How to be a Brit

by George Mikes

  Genuine expertise comes in, of course, when you begin to be able to recognize the type and the vintage of the wine served. There are two – and only two – ways of doing this: (1) Have a quick glance at the label when no one is watching. (2) Bluff.

  There is no other way. I was once the guest of one of the most famous Alsatian wine-growers whose ancestors as far as he can trace were all vine-growers. I asked him if he could recognize a wine by tasting it. He said that while he would not take a Madeira for a Mâcon or his own wine for Spanish sherry, he could not be sure. Would he be able to recognize his own wine? Not necessarily, he replied. Would he be able to tell the vintage year? Well, he said, there were certain very characteristic years and he would not mix up, say, a 1952 wine with a 1948 – but, apart from typical cases, he could not be sure. Wine of the same vintage may differ according to what side of the hill it comes from; and even bottles coming from the same barrel may taste different to the expert. What can the poor amateur wine-snob do then? You cannot possibly nod all the time when the waiter pours out wine for you and asks you to taste it. A low constant murmur of approval merely gives the impression that you are no connoisseur of wine, and that is more than any self-respecting Englishman can bear nowadays. I can give you three important tips in this field. But whichever you may choose (and all three may be tried on successive occasions) you must first practise at home. You must, first of all, learn the names of a few famous wines (Traminer, Ribeauville, Pouilly-Fuissé, etc.) and you must also learn what goes with what when ordering. There was one school which tried to be terribly broad-minded by ordering, say, red Burgundy with fish, accompanied by the exclamation: ‘I am broad-minded, I just take what I like’ – but this is on the decline and not recommended. Your lady-companion may be worried lest people at the next table, unaware that you are being broad-minded, may regard you as an ignorant lout. I should mention here that while you are studying the wine list, your lady-friend may come up with a helpful suggestion. She may say:

  An impertinent little Margaux

  ‘Oh, we had a wonderful Herriko-Arnoa in the Basque country. Please, Jack, order Herriko-Arnoa.’

  The answer in such cases is this:

  ‘Herriko-Arnoa is indeed a magnificent wine. But I am afraid it does not travel well.’

  A man who knows how various wines travel is simply irresistible. But to return to your homework: you must practise at home, putting a little wine in your mouth and making it travel around inside your mouth while you adopt a meditative, pensive expression. Without this expression the whole show is worthless; any answer thrown out without gargling or looking thoughtful gives you away as a dilettante. And after gargling, you may say one of four things:

  1. In the case of white wine you may always say – very thoughtfully – that it is not cold enough. This is not too witty or too original but it is better than nothing. Incomparably better than nodding feebly and not criticizing at all.

  2. In the case of red wine, you say: ‘It is not chambré enough.’ With a little bit of luck your lady-friend will not know what chambré means. But even if she does, the phrase is still magnificent.

  3. A brand new device – a variation on the theme: you click your tongue with irritation and send back a bottle of white wine because it is too cold, red because it is too chambré. (It is amazing how long it took to think up that one.)

  4. This version is the pièce de résistance; it is to be used only on rare occasions when the impression you wish to make is of decisive importance. You gargle with the wine, go into a species of coma and then declare – more to yourself than to the lady:

  ‘This comes from the sunny side of the hill …’

  The remark is known to have turned the heads of the haughtiest and least impressionable of women.

  Wine snobbery, by the way, is unknown on the Continent. There you find whisky, gin, and dry Martini snobberies, in turn, or – this is the latest – beer snobbery in Italy. A friend of mine – a Frenchman with a considerable reputation as a lady-killer – told me once that nowadays he offers a little wine and plenty of cognac to his lady-friends. He sighed and remarked: ‘I used to say it with flowers … More gallant, no doubt … But with cognac it is so much quicker.’

  On Shopping

  My greatest difficulty in turning myself into a true Britisher was the Art of Shopping. In my silly and primitive continental way, I believed that the aim of shopping was to buy things; to buy things, moreover, you needed or fancied. Today I know that (a) shopping is a social – as opposed to a commercial – activity and (b) its aim is to help the shopkeeper to get rid of all that junk.

  Shopping begins with queueing. If you want to become a true Briton, you must still be fond of queueing. An erstwhile war-time necessity has become a national entertainment. Just as the Latins need an opportunity of going berserk every now and then in order to let off steam, so the British are in need of certain excesses, certain wild bouts of self-discipline. A man in a queue is a fair man; he is minding his own business; he lives and lets live; he gives the other fellow a chance; he practises a duty while waiting to practise his own rights; he does almost everything an Englishman believes in doing. A man in a queue is as much the image of a true Briton as a man in a bull-ring is the image of a Spaniard or a man with a two-foot cigar of an American.

  When your turn comes at last in the shop, disregard the queue behind you. They would feel let down if you deprived them of their right to wait and be virtuous. Do not utter a word about the goods you wish to buy. Ask the shopkeeper about his health, his wife, his children, his dogs, cats, goldfish and budgerigars; his holiday plans, his discarded holiday plans and about his last two or three holidays; his views on the weather, the test match; discuss the topical and more entertaining murder cases, etc., etc., and, naturally answer all his questions.

  A few further rules for true Britons:

  1. Never criticize anybody’s wares, still less return anything to the shop if it turns out to be faulty, rotten or falling to bits. Not only might this embarrass the shopkeeper but it might also infringe one of the fundamental civil rights of all Englishmen, secured in Magna Carta: to sell rubbish to the public. This system has its own impenetrable logic. With tailors, dressmakers and hairdressers you may be as unreasonable as you choose. But to give back a singularly thick piece of meat to a butcher when you have asked for a singularly thin one is fussing. To insist on records of Aïda, failing to be content with Tristan and Isolde or The Mikado instead (when the dealer has made it clear that he would rather get rid of these two) is extremely un-English. Milder and truer types of Britons are known to have bought typewriters instead of tape-recorders, bubble-cars instead of bedroom suites and grand pianos instead of going to the Costa Brava for their holidays.

  2. Always be polite to shop assistants. Never talk back to them; never argue; never speak to them unless spoken to. If they are curt, sarcastic or rude to you, remember that they might be in a bad mood.

  3. If there happens to be no queue in a shop when you arrive, never be impatient if no one takes the slightest notice of you. Do not disturb the assistants in their tête-à-tête; never disturb the one who stands in the corner gazing at you with bemused curiosity. There is nothing personal in the fact that they ignore you: they are simply Miltonists. All English shop assistants are Miltonists. A Miltonist firmly believes that ‘they also serve who only stand and wait’.

  How to Save the World

  Only one shortage in England survived the Seven (or was it Fourteen?) Lean Years: the shortage of Good Causes. When I first came to this country, there were plenty of serious problems to get excited about: Naziism, Fascism, Appeasement, the Spanish Civil War, etc. What is left of all these? Nothing – absolutely nothing.

  Anti-Communism has been played out. Even the ex-Communists have nothing left to say. Besides, Mr Krushchev passes nowadays as the favourite clown of the free world – such a witty, jovial old boy. Because he has a sense of humour, the English (those incomparable champions of the no
n sequitur) are convinced that he is a dear old-fashioned liberal. If only he had not fired that poor little dog Laika into space, he might have successfully claimed to be elected Chancellor of Oxford University.

  It is true that we have some minor issues left on our hands, such as nuclear disarmament, South African apartheid, Notting Hill, Little Rock, swastika daubings and suchlike, but apart from a few dotty intellectuals no one gets really worked up about these. All this is a great pity, because ways and means of fighting for good causes (or for bad ones) have improved beyond recognition.

  Take for example nuclear disarmament. Are you for or against blowing up our planet with hydrogen bombs? According to the Public Opinion Polls: 2.2 per cent are for it, 1.7 per cent are against it and the rest (96.1 per cent) don’t know. Suppose you yourself are against it and you are convinced that the best way to secure our safety is to destroy our own bombs, persuade the Americans to do the same and put our loyal trust in Mr Nikita Krushchev, that dear old liberal (but for that dog, Laika). You may write a very excellent and persuasive book on the subject: it will be reviewed at length in the quality newspapers and political weeklies – in other words, it will remain unnoticed; you may lecture about your ideas to this or that learned society; you may form a club or a party to propagate your thesis; you may hold mass meetings in Caxton Hall – no one will blink an eyelid. But should you, along with a few of your followers, lie down in front of the main gateway at Harwell so that the police have to remove you, you will then be front page news all over the world. Should your disciples do their act in top-hats, pictorial coverage will be quite superb – indeed, you will practically monopolize television news bulletins and other news features for three days.

  The World’s favourite Clown, or the life and soul of the Party

  Here I give you some elementary advice on how to propagate good or bad causes:

  1. If you have discovered a wonderful new dietary system which might benefit humanity to no small degree, do not bother about the Lancet or the British Medical Journal; forget about scientific institutions. All you have to do is walk from John o’Groats to Land’s End. Thousands will come out to cheer you, traffic will stop when you pass through a town and you will become a national figure whether you like it or not, however shy you may be, and however honest and noble your original intentions may have been. Your advice and views will henceforth be sought on every question under the sun (with the simple exception of dietetics).

  2. If you believe in the old glories of the Empire, all you have to do is to go to other people’s meetings, wave rattles, make cat-calls and blow horns. If that does not convince the world that your ideas on the Empire are sound, nothing will.

  3. If, as a poet of genius, you are dissatisfied with selling four poems a year and living on a total annual income of £3.12.6, your course of action is clear. Grow a picturesque beard, put on a purple robe, prepare two sandwich-boards for yourself, stating: STARVING POET and FAIR DEAL FOR GENIUSES! and start selling your poems, printed on pillow-cases, in front of a church where a top social wedding is just being solemnized. Your future will be safe. Your poems will be in such demand that you will not be able to turn out enough of the stuff. You will make millions and will continue to be revered as the ‘Starving Bard in Purple’.

  4. Generally speaking, organize mass marches, wave banners and sell your memoirs on the slightest provocation. You may kill someone and – with a little bit of luck – your crime may pass practically unnoticed in the press, but should you refuse to pay a £1 parking fine and go to prison for your principles (if any) you will find that your publicity will far outdo anything attained by the late Dr Crippen. Suppose you have really hit upon the Word, that you have seen the Light and can at last give us the Creed to save erring humanity, all you have to do is go and dance a cha-cha-cha in your bare feet for an hour or two in front of the House of Lords, wearing a turban. The victory of your ideas is assured.

  How to be Free

  The modern Englishman is jealous of his civil liberties and rightly so. Modern freedom is an English invention – or at least an excellent English adaptation of the original Greek. The ancient and essential liberties are well known to us all; here I only want to say a few words on the new interpretation of some old ideas:

  1. FREEDOM OF SPEECH. You may say whatever you like as long as you circulate in one copy only. You may go to Hyde Park and say whatever you fancy (with certain exceptions) as long as you do not appear in duplicate and are not mass-produced in any shape or form. This is called Freedom of Speech. The trouble is that it may seem a little hard to rouse millions by delivering speeches, however eloquent they may be, in Hyde Park. To make any real impact you would need the Freedom of the Daily Express or the Freedom of Independent Television. But as none of us (including the Daily Express or Independent or B.B.C. Television has anything of shattering importance to say just now, you might as well stick to Hyde Park.

  Modern traffic has produced a number of new freedoms, unlisted in the old statutes:

  2. THE FREEDOM OF JAY-WALKING. Englishmen in cars are prepared up to a point to obey traffic signals; but the very idea that an English pedestrian should wait for the green light is absolutely outrageous. The Englishman’s right to walk under the wheels of lorries was secured in Magna Carta and ours is not the generation to squander such ancient liberties.

  3. THE RIGHT TO REFUSE BLOOD-TESTS – or breathing tests – is another basic right, in fact, you often hear people defending themselves by saying that they only had three whiskies, eight gins and five pints of beer. Anyone who tries to deprive Englishmen of their right to kill on the road is far worse than a tyrant: he is a spoil-sport.

  4. Zebra-crossings have produced a peculiar new type of mentality in an increasing number of people. This has its new correlated freedom: THE RIGHT TO ZEBRA-CROSS. If Freud were still alive he would certainly be able to define this new psychological trait, this zebra-complex. For those afflicted, life is simply a huge zebra-crossing: as soon as they step into the arena they expect all movement to come to a standstill and give way to them. In very bad cases the patient expects people to watch him admiringly and wave to him with friendly smiles.

  In Praise of Television

  When I first came to England, television was still a kind of entertainment and not a national disease. During the happy war years it was off the air altogether but afterwards it returned with a vengeance.

  In the early post-war period, television drew a peculiar dividing line in society. While people boasted wildly of not being able to afford a half of bitter or a pair of new shoelaces, they always refused to have television sets. No one ever admitted that he could not afford one. You ‘cannot afford’ to fulfil a dream; but a television set was rejected on its merits as something belonging to the lower orders. The English middle class were as proud of not possessing television sets as they are of not knowing foreign languages.

  Television, however, has slowly conquered – in varying degree – all layers of society and, whether we like it or not – it has come to stay.

  I have watched a large number of programmes from the nadir of most variety shows up to the upper-middle-brow Monitor. I have watched innumerable statesmen boarding and leaving aeroplanes with heavy, meaningful faces and have always been astonished to find that the same platitudes can be expressed in so many different ways. During our periodically recurrent strikes, I have listened to Trade Union leaders and employers on Mondays and was impressed to learn that no concessions could be made in matters of principle; only to be told on Wednesdays that their relinquishing of these principles was – on their part – victory for common sense and a true service to the community. I have heard innumerable party politicians explaining that defeat is victory, and that it is high time to save civilization by restoring hanging, birching and flogging. I am always fascinated at the sight of mild, slightly bewildered people putting up with the insolent and aggressive questions of those interviewers who buttonhole them in the street or drag them into a
studio. I like the Brains Trust, too – its poets and interior decorators with the gift of the gab, who are able to utter weighty opinions on every subject under the sun without a moment’s reflection. I am fond of watching people in Tanganyika or Madagascar catching rats, snakes and worms for pets while black ladies with bare bosoms look on. (Personally, I should like black ladies with bare bosoms to appear in all my programmes.)

  The basis and main pillar of the art of television is the TELEVISION PERSONALITY. If you want to become a Television Personality, you need a personality of some sort. It may be unattractive or simply repulsive; but a personality is indispensable.

  On the whole I like television very much indeed. The reasons for my devotion are these:

  1. Television is one of the chief architects of prosperity. Certain television personalities can give away money with great charm on the slightest provocation. It is their habit – indeed, their second nature – to give you a refrigerator or a motor-scooter if you happen to pass near them. Should you chance to know what the capital of France is called, or who our war-time Prime Minister was with the initials of W.S.C. – if you are able to scratch your left ear with your right foot while lying on the floor blindfold and watched by ten million giggling spectators, then you are practically certain to be sent to Majorca for a three weeks’ holiday. If you can tell whether polygamy is something to eat or something you find in coconut trees, or recognize the features of a fourth-rate comedian or fifth-rate guitarist in Dotto, you are almost bound to get an annuity for life.