Let's Forkin' 'ave It!

Product Photographer Taking a poke at British identity from London

I forking love this country!

One thing this country is not famed for — or at least, only infamously — is its cuisine.

So I’m looking at my turn-of-the-millennium party table, and this time I’ve stumbled upon the traditional beige “picky bits” — no other country has these delicacies. The Spanish take a cocktail stick and poke olives; we raise our tiny swords and attack mini... wait, they’re literally all mini versions of proper stuff? Who comes up with this, and why did nobody say stop? Our idea of a canapé is a mini version of already ridiculously uninspired food. We’re a hilarious people once you get us under a magnifying glass. Oh, I do love this country. We are a sham.

Looking down at the table, these miniatures jump out at me as the most patriotic pieces on it. Is it normal to have a sense of national pride at the idea of a mini Scotch egg? I guess the last time a sense of British pride sat at the centre of culture was around the turn of the millennium. From ’93 onwards, Britpop rolled into the late ’90s, until Halliwell left the Spice Girls and Cool Britannia ended with the breaking of a nation’s heart.

“These days, you’d get thrown in prison for saying you’re British” — or so my fellow cosmopolitan urbanites like to sneer in mockery of those we view as less enlightened than ourselves. There’s no doubt Britishness is once again at the fore in this country, though its celebration is no longer a point of unity but a point of division. We are at risk of developing a binary feeling about our national identity, much like our chums across the pond 🌭.

These days, I’m glad that when I go to a party, I’m faced with a cornucopia of food from across the world. I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t encounter our silly little miniatures and all those other idiosyncrasies that subtly confirm that we, the

British, are a deeply unserious, serious people.

As a product photographer in London, this is part of a broader project reinterpreting memories of a turn-of-the-millennium birthday party through a Y2K lens, using them to examine our present day — and what we may have lost along the way. You can see the whole project here