A BRITAIN Day on which to be extra patriotic? Don't think Gordon Brown's thought his wizard wheeze through properly. Most national days - like July 4 in America or Bastille Day in France - celebrate some sort of revolution. We don't go in much for revolutions in this country. Very un-British.

Difficult to define what makes us British. I'd never really thought about it until a few years ago when I was in America for July 4. There were fireworks, there were celebrations, there were singing cowboys and watermelon seed spitting contests.

There were flags in every front garden and little stars and stripes on all the graves in the cemetery. And at a rodeo, everyone stood, arms clasped across their chests, looking deeply, desperately sincere while they played their national anthem.

It was that wild-eyed sincerity that got me. Admirable though it undoubtedly was, it made us feel a mite uncomfortable.

Let's face it, when it comes to our national anthem, one chorus of God Save the Queen and we all look embarrassed, avoid eye contact and mumble a bit. At the rodeo, we stood up and shuffled, unsure of what to do, trying to be polite in the face of such overwhelming patriotism.

But never before have I felt so out of things, and so British and so relieved to be so. We've had flurries of Britishness before. Many years ago a group of secretaries started a campaign called "I'm backing Britain" and the idea was to buy only British goods. As our manufacturing industries continue to dwindle, buying British has become an almost impossible challenge.

Somewhere I think I still have a Union Jack carrier bag - very 60s. We have some Union Jack pillowcases too, but that's about it.

The idea of a deliberate British day sounds alien really. We have our ways of doing things and - apart from marking victories on battlefields and playing fields - we prefer, on the whole, to do things in our own unobtrusive sort of way and not en masse on a day or date dictated to us.

It's probably what makes us British.