I went to a Morrissey concert at the weekend. “Big wow”, I hear you say. “Fogey attends live music event. Which bit of that is supposed to be interesting?” Well, the bit where I was asked to leave, actually. Not just me. All 10,000 of us were shown the door. We had been watching our hero perform for exactly three and a half minutes.

The reason was that a human slug wearing a horrible shirt decided to chuck a plastic glass of lager at Morrissey, a man whom I don’t mind telling you I’ve idolised since 1983. (It wasn’t a plastic bottle as reported in the papers. I was standing near the front and could see the half-full glass smack him square on the head like someone aiming at a coconut shy.). Morrissey wiped his dripping hair, said just one word, “Goodbye”, exited the stage and refused to return.

Now, if we are to believe everything we are told about “boozed-up Britain”, a country in which we’re all supposed to be drunken louts or stressed tinderboxes ready to explode violently at the merest slight — parking space rage, queue rage, “are-you-looking-at-me-disrespectfully” rage — wouldn’t you expect one or two people in the vast Liverpool Echo Arena to kick off about this? After all, they had paid at least £36 each for a ticket, most were drinking, many had travelled for miles and it had been soak-you-to-the-knickers raining outside.

But other than a few, gentle shouts of “t**t” at the culprit (and that might have been me) the reaction was one of mass civil obedience. No one booed Morrissey for failing to come back on stage even though he wasn’t physically hurt, no one tried to lynch Slug Man, I didn’t see anyone trash a chair or pin the management against the wall demanding their money back, though thousands of loyal fans were being punished for the actions of one over-excitable cretin.

Instead we all commiserated at what a terrible pity it was and hoped that backstage Morrissey wasn’t feeling too sad. We then formed an orderly queue to file out into the freezing night, stopping only to throw meekly the plastic bottles of beer for which we had paid £3.50 each into the bins provided.

“I don’t blame him,” said a young, shaven-headed male fan who must have weighed 16st. “He’s 50, he’s an artist. Why should he put up with that crap?”

Precisely.

Don’t you think this is wonderful? We are forever being told that Britain is a tanked-up nation of Neanderthals ready to stab passers-by in the face if they don’t like the way they’ve parted their hair. But how did a stadium full of people react to their evening being wrecked? With benign resignation and generosity of spirit.

Of course there are boneheads in the world who will happily stove your head in if they deem your hair to be parted offensively. Last week gloomy Home Office statistics suggested that every 30 seconds someone is attacked by a stranger on British streets. According to the survey there were 1,057,000 violent attacks by strangers last year — equal to 2,895 a day or 120 every hour.

We can’t deny that there’s a problem, but we mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that every other person we meet is a moron. They are not. In my experience most people in this country are overwhelmingly reasonable. You only have to travel regularly on intercity trains to know this.

Whenever the manager announces, as he often does, some cock-up — the train’s windscreen wiper is squeaking so you’re all being tipped out at Stafford, you needn’t have paid £215 for that super-expensive early morning train because the train’s going to get in two hours late anyway, all the carriages smell of sewage owing to a toilet block, but enjoy your breakfasts! — you see a flicker of anger register briefly on passengers’ faces and then it is gone.

They shrug and return to their Maeve Binchys not because they are docile schmucks but because they quickly grasp that there’s nothing to be done so we may as well be civilised. If there’s one thing at which the British excel, it’s quiet fatalism.

You might argue that many of Morrissey’s fans are getting on a bit and would probably prefer a nice sit down with a cup of Earl Grey than spoil their shoes by starting a riot anyway. But I see this crowd as being more genuinely representative of our citizens than the dread portraits painted by right-wing newspapers and the expat community that this is a lawless country of scumbags that is going “daaan the pan”.

This week Jeremy Clarkson railed against Britain as being, among other things, a “stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, all-the-pigs-are-equal hellhole” and says he’d emigrate — but he can’t think of anywhere better to go.

Well, that’s interesting. This month a United Nations report revealed that Britain has slipped to 21st place in a list of the best countries in the world to live. In 1990 it came tenth. Number one was Norway. Yes, Norway is your best bet for good health, wealth and general longevity. And yet, do you see a queue of people battering down the door to move to Oslo? Not really. Because human contentment cannot be quantified by the ticked boxes on a UN form. Just because somewhere has low tax and very little dog dirt it doesn’t necessarily make it a stimulating and exciting place to live. Fulfilment is a bit more indefinite than that.

Britain’s relaxed cynicism, its muted pessimism expecting things to be a bit rubbish and thus not overreacting when they are, is one of the things that makes it kind of nice. Maybe that’s why so many expats, sloshed on their sangria by noon, are still secretly obsessed with the place, sniffing out old copies of The Daily Express to reassure them of their world view.

It is exactly ten years since a turn-of-the-millennium public opinion survey conducted by the Future Foundation concluded that Britain had reinvented itself as a tolerant, inclusive, empathetic country.

A decade on we might still behave embarrassingly on holiday abroad, we might accept low standards because we don’t know how to shout about “our rights”, we might still be hopeless at service with our surly shop assistants failing to tell us to have a nice day because they are too busy texting their boyfriends.

But we are good at the important things, such as modesty, manners, compassion, good humour and knowing that sometimes you should just let it go. I know where I’d rather live.