Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General, has suggested that school-leavers might want to make a pledge of allegiance to the Queen. This, he thinks, will help them feel more British.

It's at moments like this you need to check the calendar, to see which century we're in.

The idea is proposed by Lord Goldsmith in a report, commissioned by PM Gordon Brown, on British citizenship. In addition to the oath to Queen and country, the report also suggests a national holiday celebrating 'Britishness', whatever that is.

I can't be sure about this, but I suspect that the act of enoblement, the process that raises a person into the ranks of the Lords, must somehow involve the removal of the brain - at least, that part of it that connects the owner with reality.

Or maybe it's just the one batty Lord. After all, according to the BBC News story, Labour peer Baroness Kennedy said: "I think this is a serious mistake - I think it's puerile and I think it's rather silly." I have to agree.

Perhaps Lord Goldsmith dreams of sending gunboats up the Mersey or the Manchester Ship Canal to quell those unruly youths who refuse to play cricket, eat buttered crumpets and obey their nannies.

But to be serious for a moment, the concept of citizenship is important. It's arguable that Britain's multiculturalism has failed. It has led, for example, to the situation where equally batty archbishops can seriously suggest accommodating Sharia in UK law.

But I have an instinctive aversion to this form of identification with something as abstract and arbitrary as a country. There is a fine line between 'sense of nationality' and 'nationalism'. The former may help social cohesion. The latter leads more often to tyranny and oppression.

And another thing: the Queen? Since when has she represented anything remotely relevant to the lives of school-leavers, or even any other ordinary person?

I can't imagine what the ordinary teenager will make of this - something on a scale between bemusement and outright contempt, I imagine. As an idea, it deserves no better.

It was being hit by a truck that settled it. We had already found being back in England an unnerving experience. It was a country we didn't recognise, one that seemed to have been turned into a giant theme park. And the theme is 'shopping'.

The main attractions in Doncaster, for example, are the shops. Actually, 'shops' is too small a word. The Asda was the size of a large aircraft hangar, and about as attractive. The vast array of goods on sale gives you the impression that anything you want could be found under that roof. In fact, it's all a conjuring trick, smoke and mirrors.

The cheese section in Asda was huge. I lost count of the varieties of cheddar. We bought several, and red leicester, stilton, cheshire. And they all turned out to be bland, flavourless, the cheddars indistinguishable from each other. So the choice is an illusion — a marketing trick. Maybe some people like their cheese this way, like to indulge in a show of sophistication ('yes, this is a kind of cheddar made only in a small town in Cornwall') while avoiding the challenge that comes with real choice, real taste. And for those intimidated by the choice itself — that is, by the choice of labels, because that's really the only choice on offer — Asda also offers 'white cheese' and 'red cheese'.

I'm sure good food is available still in the UK, especially at the farmer's markets. It's just that the culture of branded blandness is spreading so wide that it seems to be becoming dominant.

Above the hum of the air conditioning and the mumbling of the zombies traipsing the aisles, was a sinister miasma of muzak, including what I took to be the orchestral suite of the Asda theme tune. As this reached its finale, and uttered its terminal jingle, I saw a shopper slap her hip in imitation of the company's TV ads. It's at moments like this that you know the self-serving corporates have hijacked the country's culture.

Doncaster is also home to a 'retail park'. To me, a park means a place of recreation and escape. Of course, it wasn't a park at all, but a temple to the High Church of Retail. As the opiate of the masses, shopping has long since displaced religion. God is in the credit details.

Does shopping now constitute the main leisure activity in Britain? Maybe so. We know of one British woman, who recently returned to the UK from France, whose idea of entertaining her bright but underchallenged seven year-old daughter was to take her shopping. Not to the zoo, or a museum, or to play with her peers, or even to spend time together in a real park, but to spend money on unnecessary objects.

And can anyone tell me why it's necessary to mention the brand names of motorway services on the signs telling you how far away they are? Does anyone really pass-up one brand to travel a further 27 miles to get to their favourite? And is anyone really sad enough to have a favourite brand of motorway services?

The service stations themselves are clean and bright: they reminded me of American malls and had that same brain-sapping anonymity. Their food courts offer a wider choice of food and drink than the service stations I remember. But it's all major franchises peddling their homogenised, sanitised, taste-free pastiche of food. So it's a wider choice of crap served up in a glossily corporate, soulless environment.

The motorways were completely choked with trucks delivering all this crap to stores just in time for people to waste their hard-earned money on it. Those few parts of the road free of heavy goods vehicles are taken up by hoardes of white vans delivering, installing, maintaining and repairing the same unnecessary crap.

It was a large, articulated truck that hit us — span us around, struck our car several times, finally flinging it against the crash barrier. I won't go into the full details — legal action is pending. But we did discover that side-swiping accidents by foreign trucks (whose left-hand drive tractor units have a nasty blind spot) are now the most common form of crash on England's motorways. And why are they there? That's right — they're feeding this disease of consumption.

To us, England seemed unfriendly, in fact positively hostile. The crash didn't improve our mood, of course. Our car was a write-off and we continued our journey back to France in a tinny little Fiat, feeling under threat from all sides. It was night by then, and the roads had cleared a great deal. We understood why when we saw the trucks, like sleeping monsters, dozing in night-veiled laybys. We tip-toed past, afraid to wake them.

It will be a while before we go back.