My ears pricked up as I heard the 6.00pm BBC news on Radio 4.
Rishi Sunak, our prime minister, was making an official government apology to past victims of mistreatment in the armed forces, following a report by Lord Etherton into the plight of serving LGBT persons from 1967 to 2000.
In it he used the phrase 'the British state'.
I'd never heard that phrase before. I'd hitherto only heard the country being called 'the United Kingdom'. I wondered whether this signalled an eventual renaming of the country; and in turn, what that might mean.
It wasn't as if this acknowledged mistreatment of LGBT personnel extended back into a time when, say, the present Republic of Ireland was still part of Britain, because if so I could easily see why one would need to be careful about naming the responsible national entity. 'The British state' clearly can't include the Irish Free State, which became Eire. But if considering only the period 1967 to 2000, the country existing then - and now making this retrospective apology - was undoubtedly The United Kingdom. So why not say so?
Perhaps I'm picking up on something that really isn't there.
And yet, if you think about it, the UK will have to be renamed at some point in the future. I'm pretty sure that Scotland at least will get its independence within the next twenty years, if not sooner. In the same time-frame I can see Northern Ireland becoming part of the Republic. And it's not hard to imagine Wales wanting to go the way of Scotland. It will become increasingly awkward to speak of 'the United Kingdom'. As bits drop off, the country will have to be be given a transitional name - the 'British state' perhaps? - until the parts that want to leave the UK have all left, when it can be called simply 'England'.
It sounds very Elizabethan to me, meaning the first Queen Elizabeth. She ruled a country with a few colonies but no empire, a small country with limited resources on the edge of the European continent, but one that stood up for itself.
However, I don't think we will ever return to the hearty swashbuckling days of Drake and Raleigh. By the time 'England' takes its seat at the United Nations HQ, nationality will mean very little. Every country with a coastline - which means all the current major world players - will see some of its best farmland under water, or scorched dry, and major cities ruined and abandoned. National boundaries will have been overrun as irresistible desperate millions look for dry land to resettle on. I can't see border guards holding back that tide. The alternative is to somehow force those living in hot countries to stay put and die. Only ruthless means will do that. Who will be selfish enough?
For the better-off territories, the ones who might try to control or deflect the movement of entire populations, it will mean either refugees everywhere in camps built to hold them, or a collective mass guilt for doing nothing to save them.
In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four 'Britain' had been renamed 'Airstrip One' - signifying a country forever at war (justifying draconian powers and constant surveillance), a country at the very forefront, the one closest to the enemy (whoever that was: it changed from time to time, and indeed the never-ending war might actually be a convenient fiction). Thankfully his dreadful vision did not come to pass. But events may thrust a different dystopia upon us. Maybe we will end up being called 'Holding Territory One'.
'England' as we know it will have gone, the green and pleasant land buried under a sea of muddy tents. We will witness an awful transformation. No doubt I myself will remain comfortable enough, at least compared to the average displaced person living precariously on handouts. But all of us will feel shipwrecked.
