The calm way the British react to turbulent events never ceases to “amaze”. Take their attitude to nuclear power. After the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant two years ago, most Europeans are decidedly jumpy about it; we Germans abolished it overnight. But when David Cameron’s government announced plans to build a new reactor there was a brief ripple of interest and then it practically disappeared from the news. The British would no more get rid of nuclear power because of a single disaster than they’d scrap the NHS because of all the horror stories they read in the press. Problems that would have Germans “mounting the barricades”, the “insouciant” Brits just take on the chin. They’ve been far more stoic about losing 445 soldiers in Afghanistan than we have been about losing 53. Faced with the onslaught of “fragmenting family structures”, creaking public services and a rapidly rising cost of living, they employ two weapons: “inexhaustible humour” and a “total rejection of self-pity”. Serenity is an innate British quality, so different from the constantly “agitated” state of the German mind. (Thomas Kielinger, Die Welt, Berlin).

Always interesting to see how others see you. But of course it is total nonsense. The reason the British don’t get agitated about upsetting news is that they are not presented with it. The trashy (Murdoch-style) media is chiefly interested in the bra size of the latest busty personality or the arrest of another pedophile. Nuclear power, mate, wozzat?

There’s something to be said for ignorance, but not a lot.