Britishness is up for grabs once more As I was growing up in Northern Ireland, in a Unionist family, I could sense the ambivalence about Unionism in a sizeable proportion of mainland Britons. The unease often seemed more pronounced in the urban chattering classes, for whom any hint of old-fashioned patriotism sparked an instinctive shudder. Ulster Unionists, in common with the British population of Gibraltar and - to a lesser extent - the Falkland islanders, were often regarded as faintly embarrassing distant cousins, who demanded contact rather too frequently for comfort. Official Britishness, in the Eighties, still meant a certain form of dry, mannerly understatement: the first rule of being British was that one rarely felt moved to speak about being British. It meant the cultural bulwark of the Church of England and the unifying memory of the Second World War. It whispered of Oxbridge, cricket at Lord's, a liking for real ale in country pubs, and the train hissing to a halt at leafy Adlestrop. In the past 30 years, Britain - and the world beyond - has altered radically and rapidly. The cultural climate changed: in the post-Diana, Tony Blair years, public expression grew more sentimental, vociferous and angry. People talked more and louder, on mobile phones. Immigration rose to unprecedented levels and - while Britain has historically been good at integrating new arrivals - the fast pace of change has added to a sense of social uncertainty for some. The rise of social media corresponded with the voluntary abandonment of privacy: to live one's life is now to tell other people about it. Shopping became first a hobby, and then a form of religion; the Church has been in gradual decline. What is Britishness now? It is harder to define, or perhaps it is in the process of redefining itself. It is more culturally fractured than before, more anxious but maybe more open-minded. Last year's spectacular pageantry for the Jubilee and the Olympics acted as a comfort to recent arrivals and native Britons alike. The triumph of Somali-born Mo Farah, running for Britain and ecstatically wrapped in the Union flag, briefly suggested a new kind of national possibility. Perhaps tellingly, mainland Britons no longer find the Union flag and the Royal family mildly embarrassing, but rather reassuring. It is as if they instinctively recognise that an identity in flux needs something tangible to grab on to. On that single point at least, they may inadvertently have inched closer to understanding the Ulster Unionists. Let your heart thaw for Atmeh Temperatures are falling in Britain, as a freeze grips the country. They have plummeted in other places too, where people have no electricity, running water, sanitation, drainage or adequate medical facilities: I am thinking of the Atmeh camp on the Syrian border with Turkey, where more than 12,000 Syrian refugees (3,500 of whom are children) are now huddled in flimsy tents on soaked ground buffeted by icy wind. Six children died when a candle set fire to their family's tent on New Year's Day. Suffering is everywhere, always, but there are certain winters that seem forever fused to images of human desperation and international paralysis: that of 1992-3, for example, when the battered people of Sarajevo froze and starved in their besieged city while the world looked on, as if coolly regarding players in some sorrowful theatre. Will this be another such winter, mourned too late? The Syrian refugees in Atmeh have fled slaughter and bombing, only to be embraced by neglect, cold and disease. Yet still we can watch them - in a slowly thickening stream of news reports and videos - growing ever colder and weaker. A handful of small charities are doing everything they can - among them Hand in Hand for Syria and the Maram Foundation - but no major international aid agencies are present. What can the rest of us do? Donate to those who are already helping, and press larger organisations and governments to take action too. Anything, surely, is better than watching comfortably through the little windows of our televisions and computers, and perhaps musing "they were just like us once," before the ice gently settles around our hearts. Addicted to the needle The march of ink across the human body continues at such a pace that I fear I will soon be the only person left unembellished. First Harry Styles, the One Direction boy-band member, unveiled a startling collection of 30 designs on his pale 18-year-old form last week, which appeared to have been selected at random, from the words "Might as well..." to a giant birdcage and his sister Gemma's name in Hebrew. Mr Styles has evidently taken to the permanent art form with all the headlong impetuosity of youth: he has not been tattooed so much as indelibly doodled. Over in the Czech Republic, a country which has long combined politics with a whiff of the avant-garde, a heavily inked man called Vladimir Franz is third in the running for president. Mr Franz, an artist, academic and composer, has covered 90 per cent of his body - including his face and neck - with swirling green, blue and red tattoos, which has given him the unsettling look of a woad-smeared ancient Celt, although his smile is charming. I suppose there would be advantages to being a fully tattooed president. One would effortlessly garner publicity, and never look exhausted. He evidently has both considerable patience and a high pain threshold. While part of me salutes his commitment to surprising folk who have remained with their pigment of birth, I can't help feeling that the wider craze for tattoos is partly related to the modern desire to communicate at all times. Many people now simply cannot stop tweeting, Facebooking and texting. And even when they aren't in communication, the craze for tattoos seems to suggest that they want their skins to keep on talking.