propellant combustion instability".

My friend got there on time and without further ado, a chairman invited everyone to the hall for the lecture.

'Ladies and Gentlemen!' - the lecturer started very promisingly, but then went on to say something like: "The cool flame combustion of polypropylene at 350 degrees C leads to the formation of toxic compounds. Under the conditions described, the LD50 is close to 0.95 g...". The only words my friend understood were "the cool flame".

The next paragraph, though it comprised some familiar words, the meaning of it once again escaped the mind of my friend.

"Thus, local disruptions in combustion when cold gas is mixed in, occur in the presence of intense turbulence..."

She looked at the audience around her. Everyone was listening with a great interest.

So she forced herself to concentrate to the level of meditation.

"Results that are qualitatively similar to those obtained for soot formation experiments".

She nearly learned the whole phrase by heart, but it didn't make any sense.

For the next hour she was listening to words, which separately were familiar to her, but together were beyond her comprehension.

The lecture ended and they were escorted to the dinner hall. She looked at the menu and couldn't make any sense of these otherwise so familiar words: "Crushed Périgord truffles and parmesan broth, Baklava of king quail, rhubarb marmalade, frisée and pistachio dressing"...

I must admit that the language of cricket makes exactly the same sense to me as the language of combustion physics to my friend.

Why is cricket the most English of all English games?

This week for the first time in my life, I attended a cricket test match between England and India.

I must say that with some effort, by the end of the day I had started to understand what 'overs', 'runs' and 'innings' mean, and how the points were scored.

Moreover I had enough time to conclude that cricket is the utmost English game.

I'm going to prove it here - a cricket game may be boring on the surface, but is full of subtle excitements underneath.

The English are very good at inventing.

What's interesting though, is that most games invented by the English are usually mediated and involve some sort of tools: in cricket it's a bat and a ball.

There is also an element of distancing yourself from the subject.

It's difficult to imagine two Englishmen playing a "who blinks first" type of game, each staring blankly at each other.

Cricket is not a game of big emotions or exaltations, it's a patient and reserved game, which replaces the sheer violence of stoning and lashing with cultivated and civilised bowling and batting.

Even small things like protecting an insignificant and vulnerable wicket with your own body are full of a hidden meaning.

Etiquette and formality are other concepts that round up Englishness and they are fully present in cricket.

Cricket is highly regulated and formalised game.

The set up, as well as the rules are quite complicated and are not easily grasped by an outsider.

There must be a certain devotion to grasp not even the art of bowling or batting, but the rules of that trade.

Deciding when you grant the team one run, when four runs, when - six - there's a certain graduation like in the honours list: today you are appointed a Knight, but you are just an ostler, who looks after the Knight's horse...

It's a team game (and team effort, as we remember, means quite a lot for the English) but the roles are strictly assigned and divided.

At one point you could be in the centre of the whole game as a batsman or a bowler, at another you are as insignificant as 'silly mid on' or 'long leg' in the field.

But 'the social mobility' is taken care of: players interchange their roles as the game unfolds.

Fairness and "fair play" are likewise key notions for Englishness, and cricket embodies them not just in the fair share of opportunity to be a batsman and a wicket-keeper, but also by interchanging roles between two teams.

You had a chance to batter us, now it's our turn.

I know for instance many Uzbek games, which are asymmetrical: the winning team or a player must punish or humiliate the loser.

Cricket doesn't allow it, it gives equal chances to both teams - a real fair play.

I must say a couple of words about the rule of law.

The decisions of the umpires are final and not appealable.

They just raise their hand along with an eyebrow and, like in a gladiator fight, one team dies, another marches on...

And last but not least: nice, enjoyable settings and a certain dress code - once again quite English characteristics.

Thus we arrive having completed a full circle back to the first piece in this series of blogs to the audit dinner in 'black tie'.

In that enjoyable setting akin to a picnic there's a moment of pragmatism.

Though to finish on a foreign note and make it even more pragmatic I heard an anecdote about those cricketing gentlemen, dressed white in the middle of the green field.

Once upon a time there was a severe drought somewhere in our part of the world and a learned man, who travelled a lot said to his people: "When I was in England a dozen English gentlemen used to gather in the middle of the green field in brilliant white clothes with a stick and a ball. As soon as they start to throw the ball at that stick the rain would fall. Why we don't do the same?"

Thus, they say, was the beginning of cricket's world-wide expansion.

In my last piece from this series we have discussed that 'sticking out' from the mainstream is considered to be something odd for those who proudly embody 'Englishness'.

This characteristic of the English mentality has a flip side: the English do appreciate and are usually very good in their team efforts.

I won't even dare to approach the subject of football, but can safely mention that the English cricket team is now ranked the first in the world.

The England rugby team is doing quite well too.

Usually, our relay-sprint teams also perform rather well.

But the best example should definitely be drawn from an entirely different arena - the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Proms.

There you can find seamless teamwork on many levels, as every year a dozen people from Radio 3 organise the world's biggest and best festival of classical music.

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ orchestras are among the best in the world, and this feast of music is broadcast, promoted, recorded, and distributed across many platforms to many countries.

So let's talk about English music then.

It's widely represented in this year Proms: Purcell and Elgar, Bridge and Britten are among those I listened to this summer at the glorious Royal Albert Hall.

They say that the music is the language of the soul, so what is the language of the English soul, I wondered.

But before going into my musical findings (which are quite amateurish anyway) another saying caught my attention.

The great German poet Goethe once said: "Music begins where words end".

So I thought to myself, are the English as good in music as they are in literature?

Shakespeare and Marlowe, Swift and Defoe, Thackeray and Dickens, Austin and Wolf, Orwell and Elliot - those giants formed the shape of the world literature and easily feature in any top rankings of the world's word-craft.

Is it the same with composers?

And the answer is: Alas...

So, do the laurels of word-smiths occupy too much space in the English soul, leaving too little to music?

Or maybe this is true only in case of the classical music?

After all, if you take English rock for example- it's a leading force in the modern musical world.

Or maybe that it is another, again a very much English expression - 'striking the right balance' between words and music, between music and populus, that could explain the blossom of that type of music?

Famous English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham said once, in a very English manner: "The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes."

Funnily enough, this might help us understand why groups (or teams) such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, Take That or Arctic Monkeys are doing much better in the ranks and history of music than the sole-soul English classical composers.

Classical English music, which I heard at this year Proms, it seems to me also confirms some fundamental characteristics of English mentality, which I am talking about.

The bottom line is, the English are seemingly much better with words than with tunes.

Even when it comes to tunes, they are much better with songs and choirs, rather than with solely instrumental music.

The majority of English music I heard was either Symphonies, Cantatas and Oratories with choirs or singers, and it has a long standing tradition.

Purcell, who more than 300 years after his death is still considered by some the country's greatest composer, was always credited by the musicologists for his 'exquisite talent for English word-setting and expressiveness'.

I know that I'm simplifying and generalising, however I'm talking not so much about the music, but about the national character reflected through that music.

And though Purcell might have been credited for his expressiveness, but generally the music I heard, has been quite reserved, not exultant, not sentimental, but rather rational and conceptual than spontaneous.

English composers themselves very often openly admit it in their comments. The same Sir Thomas Beecham sarcastically said: "There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between."

But more seriously, Benjamin Britten, talking about his 'Spring Symphony' said in a letter 'It is such cold music that it is depressing to write'.

Edward Elgar, commenting on his famous 'Enigma', said: 'I warn you that the apparent connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture'.

If you would like another sweeping statement from me, here it is.

Whereas in the 'continental' (Russian, German) music to my ear 'the Theme' goes through the instruments, in English music the instruments contribute and build 'the Theme' with their own 'micro-themes'.

I would call it 'the democracy of the musical instruments', where every instrument has not submitted to the wholeness of the orchestra, but creates this orchestra with the value of its own voice.

Frank Bridge's Rebus is a good example of it.

As he stated himself, he wanted 'to show in musical terms how a simple idea passed around can become distorted in the process'.

So the theme started by cello and basses is followed by cymbal-topped crash, then is replaced by lonely bassoon's solo, then by all dancing strings, etc...

As for the theme, the disappearance of it becomes an overall theme of the Rebus.

Bridge, who was Britten's teacher, said once to him: "You should try to find yourself and be true to what you found".

In that sense English composers never copied continental colleagues, but got on with inventing and producing their own brand of music.

The view that music is a solid and good human product (somehow even industrious), rather than divine revelation was upheld also by Edward Elgar, whom Richard Strauss called 'the first of the English progressivist' composers.

Explaining his famous composition Enigma, Elgar said: "the larger theme of it is not musical but conceptual: a bond that links 14 individuals".

For me it reflects the pragmatism of English character.

The following saying belongs to a famous English poet W.H. Auden: "Music is the best means we have of digesting time."

Moreover, the majority of musical pieces I'm talking about were commissioned by different non-musical bodies: Red Cross, Samaritans, Japanese government, etc seemingly to digest their time.

The pragmatic approach to music-making is even more obvious in this weird thing, which I had noticed, following this year Proms.

On one of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ channels you can hear the live comments to the played Prom - rather like from the football match. 'Now you can hear a gloriously tender, heart-warming tune in a radiant C major. This captivating vision now clouds over, however: muted trombones spit out a warning, and a brief but turbulent development section is upon us...'

So returning to the field of words I would summarise my Suite on Englishness between the words and tunes by what the English poet Robert Browning wrote in his Victorian England:

But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep thro' every nerve.

With the riots dying out on the streets of England the public debate on their background and causes, is getting increasingly more vocal.

All kind of questions are being asked and many points of view are being shared.

One side maintains that it's pure criminality.

Another argues that there are deep and uncovered social causes behind it.

The third side discusses social deprivation, pauperisation of the part of population because of the spending cuts.

The fourth speaks about mob culture, broken families, consumerism and a false sense of entitlement and so on.

Whichever side of the argument you take - the sheer scale and the character of the riots aggravated by lootings, rampage and arson can't take away the seriousness of what had happened over the last week.

By coincidence, during all of those days, I was re-reading and reviewing classic Russian and English literature.

So what I would like to discuss here is the mindset of those, who overstepped the boundaries of normality. Could the likes of Dostoevsky and Dickens help us to better understand it?

Who are these people?

The finger of blame is pointing mainly at the street gangs.

For quite a while these gangs of 'yobsters' have been marking and controlling their post code 'ends' and if you are a stranger on their territory, you could end up being beaten up, mugged or stabbed.

Any teenager in London is aware and lives with this reality.

We adults, maybe not knowingly, but regularly hear about it in the event of 'knife crimes' taking place, when absolutely ordinary boys and girls are stabbed without any obvious reasons.

So, as the authorities indicate, these gangs were the main actors and beneficiaries of the rampage.

But it becomes apparent that among the looters there were also wider representatives of youth and society as a whole.

Two 17-year-old girls drinking stolen rosé wine were interviewed by ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

"Everyone was just on a riot, going mad, chucking things, chucking bottles - it was good, though."

Her friend added: "Breaking into shops - it was madness, it was good fun." One of the girls continued: "It's the government's fault. I don't know. Conservatives, whoever it is. It's the rich people who've got businesses and that's why all this happened."

Pictures released by police and seen on TV screens show kids as young as 10-12 years old, unmasked girls casually walking, young men and women carrying out boxes with plasma screens, all sorts of gadgets and bags full of clothing.

In short - lots of 'opportunists'.

Messages whizzing around on the social networks in teenage groups indicated that it's simply opportunism, and 'because everyone's doing it, it's safe to do it without any fear of repercussions'.

So for many youngsters outside the gangs, it was just a free for all mob mentality that pulled them in. "That's what's it all about - showing the police that we could do whatever we want; show the rich people that we could do whatever we want" - as the above mentioned girl said.

How does the literature relate to all this?

Literature predominantly focuses and describes departures from the norm - be it of human character, situations, conditions, or relationships.

Nearly all great books are about abnormal, freaky or edgy people.

Don Quixote or Anna Karenina, Karamazov brothers or Faust - all of them overstep in this or that manner the boundaries of normality.

In fact, overstepping the boundaries is an inbuilt characteristic of human nature.

Without it there's no progress, no inventions, no discoveries.

Rebellion is also one kind of overstepping the boundaries.

It's also inbuilt into human nature.

Every parent who has teenage kids knows this for a fact.

He or she can also remember his/her own experience of rebelling against their own parents.

Take Little Dorrit by Dickens, where Arthur Clennam rebels against his mother, Tattycoram rebels against the family of Meagles, even little Dorrit stands up against her father.

These are soft, 'normal' rebellions.

But as Dostoevsky shows in his Crime and Punishment (in Russian the word 'crime' means 'overstepping'), the problem starts when you break the boundaries at expense of someone else.

Even if you as Raskolnikov, the main character of Crime and Punishment consider your adversary - an old usurer lady - a nuisance, nothing, less than nothing.

Here the criminality starts, and as Dostoevsky shows, it can't be justified by anything - be it your self-indulgence, arrogance or belief in your own oneness.

In Karamazov Brothers, Dostoevsky goes even further.

In the famous legend about the Great Inquisitor he develops the view that even the Messiah shouldn't be allowed back to human society because he Jesus, represents the disturbing, overstepping, destabilising, abnormal force.

Consumerist nature of the recent looting was noticed by many.

Every tragedy has its comic side; one bookstore in South London didn't barricade itself and stayed open throughout the rampage.

"If they loot the books it'll make good for them" - said the owner.

But nobody cared about that shop.

However, listening to those two girls interviewed by ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, apart from the culture of consumerism (drinking looted rose vine), many had a feeling that for them looting was 'partying', 'having fun' and at the same time a kind of a virtual, 'game' reality.

Partying and having fun are the values of mass-culture multiplied in this generation by the X-box or game console culture.

The same Dostoevsky in his novel The Gambler, shows how destructive the addiction to replace reality with the virtual one could become and what price one pays for it.

He wrote once: 'Within a quarter of an hour I won 600 francs. This whetted my appetite. Suddenly I started to lose, couldn't control myself and lost everything'.

Crime ends with punishment, game of gains ends with the reality of loss.

A word of caution from both great Ds

So far everything seems quite normal, and common sense of outrage with what has happened, mostly complies with the great literature.

But Dostoevsky wouldn't be Dostoevsky if he wasn't controversial.

In fact controversies embodied in different voices of different characters create the phenomenon of 'polyphonic' or 'dialogic' novel, which is a trade-mark of Dostoevsky.

Both Dostoevsky and Dickens also show when seemingly normal people destructively overstep the boundaries of normality and what triggers their move to abnormality.

Humiliated and Insulted is the name of one of Dostoevsky's novels and he thinks these emotions are the motivators, which can turn the human soul upside down.

Dostoevsky believes that even in case of the worst among humankind - call them scum, riffraff, criminals or else - you can't deny their self-esteem, their pride and their soul.

As soon as one (be it father of the family, landlord in the village, police in the town or the government in the state, according to Dostoevsky) humiliates and insults them, crushes their self-esteem or runs unfairly over their pride without any consent - the soul rebels.

I know from my own parental experience - how ever I am right in any of my decisions - I can't impose it onto my children without them buying in.

I can crash their will, but it's on the surface.

If I do so, deep inside it'll seed a plant of rebellion.

Nellie from Humiliated and Insulted never forgives her father - Prince Valkovsky for running over her mum, Smerdyakov from Karamazov Brothers murders Father Karamazov because of being humiliated and insulted by him as an unlawfully born son, and by Ivan Karamazov as an insignificant bastard.

In Little Dorrit Miss Wade, humiliated and insulted by Gowan, hires a murderer Rigaud.

'It's not the misfortune that kills, - as if say both writers, - but insignificance, ugliness, and plainness of your unanswered misery'.

And finally overstepping

To keep the polyphonic nature of the piece here's a free comment on the discussed issue from a normal teenager, in order not to dictate just the adult opinions in the debate, which are in abundance anyway. I give it as a long quote.

On the surface, The London riots were started in Tottenham due to accusations of the Government's ill-treatment and lack of communication with the black community (which is completely understandable now, due to the results of the inquest into the Mark Duggan police shooting), but how the rioting spread from the streets of North London to Salford, Bristol, Birmingham and countless other cities is still puzzling to all of our society.

We are shown pictures and videos of children marauding around with sticks and stones, willing to risk prison sentences for trivial material goods - whether we consider them foolish, or a nuisance to our society, the sad truth is that they are also the future of Great Britain.

The first, most common misconception is that they have inherited the hatred and lust for violence from video games.

Whilst they may learn how to injure a person in a variety of ways, and the technical names of all the weaponry that the American swat teams posses, they learn from history that the best way to gather attention to a problem is by showing discontent by the masses.

Everything from the previous Tottenham Riots in 1985, to the Arab Spring earlier this year has shown that protest brings change much quicker than say a petition, or waiting for the next government elections.

Whilst I am in no way condoning their actions in the riots, they have only repeatedly been shown on their television screens that the answer to any social problems is going out onto the streets en masse.

'Why was there a riot instead of a protest?' you may ask.

Personally, I believe that the government showed that the only way to gather social attention once more, was when violence was involved.

Throughout the autumn and winter season last year, students gathered in protest against tuition fees, benefit cuts and even travel expenses for adolescents, and yet the only protests making the headlines were ones where rioting or violence occurred.

Police 'kettling' tactics also brought a whole new issue to peaceful protesting, with people being held for hours in small, restricted areas, regardless of whether they were involved in any violence.

What does this teach the children of our society? Surely you can see where I'm headed.

The second misconception is that the generation involved with the rioting (predominantly 16-25 year olds), are one particularly tilted towards materialism, unlike prior generations.

The unfortunate truth is that whilst they may be unnaturally money-hungry, there is nobody but our own society to blame.

With the MP expenses, the News of the World police scandal having only faded away (lack of responsibility starts from the top), and our culture unfortunately revolving around material wealth, of course you're going to get children on the streets looting a new television when the chance is available.

An acquaintance of mine told me about a looter, who said: "If I stop looting, it doesn't mean anybody else will stop. This is opportunism at its best." This horribly true statement made me wonder why the government even spends money on 'citizenship' lessons, when your average teenager (in the areas affected by the rioting) knows better what police are entitled to search of theirs, than what right-wing or left-wing means in political terms.

When a friend asked another friend why the riots in form of a protest aren't happening in Downing Street (if they wish to harm the government), they replied with "I'd rather have a new pair of shoes than a bullet in my spine", showing just how isolated some people of the younger generation now feel.

Those who follow me on Facebook and Twitter might know that this summer I was accredited for the Wimbledon, but couldn't get to the finals on the Central Court.

No right of passage, to make a pun.
But no offence taken.

After spending some time in the joyous crowd on the hill under the enormous plasma screen I decided to go home to watch it just as I used to watch it all these years - sprawled on the sofa in front of the telly.

Indeed I took no offence, but going back home down the empty streets of Wimbledon, the sight of some suspicious and rather talkative gentlemen at every road junction offering me a spare ticket for £200, had conjured up in me a rather complex feeling, which - I guess - might have been related to the feelings of Andy Murray himself: the building up of his aspirations and not getting to the final...

So I would like to muse a little about this feeling.

I've lived in London for the last 18 years and observed that every year without fail, before the Wimbledon tournament, we as a nation build up our expectations of inevitable triumph: putting our trust in our 'Tiger' Tim Henman, or nowadays, Andy Murray.

Sometimes we even go for Elena Baltacha.

Tabloids predict it, McEnroe encourages it, and we duly believe.

And every year with the same perennial regularity they lose, stopped in their tracks from progressing to the final, as the cups of our tears turn into champagne for other heroes.

And it's not just the case in tennis; I wrote last year about football for instance too.

That is when the soul-searching begins.

Once we were discussing the school results of my son with our very close English friends.

Both me and my wife in our childhood had been pushed to the limits by our parents in terms of our school performance: from maths to astronomy, so naturally we were a bit disappointed by our son's reluctance to aspire to be the best in his class.

Then our English friends said: 'Don't push him too hard. Let him belong to the mainstream. In this country they don't like teachers' pets. There's an English saying 'He's too clever by half'. Let him be an all-rounded man'.

Ever since, I have heard this notion of the 'all-rounded man' mentioned time and time again by many a Headmaster of the best Public and Grammar schools, which our clever, ironic, sometimes sarcastic, witty, articulate, eloquent, well mannered, musical, and sensible - in short 'all-rounded' son has attended.

I guess somehow that he wouldn't become Rostropovich in his cello-playing, neither Fisher in his chess, nor Nash in his economics.

Because you have to be somewhat 'monstrous' towards yourself, if you aspire to become Usain Bolt, Diego Maradona, Maxim Vengerov or Raphael Nadal.

It's not the only explanation.

Who knows, maybe the concept of overnight success which we're talking about in our last entry has replaced the sum of the tireless effort towards achieving something...

Or another thought. George Orwell once said: 'English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction'.

But how do we square it with the history of this nation of conquerors, explorers, and pioneers?

Or is it even more complicated and we are talking about the other side of the medal on which the dearest words of Englishness like 'democracy', 'equality', and 'fair play' are coined?

Just to make my feelings even more complicated, returning from the never happened All England Club's final I remembered another anecdote from my English life.

You know, I've got a friend. A very decent person. Extremely nice character. She lives up in Watford, and sells fish in our local market.

When several years ago I used to buy mackerel and some frozen prawns from her, she would meet me with the warmest exclamation and laughter: "Hi, luv! The same old mackerel and a pound of prawns in weight?"

At that time I drove my first Ford Fiesta and my son studied at a random local school.
A couple of years on I started to buy four heads of silver trout and another pound of skate knobs.

She would laugh heartily and greet me with: "How are you, my dear. Your trout and the usual knobs?"

At that time my car was a Ford Escort and my son had moved to the local church school.

Now I buy red mullet and uncooked king-size prawns and I noticed that she says with a smile: "How are you this morning, Sir? Red mullet and a handful of king size?"

I bet, that weighing my regular fish she knows somehow, that I'm driving nothing less than a Volkswagen Passat and my son goes to the Habs Boys school...

I didn't mention a parallel move from the ex-council house to semi-detached town house and then to a detached Victorian House, while shifting from The Sun through The Guardian and to the Daily Telegraph because, as a freaky foreigner who mixes everything up, I still live in my two storey town house and read the Metro on the tube...