Do you remember when freak winds brought our country to a complete standstill? Do you remember when a man brought Heathrow to a complete standstill when he scaled a fence wearing a rucksack? Crazy days, readers, crazy days. And all of them this week. If a Sunday newspaper reporter manages to smuggle a replica gun into Terminal Five in one of those replica news stories, we'll have our hat-trick.

For all the giddy drama of it all, though, one might hesitate to trot out the old adage that we live in interesting times. If we do, we're certainly carrying on regardless of them.

The observation that constantly updating news turns every minor event into a crisis is not exactly what you'd call breaking news. (Sky would, naturally. They might even get the Skycopter on it.) But in the week when the Brown government appears to be casting around again for that elusive big idea, and has alighted on "What is Britishness?", the sheer drama-queeniness of the news media seems an excellent definition of what isn't.

If you had to come up with the very opposite of what it means to be British - and we've always been better at defining ourselves against things - it would be this hammy insistence that we can't cope with wind, or that one weirdo breaching the Heathrow perimeter will make one iota of difference to the volume of air travel, or indeed to the life of anyone except the chap himself and whoever monitors the CCTV cameras that cover that bit of fence. Most of this week's storm coverage might as well have been brought to you from the teacup in which it was taking place.

One of the most iconic posters of the second world war - when it might be argued that Britishness was under rather more genuine threat than it is now - was the one which read simply "Keep calm and carry on". In recent years this simple, unfussy exhortation has enjoyed a surge in popularity, and it has been reprinted as a poster, on T-shirts - all manner of places, really, except on the briefing notes of reporters required to stand on a pier and affect the pose of someone about to be claimed by the sea.

These days, even keeping calm and carrying on is under threat from those who would cast it as something else entirely. In the weeks after the 7/7 bombings, you couldn't move for reports stating that Londoners going to work were "acting defiantly". Were they heck. They were just carrying on with their business. It was not some querulous, plucky, "otherwise the terrorists will have won" situation. It was an "otherwise I will default on my mortgage and that'll be a bit of a bugger" situation.

If anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to creatures that patently do not possess them, then what are we to call this insistence on imposing the conventions of the news media on humans? Newsomorphism, perhaps - a word as clunky and preposterous as the practice it describes.

Not that we don't all do it. Heaven knows the tendency to cast an event in keeping with convention can be seen in every newspaper and news bulletin in the land to varying degrees. An old truism states there are only 10 tabloid showbiz stories, for instance - things like "is set to wed", "is set to split from" and "has splashed out on a new". All human experience can and will be shoehorned into these templates.

And so it is with the Brown administration's attempt to define what it means to be a citizen of "this septic isle", as a dewy-eyed Derek Trotter once mis-eulogised Britain in Only Fools and Horses. The attempt to distil the richness of British life into some "statement of values" will pare down people's experience of it to such a degree as to be meaningless.

Lord Goldsmith's plan to define Britishness is what philosophers call a category mistake - an attempt to ascribe characteristics to something that could not possibly exhibit such characteristics, or not in the way that has been stated. It is pointless attempting to proscribe something and asking people to salute your definition. Britishness is a quality that people tend to identify in specific experiences, and largely after the event.

Some weeks after the death of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who ate in a London sushi bar before succumbing to polonium poisoning, I remember reading that the sushi bar had gamely reopened for business. It had rebranded with a Russian spy theme. For all the fact that it was a sushi joint, and a chain at that, this seemed a sanguine, peculiarly British sort of way of just, well, carrying on.

When it was founded just a decade ago, BBC News 24 promised to give us "the whole picture of the whole country the whole time". Watching the chap at Heathrow and the windy day distorted into national dramas brought home the folly of making such grandiose pledges, in mission statements or citizenship ceremonies or anywhere else. If we must have a national motto, perhaps we could leave it at "Keep calm and carry on"?