A century on from the beginning of the end of that status, though, the stiff upper lip has lost its hard-power edge. Today, it serves largely as a cutesy means of rationalising Britain’s modern impotence. The ne plus ultra of this register was once Richard Curtis films, a sensibility later distilled into the “Very British Problems” X account. This outlet — and now book — generally focuses on themes of repressed emotion, bad food, and cups of tea, while studiously avoiding any mention of the problems that actually afflict our floundering post-imperial rump Britannia. For instance, every political issue downstream of the conviction — pervasive among the Guardian listicle class — that we should make up for the Empire by having no border control at all.

Dylan B Jones’s listicle fetishises cheap ready meals, telly, overpriced drinks, provincial origins in the “Malvern Hills Massif”, wincing at the cost of a classic posho staycation in Cornwall, and keeping up some semblance of Sloaney appearances with “the Barbour jacket you got for a fiver at Oxfam”, while finding ways to express class snobbery indirectly, such as “carefully avoiding eye contact with your neighbour who just bought an XL Bully”. These are less evocative of some universally shared experiences that “define and unite modern Britons” than the type of daily indignities suffered by expensively-educated young adults, waking up to the reality that (say) freelance journalism does not, in fact, support the lifestyle to which their ancestors were accustomed — but whose expensively-inculcated progressive politics do not permit nostalgia for the British ascendancy that did.

In other words: this listicle is intended as a light-hearted, rueful piece at which the reader can smile in recognition. But unless the author is playing a more sophisticated Straussian game than is typical of its publisher’s output, its revelations are mostly inadvertent. Whether or not the author went to public school, the listicle strongly suggests at least an implied readership that did. One that, since leaving school, is now trapped both by the ingrained reflex of the stiff upper lip and that of economic decline, such that the only way to express any feeling at all about the grim realities of downward mobility is through a heavily-ironised and cringingly twee “man of the people” act, which apes a working class they do not understand and secretly despise.

If the unedifying spectacle of “Britishcore” tells us anything, it’s that it’s time to kill off the stiff upper lip. Today, Ozymandias-like, nothing remains of this but two vast and trunkless legs of twee: a mode of emotional self-sabotage our declining fortunes can ill afford. Let us instead return to those older modes of Englishness that the stiff upper lip supplanted, and that twee now prohibits. Let us, for example, abandon “fair play” for Shrovetide football. And let’s, for pity’s sake, bin the twee ressentiment of “Britishcore” for the unforced warmth, cheerful graft, and colossal 5am breakfasts of the real eternal Anglo: Thomas Skinner. Bosh.