In fact, if our culture is "really only comfortable with two public emotions - fury and sniggering", then it is people like A A Gill who provide its backing track.Anger may well be England's ruling passion, but that is nothing to be ashamed of; indeed it is what makes English politics, newspapers, writing, comedy, conversation and everyday life so discomfiting and yet so interesting As a nation, we don't do happiness. It is for precisely that reason that we are addicted to making rules, following convention and etiquette, repressing anything that might pass for an emotion. Without these things to hold us in check, we are so pissed off with everything that we would simply run amok.Those who have read Gill's TV reviews will be aware that, as this argument trundles along, a conundrum the size of a large juggernaut threatens to squash it flat. The barometer of national mood, according to Adrian Gill, ranges from irritation to rage. England is downright embarrassing, he argues; collectively, its inhabitants are "a lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd". There can be fewer people in this world who conform less to this description than the svelte, witty and trim figure of Gill himself - but that, apparently, is because, although he looks, sounds and probably behaves like a very proper Englishmen, he is, in his blood and in his heart, Scottish.The problem with the English, apart from beefy bums, beady eyes and the rest, is that we are all bristling with pent-up resentment at the world outside, at public figures, at TV, at the weather, at other people generally. There may be other rituals around the world in which death and pain are celebrated for family entertainment, but England has led the way.Not so long ago, we might not have worried about what this ritual reveals about our national personality, but the more globally-minded the world has become, the more nations have taken to fretting about what makes them different from others.

The English have been relatively slow to analyse themselves, perhaps because the results are rarely cheering, but recently a new self-consciousness has begun to kick in.This autumn, the critic and writer A A Gill has come up with the perfect present for anyone fond of national self-flagellation with a new book called The Angry Nation. The Americans, after all, do not believe that they are symbolically stabbing George III when they carve their Thanksgiving turkey. On Bastille Day in France, there are no domestic enactments of the beheading of aristocrats. But the violence - involving gangs of 50 to 100 youths burning cars and buildings, including garages, warehouses and a school - has moved on like a bush fire to other poor suburbs.. Tomorrow night, many of us will gather around a bonfire and, in a safely symbolical sort of way, watch a man being burnt alive. It is a jolly and traditional occasion, a reminder of our less civilised past. A few painfully sensitive people might dare to point out that the burning of a human effigy is inappropriate in the 21st century, but most of us will be sensibly relaxed about it all.

The man represented by the dummy on top of the bonfire died almost 400 years ago. He was a terrorist, motivated by religion, and was tortured as an enemy of the state - utterly different, of course, from the way we live now. Not that the Fifth of November has any particular historical relevance these days; the figure burnt on that night has come to represent pretty much anyone who has become something of a public enemy. For a family bonfire a couple of years ago, someone brought along an effigy of George W Bush; how we laughed as the flames engulfed his stuffed straw body and licked around facial features that, oddly seemed, more lifelike on the effigy than on the real thing.For all our pride at the civilised values represented, or so we like to think, by this country, there is something peculiarly bloodthirsty about the way we enjoy our annual ritual. After the outbreak of violence in the greater Paris area, France faces the danger of a cascade of copycat riots in deprived and racially mixed suburbs across the country.

The internally divided government, whose clumsy response has helped to fan the flames of protest, attempted belatedly yesterday to satisfy some of the demands of the original rioters. If Nasa had been smart, they could have saved the $20bn it cost to build the vessel. All they needed do was hijack Clement Attlee's coffin as it corkscrewed its way towards the earth's core.. It doesn't take much imagination to guess what Clem would make of the events of the last few days, or indeed the last few years Spinning in his grave doesn't come close. Also on Tuesday, a channel owned by Mr Blair's guv'nor Rupert Murdoch - not a chap Clem would have found wildly sympathique - showed a compellingly awful movie about a team of astronauts burrowing to the earth's centre, to start the stalled planet (don't ask) revolving again with nuclear warheads.

We all have different experiences of reality, and diverse interests and backgrounds that influence the meaning of experiences for ourselves. The debate between many contentions and points of view goes backwards and forwards, and a new synthesis emerges, is challenged, controverted, and a fresh debate ensues. The process is never-ending, there is no finalised truth.The strength of the Truth Commission is that it was based essentially on dialogue, on hearing all the different viewpoints, on receiving inputs from all sides So the commission did not begin with the archive. The truth emerged lava-like, and congealed for posterity to end petrified in its limited but undeniable way in the archive..