There Will Always Be An England

Although it may well be a load of boring rubbish, as suggested by an amusing item from The Guardian, despite our having no idea who & what those on the receiving end of the insults are. And of course we quite enjoy concepts like "The New Boring."

A mind-numbing cultural diet of Downton Abbey, Adele, home-baking, crafts à la Kirstie Allsopp and novelty knitwear is crushing the spirit of the nation. Rise up against the New Boredom

This Allsopp person sounds like a veritable Limey Martha Stewart.

The New Boredom is everywhere. Think of Kirstie Allsopp (is it insignificant that so many of the New Bores are insufferable toffs with reactionary agendas, such as her and Julian Fellowes? The question was rhetorical), her fascist craft programme and its allied book.

It was one thing to be nine and have Val Singleton on Blue Peter tell me how to make a functionally useless mobile for my mother's birthday with knicker elastic, used washing-up liquid bottles and spit. It is quite another to be an adult and face Allsopp's aristo homilies directed at making povvo proles shape up and cut their expenditure in line with the decline in real wages by reviving dead "crafts" as part of a TV-government conspiracy dreamed up by her and George Osborne on a billionaire's yacht moored off Corfu (that meeting probably never happened, but, in making it up, I feel justified because the actual truth of Kirstie's commissioning process is surely even more boring).

The blurb for her book reads: "Kirstie Allsopp's love affair with British crafts took off when she renovated her house in Devon." My hate affair with craft started when I was bought a stencil kit and it was suggested I could use it to decorate my Walthamstow slum. Allsopp has spent ages on the road "finding the things that make our Great British crafting nation truly great". So whether you want to make your own jewellery, crochet your own cushions, distress your own furniture or simply self-lobotomise and puree the resultant brain tissue to make authentic medieval stippling paint to decorate your garden chimenea (I made the last one up), then buy what is billed as "the ultimate crafting bible". Or realise that lost crafts got lost for a reason and save yourself a few bob.

Possibly worse than Martha Stewart. Certainly more boring.