Stuff Brits Like

by Fraser McAlpine

  Being stingy carries such a social stigma that tales of legendary tightwads are handed around in hushed tones. Rod Stewart has been said to be particularly parsimonious—apparently he’s the “let’s just pay for what we ordered” person who will “forget” money for the tip and the champagne—to the extent that Ronnie Wood, Rod’s former colleague in the Faces, famously referred to him as being “as tight as two coats of paint”. Being in a band together, the two of them would have had the “are we doing rounds?” conversation, and Rod must have disappointed Ronnie with his answer.

  The “are we doing rounds?” conversation is the miser’s safe escape from the social minefield of pub protocol. It’s a way of establishing that no one is going to be indebted to anyone else tonight, because you already know you can’t fulfil your end of the bargain. The best thing about the “are we doing rounds?” conversation is it takes place at the very beginning of the evening, when it’s still acceptable to opt out and when everyone is pleased to see each other and excited about the night ahead. In marked contrast to the “are we dividing this equally or just paying for what we had?” restaurant conversation, it’s possible to get “are we doing rounds?” sorted very quickly, with the designated driver and the concerned parent with an early start being given a free pass because soft drinks are so much cheaper. Small groups of mutually supportive round-getters can form quickly, with everyone else getting their own drinks (or even forming a fruit juice subgroup that gets its own rounds more slowly and with far less expense), and the night can continue unsullied by petty bickering.

  Mind you, the canny drinker with an eye for social sport can still employ a few dodges here and there, especially if he wishes to avoid having to carry a wobbly tray of full glasses across a packed pub, such as the one when you’ve just arrived at the pub and you slip a twenty-pound note into a friend’s hand and get him to get the drinks while you secure a table. But these are just minor points of protocol, the sort of trifling victory no one will be upset about conceding.

  And you do still end up getting a round in, so there’s no harm done.

  WHAT TO SAY: “Who wants a top-up?”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Ah, I appear to have mislaid my wallet. Could one of you get me a brandy and I’ll get the first round next time?”

  Bell Ringing

  A pervasive myth has long held that the British think of themselves principally in medieval terms. They live in small, isolated, rural villages, inside thatched cottages near a village green where they like to sit out with a picnic hamper, eat pork pies and drink ginger beer, while the ruffians from a neighbouring village are given a firm thrashing at cricket.

  Sorry, did I say medieval? I meant hobbity.

  In fact, that’s chiefly an English (as opposed to British) archetype and, like all good generalizations, it contains just enough evidence to be suggestive of the truth—there are indeed many villages in the UK that have thatched cottages, village greens and wickerwork—while conveniently ignoring the millions of people whose lives are not, and never have been, anything like that. Some Brits don’t even like ginger beer.

  But one aspect of the great mythical English village resonates through to even the most urban of environments, and it’s all to do with bells.

  Out in the British countryside are many, many churches. You’ve seen The Vicar of Dibley, right? Well, it’s like that: ancient buildings that have served as a moral fulcrum for generations, possibly with something of a leaky roof problem and very often with a bell tower of some description. Those bells have rung out for significant events in the community: baptisms, marriages and deaths being the most common. And sometimes they are just rung for the joy of ringing.

  The same is true in cities, with bells taking a particularly prominent role in London mythology. The nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons runs down a list of the bells of various London churches, and some people claim you cannot call yourself a true Cockney unless you were born within the sound of the bells of the church at St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside (known as Bow bells).

  And bell-ringing societies abound across the country. People from all walks of life (sort of) and all ages (more or less) come together to learn how to create intricate peals and ring the changes. They come to ease the stresses and strains of the working week by yanking on a massive rope and making a terrific row with some mates. And no one can criticize them for that.

  So you can hear bells in the country and you can hear them in the towns and cities. But there are two particularly magical times to hear church bells, two moments at which those resonant chimes are at their most appealing.

  The first is a Sunday morning in which no one has a hangover, there’s nothing pressing that needs doing and everyone is in a good mood. These are the bells that say, “Congratulations, you are about to embark on a British Sunday. Expect little, ask for less, and you will be duly rewarded.”

  The second is slightly more subtle, less easy to define in universal terms, and a lot more personal.

  The author Dodie Smith coined the phrase “twilight bark” to describe the amount of noise dogs make in reaction to other, faraway dogs when the light starts to fade in the day. It’s in 101 Dalmatians as a device for the dogs to carry messages across a great distance. A peal of church bells at twilight on a fine evening—spring, summer, autumn and even winter if there’s a decent frost and the air is dry—has the same resonant, pregnant quality as the twilight bark. Time may as well not bother counting for a bit; what the bells do is provide an audio map to the place some people call home.

  In London or Glasgow or Swansea, that map may also feature the wheezing rasp of heavy traffic, car horns blaring, high-heeled shoes on paving slabs, and the distant rumble of trains. In Shillingford, Praze-An-Beeble and Bagginswood, it may be pockmarked with the lowing of cattle, the sharp caws and hoots of evening birdsong, and the hissing of insects in the long grass, but it’s the bells that draw all of those details in. It’s the bells that cast the spell of mythical England.

  Play a recording of the church bells of home to a lost British traveller and he or she will be back on that warm grass listening to the warm crack of leather on willow before you can say, “But I thought you said you were from Birmingham.”

  WHAT TO SAY: “Shh! Is that . . . Are those . . . Chorlton-cum-Hardy? Here?!”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Of course, most churches use recorded bells these days.”

  The Royal Family

  Pulling together a coherent picture of how the British feel about their own royal family is like trying to work out how they feel about the Beatles. The history of the nation is unimaginable without their presence, their victories are embedded in the fabric of cultural life—although in the case of King William I, his victory is embedded in the fabric of the Bayeux tapestry—and all their follies and quirks have been absorbed into popular myth.

  But with the Beatles it’s easier to discuss and assess their contribution to British life because they made a palpable thing. They created music that people can still listen to and have an opinion on. Whether you enjoy that music now or not—and enormous numbers of British people still do—is immaterial. It is there for future generations to judge, while reading up on the social revolution that blossomed in their wake and grumpily answering test questions like: “The cultural impact of the Beatles was created by the postwar baby boom and has been entirely exaggerated by it. Discuss.”

  With the royals the contribution is less clear, apart from the Queen’s Honours List and the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day (see: The British Christmas). However, that does not mean their actions are of little consequence or interest to British people. The royal family are there to represent the nation, and this does cause heated debate about the extent to which they do that and whether they should continue. There are fans and there are critics, and in between there are people who are interested but not passionate, people who are passionate but not interested, and somewhere, right in the middle, a woman polishing her car in Dudley.

  Havin
g had their role restricted from ruling to reigning, the royal family have become, in the greater public imagination at least, a state-funded soap opera. There have been moments of warmth and empathy, moments of flintiness and discord, and one enormous moment of high drama that came to entirely refresh the public’s relationship with the modern monarchy.

  The period following the death of Princess Diana was a strange time to be British. It came at the end of a long media scrum around her every move, one that was wearying to watch from the outside, so it can only have been exhausting from within. After years of declining affection for the royals—best represented by the strong national debate over the repair bill after a fire damaged Windsor Castle in 1992, the queen’s self-confessed “annus horribilis”—public scorn for Prince Charles and his mistress Camilla Parker Bowles, and a tell-all autobiography, a post-divorce Diana had given a recent interview in which she discussed moving away from the royal family, saying, “I’d like to be a queen in people’s hearts but I don’t see myself being queen of this country.”

  Imagine if an actress or pop star said something like that now. No matter how beloved a figure they may appear to be in the media, imagine how annoyed some people would be at the hubris in a statement like that. And it arrived when strange stories about Diana were a daily fixture of the news. The trouble with a tiring media scrum is that often it’s the person at the centre who appears to be creating all the mayhem, not the camera people and reporters and editors—who would claim to be acting out of public demand anyway. Nonetheless, at the moment Diana died, she was not the queen of British hearts. Her death was a huge shock, but it didn’t become the iconic national tragedy until slightly later on. It took a short while for emotions to shift from “What has she gone and done now?” to “Good-bye, England’s rose.”

  And that transition was created entirely by a congregation that had not been represented until that point. News people believed that the national conversation around Diana was about her being a fallen princess who had let fame go to her head a bit. Her charity work, her public appearances to support causes close to her heart and her willingness to be visibly among the people less fortunate than herself may have raised cynical eyebrows among small-r republicans, but for a good deal of the population it proved she was a people person and a force for good. Her sudden departure, leaving her two boys behind, prompted that silent cohort into action. They began to lay flowers outside Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace. Bunch after bunch, wreath after wreath, over a million in total, until it became clear that this was a national wake.

  That was the moment at which the conversation around the royal family changed. This heartland support was taken as a cohesive movement, an outpouring of national grief, and the media subtly adjusted their coverage to appear more humbled. Even the queen, who had resisted making a public proclamation about the accident, had to acknowledge that usual protocol was insufficient for the public mood, and addressed the nation. Those small-r republicans with a sense of self-preservation also read the mood and shushed up for a bit.

  And that’s essentially the way things have stayed. Having been at the centre of an international tragedy, the general public view is that the next generation—Princes William and Harry, and also Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice—have suffered enough and deserve every moment of happiness coming their way, and people are more than willing to help them celebrate their successes. William’s marriage to Kate Middleton was a way for everyone to reset the clock, take a step back from the stern politics, and wallow in some heartwarming pageantry on a global stage. Plus it was a free bank holiday and a chance for a knees-up, and that’s always welcome.

  William has now assumed the greater part of his mother’s charitable image in the public eye, as well as furnishing the nation with another fairy-tale princess and heirs to his throne, while Harry maintains the fine tradition of royals who get a bit daft when drunk and end up on the front page of the tabloids. The monarchy is in very safe hands.

  WHAT TO SAY: “Do you think we could change the national anthem? It’s a bit dreary.”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Queen of hearts? Was there even a job vacancy advertised for that? I’d have gone for it.”

  Phone Boxes

  Four K6s, loitering.

  It may be a tribute to the many gallons of blood spilled in the centuries-long struggle to forge a nation out of warring bits of kingdoms, or it could be that subconsciously the Brits feel happier among warm colours, the way a daisy bends towards sunlight, but, my crikey, there are a lot of prominent red things on British streets.

  Stand on a roadside in London and you’d be forgiven for thinking every object that provides a valuable public service has been painted an identical shade of red, so that Londoners can be on a constant state of alert as to where they are and what dangers may be present. These include: postboxes, double-decker buses, Royal Mail delivery vans and fire engines, but the most iconic of all are red phone boxes.

  The K2 phone box (and later K3, K4—complete with postage stamp machine—K6 and K8), as designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, became a part of British street life at around the same time as the blue police box (see: Doctor Who). It’s a cast-iron affair, closed to the elements, with six rows of tiny windowpanes on three sides, and it was built like that so people making a phone call could stay visible and safe but still have some privacy to make their call, should a queue form outside.

  The redness is mainly the post office’s fault. When postboxes were first introduced to British streets, they were a deep, bronzed green colour, to subtly blend with the grass and trees, or to remind city dwellers that such things existed. Sadly this thoughtful approach met with a few problems: the postboxes were just too subtle, and people kept walking into them.

  This was before smartphones, so no one was texting or tweeting—unless you count the little cartoon birds circling their dazed heads—and in response, the Royal Mail (which operated both the mail and telephone services at the time) elected to paint the postboxes all bright red. Then it did the same thing when the first public phone boxes were built.

  Naturally, this kind of crimson public gaiety was stiffly resisted at first, probably with a petition or two from outraged locals demanding they tone it down a bit. But then it wasn’t long before London buses decided to get in on the act; and fire engines were always red, because, y’know . . . fire.

  Fifty years later, when the K-series of phone boxes were abruptly painted yellow to match the livery of the newly privatized British Telecom, there were louder howls of outrage, which became eye rolls of disgust as the entire design was abruptly phased out. Their replacements were silvery, glassy and open to the elements from the ankle down—so that no one could shelter in them overnight or leave puddles of unpleasantness behind. Despite having been a firm fixture of British streets for the last thirty years, they remain uncelebrated as an item of street furniture, probably because they just look like phone boxes. And they are not red.

  The K-series, on the other hand, pop up all over the place. There are discontinued phone boxes that serve as tiny book exchanges or libraries in rural areas like Somerset, Cambridgeshire or Cornwall. There’s one in Settle, North Yorkshire that houses small works of art; there’s a K4 in Warrington that still has its tiny stamp dispenser; and the K6 in Glendaruel, Argyllshire has been converted so that it now houses a defibrillator, for a thrillingly retro lifesaving experience.

  Some have been sold to private owners to use as shower cubicles. In Kingston-upon-Thames, twelve old K6s have been arranged to look like a row of toppling dominoes in a sculpture called Out of Order, by David Mach; and the street artist Banksy cut one up and reassembled it to look as if it had been attacked—it lay collapsed in a heap on the ground with a pickaxe sticking out of its back and red paint leaking onto the pavement. And there are still eleven thousand functioning K-series phone boxes from which it is possible to make a phone call, if you know where to look.

  Even if you take all the phone boxes out of the eq
uation, you’re still left with enough crimson, scarlet and poppy-hued objects on the streets of London, Inverness, Swansea and everywhere in between to maintain a state of constant national public vigilance at all times.

  In this respect, being British is not unlike being a mouse or, if that seems too base a comparison, a thoroughbred (but skittish) horse.

  WHAT TO SAY: “Hey, buddy, can you direct me to the . . . oh, it’s there.”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Seriously? People used to walk into the . . . oof!”

  Reality TV

  It’s bubble-popping time! A certain number of people may be interested in reading a book about British culture because they believe the world is going to aitch-ee-double-hockeysticks in a handcart and entertainment media are throwing vacuous nonentities out there as hard and as fast as they can and it’s the end of civilization as we know it unless the British—with their tradition of theatre and literature and thinking hard about stuff—have the key to making everything okay. Surely they won’t have fallen prey to the base demands of reality TV? Surely they’ve seen through the giddy parade of desperate egos and stuck to watching BBC dramatizations of the lives of prominent scientists, starring Benedict Cumberbatch or Tom Hiddleston? Surely? Please?

  Sorry. That hasn’t happened. I mean yes, Benedict Cumberbatch has made those dramas, that’s still a thing, but the Brits are as dazzled by reality TV as anyone. Heck, they invented some of the most successful brands in the genre, and they’re still exploring new ways to put members of the public in front of the camera. One type of these shows has people (and celebrities) trying to be talented for judges—The X Factor, Fame Academy, Britain’s Got Talent, Strictly Come Dancing, all that lot—and another shows people (and celebrities) living in a place for a while, while TV producers tell them to do things. Big Brother being the most notable example, though I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here is the real champion. Big Brother may encourage people to acts of extreme humiliation, but only I’m a Celebrity could put a dismembered kangaroo penis in George Takei’s mouth and expect him to eat it.