I was chatting with a chap last night about how Canada is changing and becoming more like the US. He has three children, two work in insurance (Kitchener/Waterloo is big in insurance) and the other has a trade. He was complaining that working conditions are deteriorating, and that the US hire & fire, people are expendable view of business has come to town, and into his children's lives. He's not happy to say the least.
It reminded me of a George Orwell quote. Not that I had it to hand of course, it's always the sort of thing you remember later and wished you'd said at the time. Anyway, it's from "The Lion and the Unicorn", which was Orwell's book celebrating Englishness that he wrote after the fall of Dunkirk, when things were looking very dark indeed.
[English civilization is] bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes. It has a flavour all its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then what do you have in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
Somehow, I find that comforting.