Although I live here among them and have done for virtually all my life, although I sound like them, I’ve never been one. Never thought of myself as one. After more than 50 years of rubbing up against the English I still resist assimilation. I don’t stick out, but neither do I fit in. My heart doesn’t syncopate to Land of Hope and Glory. I don’t want three lions on my chest or the cross of St George on my windscreen.

The truth is — and perhaps this is a little unworthy, a bit shameful — I find England and the English embarrassing. Fundamentally toe-curlingly embarrassing. And even though I look like one, sound like one, can imitate the social/mating behaviour of one, I’m not one. I always bridle with irritation when taken for an Englishman, and fill in those disembarkation cards by pedantically writing “Scots” in the appropriate box.

I was born and part bred in Edinburgh. I only lived there for a scant year of my life, of which I remember not a thing. But still it’s the place that raises in me all that sentimental porridgy emotion that England can’t reach.

Scotland is a country and a people whose defining characteristic is built on the collective understanding of what they’re not. And what they’re not is English. But having said that I don’t feel English, neither do I recognise the caricature that the Scots make of the English to underline their Scottishness. That snobbish, stuck-up, two-faced, emotionally retarded, dim, foot-in-mouth prat and his good lady.

The truth is I don’t know what it is that makes the English so dreadfully English. So impervious to fondness, sympathy or attraction.

If the English could award themselves one attribute it would be fairness, whether it’s embodied in referees, High Court judges or gunboats. So perhaps it’s a good place to start. But actually I think it’s the wrong way round. What the English are eternally concerned with isn’t fairness, it’s unfairness. There’s a constant mutter of grievance at the deviousness, mendacity and untrustworthy nature of the rest of the world.

The thing that seems impermeably English is, in fact, anger. Collectively and individually, the English are angry about something. The pursed lip and the muttered expletives, the furious glance and the beetled brow are England’s national costume.

A simmering, unfocused lurking anger is the collective cross England bears with ill grace. I can see it in English faces, in the dumb semaphore of their bodies. It’s how they stand and fold their arms and wait in queues. It’s why they can’t dance or relax.

Anger has made the English an ugly race. But then this anger is also the source of England’s most admirable achievement — their heroic self-control. It’s the daily struggle of not giving in to their natural inclination to run amok with a cricket bat, to spit and bite in a crowded tearoom, that I admire most in the English. It’s not what they are, but their ability to suppress what they are, that’s great about the English.

The world is full of aggrieved people whose fury engulfs their land and lives. Places where feuds and retaliation have become the sole motives for existing. But the English aren’t like that. They live and have always lived in a comparatively harmonious and liberal country. There is more give and take and compromise in England than anywhere else you can think of, but I know as certainly as I know anything about this place that this is despite the nature of England, not because of it.

People with therapists will tell you that repressed anger is a dangerous thing that in the end will consume the repressor. That it’s a spiritual, emotional cancer. That it must be evacuated like trapped wind, transformed and metamorphosed. But the English are an uncomfortably living testament to the benefit, if not the pleasure, of repression.

They have come up with dozens of collective and individual strategies to deflect and contain their natural fury. Not least in inventing a bewildering number of games.