It’s been quite a patriotic month for us Brits, what with HM the Queen’s recent birthday, all that Hillsborough hilarity, and the 400th Anniversary of Will Shakespeare’s death (which people are celebrating for some reason), and it’s led me to look around and ask where that oldest of British values has gone: Bravery. Bravery is something not celebrated enough in modern society. Instead of incessantly littering our news feeds with celebrations of dead veterans and people who’ve happened to go to the moon, we lend a helping hand to the meek and fearful with things like anti-bullying campaigns and suicide prevention hotlines. So this week I thought I’d do something brave myself and pull a societal U-turn, ploughing aside all you oncoming sheeple with my righteously chugging blog-shaped front-end loader. Over the past six months the world has endured enough awful things to mentally scar Charles Manson (the announcement of an Independence Day sequel comes to mind), but in light of it all we’ve witnessed the surfacing of some real British heroes. Here are three figures I’m sure everyone missed out in their semi-annual scour for people to like.

Andrew Neil

In late 2015, Andrew Neil- no doubt topping even Jon Snow in terms of journalistic integrity- bravely went on air and spoke his fat mind about the then-recent terrorist attacks on the streets of Paris. He began his epic monologue by referring to so-called Islamic State as “loser jihadists”, claiming their actions to be a pathetic attempt “to prove the future belongs to them, rather than a civilization like France”. He then went on to read out from his auto-cue every great figure or breakthrough that France has produced, although it wasn’t until he finished with the weird names and reached “cutting-edge science” that I realised he wasn’t just having a stroke.

To inject a bit of levity into the affair (something we know that Islam despises) he even crowbarred in Daft Punk and Crème brûlée, two things he knows would actually make every self-respecting Englishman sick to their fucking stomach. Neil went on to list all the so-called atrocities committed by so-called Islamic State, incorrectly claiming that they would “shame the middle-ages”- Bin Laden’s best output was during his 40s and he would have very much approved! Haha- joking aside though, beheading, slavery, and what Neil himself refers to as “medieval squalor” were very much common in the middle ages, but glaring factual inaccuracies shouldn’t have to detract from a decent journalistic statement; so-called Andrew Neil was brave. Brave to sit on television before his usual viewing figures and say what everyone else was thinking. I’d like to see all those naysayers, who usually go against the crowd, pluck up the courage to agree with everyone else for once.

Milo Yiannopoulos

There’s something exceptionally admirable about a man who suffers from anxiety throwing himself out there by questioning others’ views and sparking off heated discussions whether people like it or not. Mr. Yiannopoulos, who is gay, is an ardent anti-feminist pundit who supports men‘s rights (yeah), a rapidly growing movement spreading in the form of satirical subreddits such as /r/theredpill and these weird kinda protest things, that nobody really knew about until Reggie Yates asked them what in God’s name they thought they were doing. Milo has trouble speaking on air- he is undoubtedly attractive, witty, and sticks to his views like a cat on an iron, but almost every discussion I’ve seen shows him interrupting people, stumbling over his words, and making the odd overly-shocking statement that ensures viewers notice him, for if those menstrual feminists had the willpower to simply ignore the man he would surely become a ghost, wandering this earth with his empty phrases like “Hey guys, but trans people are mentally ill, right?” falling upon deaf, tolerant ears.

Yiannopoulos is best when he’s expressing himself through action rather than words, like when he announced his new University grant only available to white men. The idea, originally conceived as a bit of a laugh but eventually put into action due to its obvious need to exist in a world absolutely dominated by black women, aroused a significant backlash (as it was solely designed to do), but my heart went out to him when, just a few weeks later, everyone had sort of forgotten about it, but would have noticed and laughed if the plan had been cancelled just because the angry responses died down, so he had to go through with it anyway without anyone really paying attention anymore.

The Soldiers of WWI

Okay, I said in the last six months, but it’s currently 100 years since The Great War raged on, which kinda counts, and also if you add up all the ages of the people who fought then I spose it does sort of mean they are still around today.

Philip Larkin, born four years after the war ended, summed up in his poem MCMXIV the innocent optimism of those awaiting their recruitment as soldiers.

Those long uneven lines

Standing as patiently

As if they were stretched outside

The Oval or Villa Park,

The crowns of hats, the sun

On moustached archaic faces

Grinning as if it were all

An August Bank Holiday lark;

And Philip wasn’t larkin’: looking back at the propaganda that was churned onto the masses, we see a nation blind in the assumption that war was nothing to be afraid of; Victory was close at hand. The fighting would be over by Christmas. So many young men wandered into the fray without a fear in the world, in the same way that senior officers, who’s only front-line experience was slaughtering tribesmen armed with sharp slices of mango, expected the hun to offer similar opposition. Larkin’s final stanza begins with the line “Never such innocence”, ending with one identical but for the “again” tacked onto the end.

This repetition was not for effect, but in fact due to the magazine printing process that Britain had retained from the war. 27” presses, left over from pre-war news magnates, many of which toppled when rationing began, were re-purposed for zines such as The Wipers Times, and later war-poetry anthologies. After 1918, when resources were once again in abundance, publishers would employ multiple vertically adjacent presses to print each page simultaneously. Mass poetry re-pressings (or repressions) were commonly circulated in tiny 5 1/2” square booklets known as Toothbrushes (named after the infamous moustache), each page containing one stanza. However, due to the discrepancy in size between the old newspapers and the current publications, the first line of the next page along would appear at the end of each wall of text. In the case of multiple identical pressings it would be the first line repeated, and this inspired Larkin to slap his glorious “again” onto the end rather than paying for better quality publications- the poet was famously tight with his money.

MC…. talks about how that ignorance, that assurance that the fight would be a jolly, glorious and fearless thing, would all dissolve by the end of the war, or perhaps even by the time that those men first hit the stinking, diseased trenches. Meanwhile, but years earlier, Sassoon and his friend Wilfred Owen, who actually bloody fought in the war, conjure up even more visceral first-hand imagery. Of the Western Front Sassoon stated “The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still, and I remember things I’d best forget”. Owen, who was killed in action just seven days before WWI ended, wrote in his poem Dulce Et Decorum Est of the horrors of gas warfare with grotesque accuracy, holding back no image too nasty or blood-curdling, before concluding that any patriot who was subject to the “guttering, choking, drowning”, who could hear the blood “come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”, would not lie and proclaim that “It is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country”- well he wrote that bit in Latin- tad pretentious but you get the sentiment.

Attempted desertion was commonplace. Of those allied soldiers that did not succeed, over 20,000 were convicted, 306 of whom were executed. Those that dared take what one could regard as a bigger gamble and remain in the trenches were at risk from shell-shock. Millions of men suffered psychological trauma as a result of their harrowing experiences- ironic, as harrowing back on their farm was probably where they wanted to be. The symptoms ranged from sickness and diarrhoea to anxiety, depression, madness, and the thousand-yard stare.

And it’s with great pride that we raise these men up on pedestals and write the word brave underneath- Claim that, without a doubt, they are an example to live by. Bravery is not only garnering support by saying what everyone else is thinking, or looking incredibly attractive and provoking the anger of genders and races that have only been subdued for a few thousand years so far; bravery is ignorance. Being sure that there is nothing to be afraid of- expecting your plight to go short and swimmingly, only to realise the truth too late into the game, leading you to either attempt escape or remain and suffer madness when your mind can’t handle the facts. Rather than charging onto the battlefield with a proud smile on your face, you’re shelled before even getting a shot in or you’re sticking the whole thing out without completely snapping and then going on to write books about how the enemy probably had feelings too. Bravery. Britain. God Save the Queen.