With Brown and Cameron already both promising that they will "listen, and learn from" the people of this country in what is now shaping up to become the most protracted general election campaign since Major v Blair in 1997, who are those people? What is "modern Britain", and who lives in it?

We clearly need to refine the Major stereotypes of women cycling home from church, and men drinking warm beer watching cricket on the village green, because those dreams of Mr Major no longer exist (even if, in truth, they ever did, when he had his "Good Life" vision of the country in the early 1990s).

There must however still be groups of people who make up our great and proud country, whom we would all recognise as ubiquitous to all towns and cities, from Wick to Weston-Super Mare, from Barry Island to Blackpool. But who are they?

I'd start with (from a mental walk around my village):

1. Groups of men in hi-viz jackets sat on wooden tables in pub beer gardens drinking lager

2. Young mums putting oven chips and mini-pizzas into trolleys at Asda

3. Men in their mid-thirties wearing jeans and pringle sweaters and still using hair gel, washing their mid-range hatchbacks on their drives on Sunday mornings

any more...?