British tourists like to feel as if they belong everywhere they go. This is why so many holiday destinations boast English-themed pubs and cafés that serve a decent fry-up, but it is also why many British people avoid those places and head straight for the unwelcomingly local end of town. “We are not a hated nation,” they reason, “so we have no reason to fear walking around in broad daylight, waving smartphones in front of our faces and not looking where we’re going.”
Whether they are correct in this assumption is a matter for further debate, but they do tend to approach all transactions—whether with market traders or rickshaw drivers—with the same brittle air of entitlement, and awkward mock-humility.
It’s all in the body language; there’s a touch of the bow to the shoulders, a meekness to the eyes, that effectively says, “I’m sorry, I know you must think I’m not from around here, and that must be incredibly frustrating, especially as I’m now about to demonstrate that I don’t know any words in your language whatsoever, but if you could see beyond this situation, you would realize that I’m actually not like those dreadful German and American tourists over there. I’m nice! I have empathy! So if you could possibly see your way clear to providing us with TWO. TICKETS. TO. THE. PARTHENON. GRASS-EE-ASS. That would be most obliging. Sorry again.”
Of course, if this approach should prove to be unsuccessful, exasperation quickly replaces submissiveness, and eventually it becomes clear that the reason for the breakdown in international relations is entirely the fault of the idiot who has wilfully chosen to speak a foreign language in their homeland.
Some Brits find all of the above to be something of a chore and will let all pretence at humility drop, launching into a loud and simple “FIVE-O PINT-OS OF LAGER, POR FAVOR”, said with unreserved confidence whether in Spain or Turkmenistan.
Note: The curious thing about this situation is that Britain is an island that can boast at least three distinct and recognized native languages that are not English: Welsh, Cornish and Scottish Gaelic. It’s probably fair to say that it’s the English who are the best at repeating themselves at increasing gradients of volume and temper because, as a nation, they’ve had the most practice.
WHAT TO SAY: “Hello, do you speak English? English? ENGLISH?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Hang on, I’ll just look this up in the guidebook.”
Sarcasm
A sense of humour is like a fine martini: the dryer it is, the better. That means it’s not necessary to guffaw if you have made a joke. It’s not even desirable. It’s not necessary even to smile. In fact, if you can manage to arrange your face in such a way that it’s hard to spot that you’re even joking at all—no raised eyebrows, no cute eye rolling, and definitely no winking—that’s the very best way to interact socially at all times. The fine art of sarcasm keeps everyone on their toes, trying to work out whether that sharp thing you said was meant sincerely or not, trying to work out if you’re really the kind of person who enjoys making others feel uncomfortable or just having a dark laugh, and sometimes being unable to speak from all those sharp intakes of breath. What could be more enjoyable?
And you don’t even have to be trying to get a laugh in order to use sarcasm. It’s a friend to the parent whose child is having an attack of the tantrums—“Still crying? Do let me know when you get dehydrated, there’s a poppet.” It’s a sword of justice for the teacher whose most troublesome pupil has once again failed to hand his homework in—“I can only imagine that today’s excuse will have taken longer to invent than the essay would have taken to write, and as such, you get an A.” And the handyman whose shelves have just fallen off the wall will find more expression and catharsis in a muttered and bitter “Oh, great” than in fifty swearwords. Even the really good ones.
It’s also a wonderful shield to keep prying eyes away from your real feelings. That’s the Chandler Bing model of irony and, let’s face it, if Friends had been made in Britain, he’d have been the hero. Not that the Brits are short of their own heroes of sarcasm. There’s the withering scorn of John Cleese, the fathomless cynicism of Rowan Atkinson’s Edmund Blackadder, and the sharp barbs thrown around by pretty much everyone in Absolutely Fabulous. The banter on Top Gear treads a fine line between sarcasm and the genuine opinions of the three presenters at times, and that can be fun to try to work out. It’s like a word search for sincerity.
As if to counterbalance this, the deadpan comic Stewart Lee had an astonishing routine in which he said, with a stone face, that he hates Top Gear to such an extent that he wishes Richard Hammond had died in the car crash that genuinely almost killed him. Taken out of context, that’s a horrific thought, but because his audience was able to filter out the sarcasm from the sincere point being made—which was that there is a culture of saying a shocking thing and then, when challenged, shrugging and saying it was just a joke, “like on Top Gear”—it became a thrilling highlight of his stage act. Although he did have to stop mid-act and explain this, to avoid a nasty confrontation with the press, which tends to take irony at face value.
Sarcasm can even be comforting. Let’s imagine you are friends with someone who has just had to have a beloved pet put down. Your friend is terribly, terribly upset, and you have gone round to try to console him on his loss. You may go in with something warm and loving, like a hug and a comment on how sorry you are, how it clearly hurts a lot right now, but in time your friend will come to see that the pet is no longer in pain and this will eventually be of some comfort. That’s one way of approaching the situation, and it will probably work just fine.
The other way would be to go in with a sympathetic look on your face, do the hugs and everything else, and then, when you judge the moment to be just right, say you are delighted that the stupid thing has gone, it was secretly stealing your friend’s money for booze and had actually been living a double life with another family two blocks away. And it never pooed in their garden.
It may seem a bold approach in a vulnerable moment, but, let’s be honest, in a situation like this it almost doesn’t matter what you say, so long as your friend knows he can talk about his feelings if he wants to. And one school of thought suggests that going in there and presuming to offer your feelings on the situation, no matter how well intended, could actually be selfish and annoying. All I’m saying is that having a dry sense of humor is not always the same thing as being emotionally cold. Far from it.
Not that there has to be a deep wound to soothe either. Sometimes sarcasm is a good way of saying a thing that no one would expect, because to say the expected thing would be boring. In a bus queue, your eyes meet another person’s and you ask, “Been waiting long?” The other could reply with helpful honesty, but there’s more fun to be had saying, “Twelve years. I’m actually on my way to school.” The trick is not to get in a huff, assuming the other person is being rude, and to come back with something snappy like, “You’d better have the right lunch money—we’ve gone metric now.”
And yes, the day the news came out that the U.S. Secret Service was seeking to develop sarcasm-detecting software for Twitter definitely felt like a victory for British sensibilities.
WHAT TO SAY WHEN SOMEONE SAYS, “SARCASM IS THE LOWEST FORM OF WIT”: “‘. . . And the highest form of intelligence.’ Isn’t Oscar Wilde marvellous?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY WHEN SOMEONE SAYS, “SARCASM IS THE LOWEST FORM OF WIT”: “I’m so impressed you have bothered to learn that quote. It’s a mark of supreme diligence and scholarship on your part and you should be applauded.”
Libraries
Many British people view libraries in much the same way they view colliery brass bands, male voice choirs, child labour laws or the two-day weekend: as a crowning glory of the labour movement. Public libraries are, by their caring, sharing nature, not a victory for capitalism. They’re from the same utopian mind-set that gave Britain the Workers’ Educational Association, free museums and universal suffrage, and the true believers take them very seriously indeed.
P
eople who can afford to maintain their own libraries may not see the need for them. Anyone who attended private schools with beautifully stocked shelves may not even realize what treasures they were being allowed access to, and how exclusive that access was. But the public library is a place to access books—lots and lots of books—in a way that takes all negative consequence out of the equation (provided they are returned in good time). And the memories of being taken to the library to choose and fetch books as children tend to linger long and fondly in the mind.
A public library is a place where an education can happen from a standing start. Ask the writer Caitlin Moran, who was home-schooled and took herself to the local library in Wolverhampton every day, having decided to read every book in each section in a methodical fashion, starting with the books about the paranormal. She still wears a Lily Munster streak in her hair to this day, and that’s the point. A library is a place where self-made men and self-made women can get to work with the self-glue and the self-paint in putting together their self-assembly kits, using the words of geniuses as their instructions. It’s a place where trashy novels and high-minded literature flap their flyleaves seductively in the faces of people with normal, unremarkable lives and invite them to jump aboard for a wild ride. Or read about the inner workings of the internal combustion engine.
It’s a community resource that comes from the community, in order to elevate the community, and libraries know it too. That’s why you’ll find inscriptions on the outer walls saying inspirational things such as “Knowledge is power”, as is carved above the door of the public library in Pillgwenlly, Newport. Far more than just a building with books you can borrow, a library is also a place where local history is stored, where maps and ledgers are freely accessible, along with reference books about the law and council legislation and a children’s section with The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom and Charlie and Lola and all the adventures of Asterix and Tintin. They are a means by which people of meagre resources—people of any resources—can feast on the riches of culture and community whenever they wish (providing all of the really popular books haven’t already been taken out).
They’re also quite stuffy places, often governed by strict policies of quiet reading and no talking: the kinds of places that breed mischief. Many’s the rebellious teen who has brightened a librarian’s day by defacing library books before handing them back with a smile (see: Drawing Willies on Things). Playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell would entertain themselves in the 1960s by sneaking books out of libraries and replacing the dust jackets with homemade ones, complete with a fresh (and scandalous) blurb about the author and the odd naked man for good measure. When caught, they both spent six months in jail. Did I mention the Brits take libraries very seriously?
How seriously? This seriously:
When recent government cuts threatened hundreds of libraries with closure, amid claims that the Internet was providing some of the valuable services that used to be their sole preserve, tempers began to fray very quickly, particularly among authors and poets, the people whose work was being effectively distributed for free by those self-same libraries. Writers like J. K. Rowling, Michael Rosen, Salman Rushdie, Jacqueline Wilson and Philip Pullman took great lengths to speak out against library closures and encourage local people to use their library cards more, because they remembered their own lightbulb moments with books and wanted to be able to hand those down to future generations.
Which does bear some comparison with actors campaigning against the closure of torrent websites because that’s where they first grew to love movies, except it’s totally different because libraries are great. So there.
WHAT TO SAY: “The first thing we did when we moved into the area was get library cards.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I just read stuff on my Kindle anyway, so . . .”
Puns
Here’s a little game you can play. Take a walk down any British high street, any thoroughfare with shops on either side, and see how long it takes you to spot a business that has used a pun in its name. If you’re stuck, try looking on the backs of commercial vans as they scoot down the road. It won’t take long.
That’s because the British love nothing more than a good pun, unless it’s a really bad one. Comedy purists such as John Cleese may look down their noses at humble wordplay as a source of big laughs—his three laws of comedy are, famously, “no puns, no puns, no puns”—but that’s his prerogative: he wrote Fawlty Towers. For the rest of us, the best we can hope for is to find a sentence, popular saying or well-known name and twist it so it says something else in a comic fashion.
Anyone who can do it is in good company too. British tabloids depend on bad puns for their headlines and on their headlines for their sales, which should be ample proof of the pun’s enduring appeal. Here are just a few examples:
Kim Jong Il launches nuclear tests: “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea?”
Bank bosses apologize for global financial crisis: “Scumbag Millionaires”
The UK is due to receive a chilling Siberian storm: “From Russia with Gloves”
George Michael falls from his car on a motorway: “Scrape Me Up before You Go Slow”
Dorset police are recruiting: “May You Be with the Force”
Inverness football team Caledonian Thistle (nicknamed Caley Thistle) beat Glasgow Celtic: “Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious”
But to really experience the full glory of the British love of wordplay in action, it’s back to the high street, where it’s important for businesses to grab the attention of passing strangers and force them to remember who they are.
A good place to start is with hairdressers, who have been at this pun lark a while longer than everyone else—in fact, you could even say (wait for it) that they’ve had (drumroll) a head start (tish!).
As well as the classics like Curl Up & Dye, A Cut Above and Short & Curlies, there are specifically British-themed barber’s and hairstylist’s with names like British Hairways, Choppy Toff’s (toff being a gently pejorative term for a snooty member of the upper classes) and Jack the Clipper.
You’ll find pop culture references too—Jabba the Cutt, Fatboy Trims, Barber Blacksheep, Shearlocks, Alley Barbers—and names that don’t even really work as puns unless you are local. In Edinburgh there is a hairdresser’s called Nut Hoose, a name that only makes sense if you know that nut is Scottish slang for “head” and hoose is a phonetic spelling of “house”.
And this has spilled out into other areas of beautification and en-gussifying, although somehow once you’re advertising a business in which your customers have their skin rubbed by strangers, some of the well-meant gags can become a little creepy. Facial Attraction, anyone?
I once saw a tanning shop that gloried under the name U-Rang-A-Tan, presumably without stopping to think that any kind of visual link between their prospective customers and a wrinkled orange ape might undermine what the business owners hope to achieve. There again, I’ve remembered it for over ten years, so maybe they’re cleverer than I thought.
Then there are the food establishments such as Codrophenia, Abra-kebabra, Baguetti Junction, A Fish Called Rhondda and Breakfast at Timothy’s, or the Chinese takeaway in London that also does fish ’n’ chips: Wok ’n’ Roe.
Or how about the cake shop Much Ado about Muffins? Or the pet-minding service Hairy Pop-Ins, the secondhand shop Junk and Disorderly, the self-explanatory World of Woolcraft, Florist Gump or Pilates of the Caribbean? Then there’s the removal service Jean-Claude Van Man, garden specialists Floral & Hardy and Back to the Fuschia, double-glazing suppliers Pane in the Glass, removal service Toad Haul, the cleaning service Spruce Springclean and a personal favourite, the drainage services company Suck-Cess.
And that’s before we even think about the amount of hours wasted on Twitter every single day with hashtag pun games like #PunkRock-Cooking or #StarWarsSongs, which are in themselves just digital versions of the same conversations people have in th
e pub (see: Banter).
The modern world can be a scary, confusing place, but as long as there are people who are prepared to while away the hours trying to make #RoaldDalek a thing, we’ll all sleep a lot sounder in our beds.
WHAT TO SAY: “Hang on, I’ve got one . . . a bathroom fitter called Cistern Sledge!”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Of course really it should be Shearlock Combs.”
The Bumps
This is included more as a panic prevention measure than anything else. The practice of giving people the bumps is no longer as widespread as it once was, but that doesn’t mean it no longer exists, and should you find yourself in a position where you or a member of your family are suddenly given the bumps, you’ll want to know what is going on, how it is all going to play out, and whether you’ll need to call for an ambulance at the end of it.
This is because, in the initial stages at least, there is not much to differentiate being given the bumps and being attacked by a gang of close friends and family and having your arms and legs ripped off. Luckily it’s a tradition that principally affects children, not least because it’s harder and scarier to give the bumps to a grown-up, and kids are rarely strong enough to cause lasting damage anyway.
The good news is that for 364 days of the year (and 365 on leap years), you are safe from the bumps. There’s only one day of the year in which there is even a mild threat, and that day is your birthday.
That’s the one time, amid rousing choruses of “Happy Birthday” and cake and presents and hearty slaps on the back, that Brits of a certain age and experience suddenly recall the nagging fear from childhood that everyone at their birthday party will suddenly give them the bumps, and it casts quite the dark shadow, I can tell you.
Stuff Brits Like Page 4