INDEPENDENCE DAY

So it's July 4th, Independence Day, the day when we celebrate those brave Americans who blew up a spaceship full of telepathic aliens, twenty years ago.

Over here in Britain, July 4th goes largely unnoticed. Our king, George III went bonkers and thought he should punish the Americans for throwing a load of tea into Boston harbour. They ought to have known really, that that's not how you make it. Always the tea first, water second.

I rather like the Declaration of Independence. I like the idea of equality, I like the idea of having 'unalienable' rights - the right to punch an alien in the face and then smoke a cigar on top of its spacecraft, for example.

I like the 'pursuit of happiness' too. It encapsulates Jefferson's idea that happiness is a sort of elusive rainbow that independent Americans ought to run after, now that they are free from the terrible tyranny of Great Britain, not to mention those pesky aliens. I reckon Jefferson knew that it would be all about the pursuit.

I also wonder how similar that time was to our own. I know the circumstances are different, but there must have been chasms opening up between Englishmen who saw the colonies as the free, independent states of a new nation, and those who were utterly loyal to the British Crown. What must that have been like? We think our country is divided! Essentially, that split rumbled on way into the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In some ways, you could argue that the USA is still, even now, working out what kind of nation it really wants to be. Perhaps our problem is that we really ought to know by now too.

But I'm out of my depth, and I'm a flag-waving tea-drinking Brit whose closest tie to the States is the day I went ten pin bowling on a US Army Base in East Anglia.

Run free, Americans, and light a firework of thanks for me. Especially you, Will Smith.