The Heartbreak of Vinnie Jones and All the Other Lost Englishmen

"There’s nothing to come back to here. To me, England is past its sell-by date. It’s not the country I grew up in. It’s a European country now. If someone blindfolded you and put you on a plane in LA, and you landed at Heathrow and they took it off, you wouldn’t have a clue where you were.

"[In LA] a bottle of Ribena is $14. But I get my Walkers crisps delivered once a month. I have a box of Roast Chicken, a box of Salt and Vinegar and a box of Monster Munch."

England’s fuct. That’s the word on the street from yer man, Vinnie Jones – the word on the street of Los Angeles. Because, like all the best Anglo cultural analysts, the hard man now lives out his hardest hard-man fantasies in America. There, no one can understand him when he says: “I ain’t pissing about.” They just think: 'Who's that weird British guy?' Then someone tells them: “That’s Vinnie Jones. He used to be a soccer player. With a vicious reputation.” And they say: “A vicious soccer player? You gotta be kidding me. Is there such a thing? Those guys only have to get touched and they're falling over.” He don’t get no respect, but that is the natural fate of the Brit in LA, and Jones is now part of that narrative. He’s an alien. A legal alien. And for all their fantasies of being heralded at LAX as the authentic plummy-mouthed ancestors of all America and getting cheered through the taxi queue by cops who want to know whether they’ve ever met The Queen, they ultimately get the same treatment as Danes or Spaniards or Australians. In truth, it has never mattered much whether we fought their wars or not.

Like Morrissey, who can't seem to give an interview without slagging off our lives, Jones has decided that Britain is stuffed. That only America, with its relatively immigration-free history, can provide shelter for him, from an England that has torn its own guts out in the rush to accommodate those foreigners who arrogantly feel that Barbados just isn’t good enough for them any more.

There’s something beautiful about the wounded pride of these men, stalking off to Italy or LA to be alone with foreigners. To express their love of England through their hatred of what England has become. To sit in their big houses on the hill among the palm fronds, wondering whether they should go down the expat deli for more Marmite. Endlessly plugging the buttons on their satellite remotes between Sky News and BBC World. Sweating like fallen racehorses as they cocoon themselves in the latest debate over the bedroom tax. England perceived through the lens of Sky News in foreign hotel rooms must seem a strange, queasy beast. A land composed entirely of missing children and NHS surveys about obesity.

The problem isn’t England. England is a lump of coal-filled rock in the North Atlantic where 50 million people try not to starve or kill each other every day: in itself it neither supports nor overturns their theories. Perhaps anyone staring down the barrel of a Schuh-Topshop-Millets-Marks-Argos-Boots-Primark cyclical high street would be inclined to agree that something has gone wrong over the past 30 years. But that is not the point Jones is making. He's more concerned with a sense of nativeness that he feels he has lost. “Who am I?” he is asking himself. “What is my essential cultural nature in a post-modern globalised worldspace where questions of economics inevitably trump questions of social cohesion, where culture is obviated by commerce?” Or perhaps just “Facking foreigners everywhere.”

The problem is the romantic image of England that the Morrisseys and Joneses have put together in their heads. It’s easy to see how Morrissey did this. He listened to Vera Lynn on repeat and hoovered up Alan Bennett until he’d invented a country that, when it loved him, was loveable. But when it turned against him – in all its flaws, all its horrible realness – was exposed as being something other than the imaginary country that Morrissey had concocted in his mind.

As for Jones, well, perhaps his delusions are less potent. Though he is also a quintessence kinda bloke, just in a very different way to Morrissey – all that time spent in Guy Ritchie movies, having his head filled with instructions about which doors to blow off by people called ‘Arry, it’s affected him. He has come to genuinely believe that there is a race of people in Bow who love jellied eels and knees-ups, whereas what is actually in Bow are various bunches of people who love jalfrezi and curry goat and Skol and FIFA, and the people who used to live in Bow and like jellied eels now live in Swanley and love ASDA Everyday Value Jalfrezi. When the fantasy dissipates, all he can do is bury his head in another Krays biography and, with a heavy heart, bemoan England’s ongoing failure to be cast as itself in a biopic of England.

There’s some small irony in these figures ending up in LA: the least-English place on Earth. It would be alright if they'd moved to Belgium – the climate is similarly cheerless, the people similarly fat around the haunches, their diets similarly reliant on chips and mystery-meats to soak up the gallons of sulky beer. Belgium has long struck me as Britain’s spiritual twin. Chiefly because they’re the only other Europeans who seem to be made consistently furious by alcohol. They’re French without innate moderation and Dutch without a liberal relaxedness. They’re as culture-divorced and at-sea in the 21st century as England is.

But to end up in LA, denouncing Wolverhampton via your hands-free kit as you hum-vee down a satirically straight ten-mile boulevard in the sort of heat that would melt a lizard into an inky green splotch, that’s something else entirely. In a way, it stops people saying, “Well if you don’t like it, then leave.” You’ve left. Point made. In another way, it doesn’t help your central case that all you want out of life is Tetley's and brooding clouds and people in charcoal overcoats dripping in and out of Dorothy Perkins, dreaming of lunching on moderately-interesting cakes in a church cloisters tea shop.

The idea of Morrissey in a hot climate has always been an intuitively offensive one. Morrissey sweating. Morrissey with a piña colada. Morrissey with a sunburn-line at the top of his arse. A maudlin poet on a jetski is always a travesty. Much like his bulking-up, it offends our sense of who he ought to be. Damn that man and his failure to die at an appropriate time. Damn his desire to become happy and liberated.

Essentially, Vinnie’s case is a Platonic one. His argument seems to be that every country should be what that country is at its essence. India should be the most Indian country you've ever seen in your life. Azerbaijan should be, uh, whatever Azerbaijan’s meant to be. France should be 100 percent French. The French at least know this, and they are consequently quite good at hiding the bits of France they don’t want you to see – the malls, the theme parks, the smoothie bars, the go-karting tracks – in big out-of-town pleasure-gulags where they can go and be as gauche as they damned well please in the privacy of their own kind, while the tourists fritter away their Euros getting mimes to juggle bulbs of garlic outside the Hôtel de Ville.

Many people move abroad for work purposes. Many more to make a better life for themselves. But then some do it because they are breaking-up with England. Except they’re not, really, are they? Really, these people just feel that they have to be alone in order to preserve the idea of the England they hold dear. It is that very isolation that makes their life possible. “England, in order to save you, I have to kill you.” That’s their credo. And it has its own, perverse kind of beauty.

Suitably distanced, perhaps Moz and Vinnie stage occasional meet-ups at Ye Olde King’s Head in Santa Monica and develop their rose-tinted views, while each drinking a pint of fish and chips, before popping next door for to the Gift Shoppe to grab some more Heinz 55. A landmark for Brits in LA, the King’s Head (or should that be "Kinge’s Heade"?) is a place where the clock still stands at ten to three, where there is always Heineken Super League on TV. Always Charlatans on the jukebox. A nirvana where they can truly immerse themselves in their deliberately distanced reveries. I’d like to think so. It’d be a shame if they just did as the natives did, eating burritos, talking about Game Of Thrones.

Follow Gavin and Marta on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @MartaParszeniew

Illustration by Marta Parszeniew.

Previously – A Depressing Guide to the Classic British Drug Mule Arrest