I have lived in this country — on and off, but mainly on — for more than 30 years now, yet occasionally a news story will come along to remind me that, no matter how in-depth my knowledge is of the career of Cilla Black, no matter how many opinions I have about the presenters on the Today programme, I will always be a stranger in a strange land.
Some stories are just so extravagantly, deliciously British they are impossible to translate. They are not just British in subject but in flavour, and this flavour is self-deprecating but smug, silly but sentimental, grandiose but also utterly parochial. Examples include but are not limited to: the Oasis versus Blur battle for No 1 making the evening
