On the Continent, people would wonder whether I had made any friends in England. After all, the English "always kept themselves to themselves", thought a German, they were "reserved and a bit arrogant", said a Hungarian, there was "little community spirit", complained a Dutch friend. In their eyes, England was a country determined by a prevailing sense of knowing your place amid all kinds of divisions — class, race, wealth — in short: a country that was all about belonging or not belonging. While this may be true in that English society doesn't call itself open — as, for example, Holland and some Scandinavian countries do — what I encountered when I came to London was something else. In the busy streets, I found on display an innate sense of community which showed itself in the most simple behavioural pattern of moving in space: not bumping into each other even in large crowds, not being overly pushy on escalators and yes, not jumping queues. 

Now, this may be painting too rosy a picture or rehearsing old clichés about polite English gentlemen (and indeed restricting them to this small group of society), but I believe that having a clear sense of yourself while considering others is a root of the uniquely English common sense — which has suffered in the past couple of years, or so it seems. For when I left London having completed my studies, I left a country full of rules and regulations — where a mobile phone company would let you sign a contract only when you could provide the details of your bank account, which you could open only when you had proved you had lived at your address for more than half a year, for which you needed a bill from your mobile phone company. Or where "health and safety" would not allow you to open a window in a stuffy lecture hall. It was a place full of Catch-22 situations. 

I had almost learned to accept this as the absurd other side of the coin of common sense, when I returned to London this autumn and found the country had changed yet again. Regulatory concepts like health and safety had become the subject of universal ridicule and there was a fresh tone in the debates that didn't tiptoe around political correctness. 

Is this shift to do with the change promised by the Conservatives who want to lead the way to a more flexible England? I believe that what drives this subtle, tentative and protean shift is not politics, but the English trait most admired by German writers and thinkers: to have the courage to express bold opinions, without shouting them from the rooftops.