Oh goodness, it has been a while since my last post, hasn’t it? Many, many apologies, though let that stand as a testament to just how busy Oxford manages to keep its students. I am currently nearing the midpoint of Hilary Term, which means that I am nearing the midpoint of my year abroad (!), and happily immersed in studying Command and Transition Economies on one hand and Society and Politics of China on the other.
My second term at Oxford hasn’t been all work, however. During the first two weeks of term, I rediscovered my love for the game of tennis (and, by that, I mean watching the sport, not playing it, as I am quite inept with a racquet in my hand) by way of the Australian Open. A quick primer on professional tennis: the highlight of the tennis season are the four Grand Slam events, and the Australian Open is the first of these. It is also usually the one that manages to escape my notice entirely when I am back in the States, largely because of the time difference. When late-afternoon matches in Melbourne are broadcast live in the U.S. at the cheerfully early (late?) hour of 3:30am EST, it becomes something of a bother to keep track of things. Being five hours ahead on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, though, at last turned the time difference in my favour. This, combined with BBC.com’s online broadcast of the matches (available to UK internet users only, as I learned many times while in the States!), meant that I could actually follow the Australian, and I did so with relish.
The men’s final pitted Roger Federer, a Swiss who has a strong case for being the greatest tennis player of all time, against Andy Murray, the Briton who provided the inspiration for this post. Here, it is appropriate to briefly reference the British obsession with their historical tennis futility. No British man has won a Grand Slam in 74 years, and, until Murray did so at the Australian, no British man had so much as appeared in a Grand Slam final in 72 years. To understand how important tennis is in this country, one need only look at the free wall calendar I received from Daily Info, Oxford: the date of the finals of the Championships at Wimbledon, the prestigious Grand Slam event hosted just outside London, is marked alongside that of more usual holidays like Christmas and Easter. Every time another Grand Slam comes around, the British media hold their breath and scrutinise the progress of every British player in the draw, and, for three quarters of a century now, that progress has not amounted to overly much.
Andy Murray represents Britain on the world tennis stage, but, having been born in Glasgow and received his schooling in Dunblane, he considers himself Scottish first, then British. He is widely heralded as Britain’s next great tennis hope, and the disappointment that accompanied his defeat by Federer in the Australian Open final was evident in the comments left on BBC.com’s tennis message board after the match (er, yes, I was indeed that keen on avoiding work). Most interesting, though, was the undercurrent of resentment that I saw in some of the remarks: Andy Murray couldn’t possibly win a Grand Slam for Britain, they either implied or stated outright, because he is Scottish, not English.
The questions posed by the thorny issue of multiple nationalities within a single United Kingdom are many, and their answers are not immediately evident. In the late 1990s, the ongoing process of devolution began, as three out of the four constituent parts of the UK were permitted to establish their own parliaments and exercise greater control over their domestic affairs, though supreme legislative supremacy remained entrusted to the Parliament in Westminster. England was the odd one out, and it continued to be directly administered by the Parliament in Westminster. Meanwhile, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland each have their own regional parties, whose MPs (Members of Parliament) are able to vote on matters pertaining to England while English MPs cannot vote on matters pertaining to Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The complexities posed by this political arrangement are evident even in mundane encounters: when a friend currently studying abroad in Glasgow came to visit this past weekend, I cautioned her that her Scottish pounds may not necessarily be accepted in England — Scottish pounds are technically only promissory notes instead of legal tender in England, and visa versa — even though the Scottish pound and the pound sterling are equal in value and the general practise should be to treat them the same. Fortunately, my friend didn’t encounter any difficulties in using her currency, though a bus driver did look askance at one of her Scottish notes and proceeded to examine it closely.
How much of the difference between England and Scotland can be attributed to these recent political developments, and how much is the result of long-standing cultural and historical differences that have led the two nations to clash time and time again over the centuries? How distinct, really, are the English and Scottish identities, and how much of it is nationalistic bluster? And, to bring this post full circle, if/when Andy Murray at last wins a Grand Slam, how will his victory be interpreted: as one for Scotland or as one for “Britain,” whatever that term may mean?
