The truth, as any fool could predict, is somewhere in between. By which I mean it’s not banter’s fault that spiteful sods with a grudge now have a word for their most revolting comic instincts. A comedy roast is still just a comedy roast, even when it’s really near the knuckle, but sometimes using humour as a kind of escape vent for bleak thoughts allows other things to travel the same path. And it would be wrong to try to halt the little bit of laughter that releases a lot of tension in what are, after all, very tense times.
That said, it’s abhorrent to claim that everyone should just put up with abuse just because the abuser has claimed banter as a free pass. The idea that social taboos need to be dissected by humour, while appealing in the hands of expert comedic surgeons, only betrays the rubbery scalpel edge of the tools used by most pub boors.
And if things do go badly, the idea that “I’m sorry you found that offensive” could even be considered as a real apology for any offence caused is beyond laughable.
WHAT TO SAY: “My comedy is about challenging social norms and forcing people to examine their own prejudices, yeah? Now get me a pint.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Easy, love, can’t you take a joke? Jeez!”
Ampersand Foods
British cuisine has long been the subject of international derision. Many Americans like to make jokes claiming that British chefs think the way to prepare any meal—from Christmas dinner to cornflakes—is to take the basic ingredients, whack them in a pot and boil them for nine hours, then dollop everything onto a plate in a pool of rapidly cooling water, with a sprig of parsley as a garnish.
This is patently unfair, especially coming from a nation that seems to believe that a reasonable dressing for any dish—including dessert—is cheese. The British Isles can boast some world-beating recipes, and some of the best of them are made with a secret ingredient they have always been very fond of: the ampersand.
It’s there in some of their best-known dishes: not just fish & chips*—the full title of which should really be fish & chips & mushy peas—but also firm favourites like bangers & mash (sausages and mashed potato and gravy), pie & mash (eel pie, mashed potato and a parsley-based sauce called liquor) and the ever-popular steak & kidney pie. And it’s particularly prevalent in some of their most beloved food brands too.
The mighty fish & chips (& mushy peas & tartare sauce).
It now seems incredibly quaint to look back on a time when the makers and purveyors of foodstuffs would simply name their companies after their founders, especially in an era of one-word corporations like Innocent and Starbucks and Monster. It’s not unlike Coldplay calling themselves Martin, Buckland, Berryman & Champion, which they almost certainly would have done had they formed in 1972.
There’s Marks & Spencer, whose food hall contains many wondrous delights. Some are precooked and ready to eat; some you take home and bake in the oven. Marks’s is any Brit’s absolute reliable standby should one attempt to throw a dinner party and then panic over what to serve. Even the queen would find herself pleasantly surprised by a table groaning with its food.
Mind you, she’s probably more of a Fortnum & Mason girl. They’re the people who make the hampers wealthy people send to each other at Christmas (if popular fiction is to be believed). Never mind the ready-to-bake three-bird roast, a hamper from Fortnum’s will come with startling delights such as pickled quince and Piccadilly piccalilli, with variations tailored for any occasion (apart from a children’s birthday party where they’re expecting Happy Meals for everyone). There are hampers for him, hampers for her, hampers for mothers and fathers and lovers and fighters. Cheap(ish) hampers and plush hampers. It all depends on the statement you wish to make.
One item that will probably make an appearance in either retail establishment is Worcestershire sauce (which, as any fool knows, is pronounced “woostersheer”, just to save an impatient look from a British shop assistant). This peculiar condiment—most famously used in the creation of the Bloody Mary—adds a brackish tang to any dish, is entirely unique, has carried the Queen’s Warrant as a sign of purebred British quality, and is made by Lea & Perrins.
Crosse & Blackwell does not have the Royal Warrant, but its creations are no less singular and no less popular. Specializing in preserved food—whether that’s tinned beans, dehydrated soups or chutneys and pickled items—this is the company responsible for making Branston Pickle, which is to chutney what Shakespeare is to the theatre. There will always be other pickle relishes, and some of them are wonderful, but Branston is the one you’re most likely to find in a ploughman’s lunch. If any relish were to take on the mantle of Sole British Pickle, Branston would be top of the list.
Should you be looking for something of a more pulsey, nutty or vitaminy nature, the place you’ll need to go is Holland & Barrett, which will sell you an enormous jar of weightlifter’s protein powder with your Bombay mix and multivitamins. It’s that kind of place.
Huntley & Palmers used to rule the world with biscuits. At one point it had the largest biscuit factory on the planet, with its own internal steam railway network, churning out four hundred different varieties of biscuits and exporting them all over the British Empire in colourful tins. The firm had the kind of market penetration that McDonald’s has now, only it amalgamated with rivals Peek Frean and Jacob’s to form Associated Biscuits. Although once the & was gone, so was the market dominance. Coincidence? Well, probably.
Tate & Lyle specialize in sugar, with Lyle’s Golden Syrup proving to be a particularly iconic piece of British packaging, thanks largely to the green and gold tins featuring an illustration of a dead lion with a swarm of bees above it. This is not as unsettling as it sounds; the image comes from part of the Old Testament, in which Samson kills a lion and later discovers a bees’ nest, complete with honeycomb, in the great beast’s carcass. The inscription on the tin—the same now as it has always been—is taken from Judges 14:14 and reads, “Out of the strong came forth sweetness”.
All of which just goes to underline a simple point: while an ampersand may not be the only thing required to make truly great British food, having a couple in the kitchen will certainly come in ’andy.
WHAT TO SAY: “Care for a dash of Worcestershire on your pie & mash?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “So wait, Lea & Spencers does . . . what?”
Conkers
This game has taken on legendary—nay, mythical—status as a totem of childhood fun, most commonly for British boys, although that’s probably as much to do with the legend as the reality. And that’s an important distinction to make, because the British love of conkers is all about the memory of conkers, the legend of conkers, and there are two important reasons for this:
1. It’s only really played by children from around the age of eight until the age of eleven and, even then, can only be played for a short period, during the early weeks of autumn. This means most children, even the keen ones, have perhaps two or three seasons as conker players. So to think back as adults, on that time between the full blush of childhood and the shaky onset of puberty, is guaranteed to provoke a rush of fond memories.
2. Thanks partly to concerns over playground safety, but mostly to the rise of handheld electronic devices, very few children actually play conkers any more. There are exceptions and enthusiasts, although they do tend to be pushed by adults seeking to re-create that innocent rush for their own children (or grandchildren).
The rules of the game are simple, but some preparation is key:
Choose your conker—a horse chestnut—preferably harvested in the first flush of autumn during a walk through the fallen leaves in your wellies. Having found a suitably tough nut, drill a hole through it and thread a bootlace through the hole, tying a hefty knot at the end. Hold the other end of the string, and make a few experimental swings with your conker, as if using a flail. Now you are ready to play.
Find a suitable opponent with his or her own weapon and face off. Player one dangles his conker at arm’s length and waits. Player
two winds the string over her knuckles until there’s about five inches left and, keeping the string taut, swings her conker at the other, attempting to smash it to bits. Then the positions are reversed and it is player one’s turn to let fly, whether contact has been made or not.
The game of conkers (first position).
The conker that eventually survives intact gains a point, becoming a one-er (new conkers are all none-ers). Subsequent victories add to that conker’s tally, moving from a one-er to a two-er and so on. In some areas conkers take on the scores of the conkers they beat, so a one-er smashing a two-er will become a four-er: adding one for the game, as well as the two points belonging to the smashed conker. The former two-er is now just a smashed horse chestnut on the floor.
The preparation of the conker for battle has also taken on the status of a mythic quest. If you ask most British people of a certain age, they will tell you about baking conkers to make them harder, or soaking them in vinegar, or even keeping them in a drawer for a year before using them. Of course, these methods are to conkers what performance-enhancing drugs are to the Tour de France, but a lot of enthusiasts claim that the stamping-out of these traditional methods of one-upmanship has contributed to the decline of the game in school playgrounds. These are clearly not smartphone users.
But even if the only people who play conkers are those who are too old to play conkers, the myth of conkers is what will endure. Despite being less than two hundred years old, conkers feels both ancient and traditional and also very eccentric. Three qualities most Brits find very hard to resist.
A related game in Peterlee, Durham is played with hard-boiled eggs, held sharp side up. It’s called egg jarping, and the town even plays host to an annual World Jarping Championship, although there probably aren’t that many teams coming from too far afield (see: Weird Traditions).
WHAT TO SAY: “No conkers? Okay, who wants to play British bulldog?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “You’ve cooked this one—I can smell it.”
EastEnders
Things have changed in the smoke-blackened continuing drama meeting room since we last visited. It is now the early 1980s, and Coronation Street has been dominating the TV schedules for over twenty years. It’s been the subject of some rivalry from a show called Emmer-dale Farm—later renamed Emmerdale to steer the story lines away from cattle, feed and threshing—and another called Crossroads, but no one has managed to create a serious contender for Corrie’s crown. The people sitting around the fabled table have been having a serious go, though. This time, instead of paper there’s a whiteboard, which is becoming increasingly mucky at the top as successive ideas have been abandoned and scrubbed away before they can even be fully explained. Sometimes the titles are enough: Victorian Boxing Club, Zookeeper Nation, Eldorado . . . it’s a sorry state of affairs and by now some of the senior executives are openly sobbing into their ties.
At the dark end of the table, the shadowy man has begun to clip his latest and fattest cigar, sighing at some volume. He is starting to lose what little patience he ever had. Then a brash voice pipes up from behind the whiteboard. It’s a cheeky little fellow in an outsized bottle green frock coat and tatty top hat, and his face appears to be lit from within.
“If I may be permitted to speak, your honour?”
“What? Who are you?”
“Dodger’s the name, sir. I’m what you might call a jack-of-all-trades. Sometimes I can be found relieving hardworking gentlemen, such as yourselves, of their heavy wallets; sometimes I’m delivering packages and messages for my personal sponsor—a fine fellow who only ever hurt those what he don’t like—and sometimes I’m away down the boozer to neck the gin. But today I have the answer to your prayers . . .”
“I . . . have prayers’?”
“O’course you do, sir. ‘Course you do. You want a new soap opera—”
“If one more person calls them soap operas, so help me I’ll have you all shot. They are ‘serial dramas’, or ‘continuing dramas’, and—”
“I know how it goes, guv’nor. I calls myself a toff sometimes too, but it don’t make me posh. A soap opera is a soap opera and there ain’t a thing you can do about it. Now, it strikes ol’ Dodger that what you needs is a slice of working-class life, with a community of people what lives on top of each other in a big city and meet up in the pub for drinks and plotting and romance and fighting. That’s what the people want.”
“They do want that. And they get it. It’s called Coronation Street.”
“No, no, no, me old china. I’m not talking about your northerners and their flat caps and whippets and all that rubbish. I’m talkin’ about your proper Londoners. Y’know, salt of the earth, happy to greet you with a smile and a hearty handshake while emptying out your pockets and throwing you in the canal. That lot.”
“So this will be set in the past? Like Dickens?”
“Like who? Naw, mate, this will start right now, in the mid-1980s, in the East End of London, in a made-up borough called Walford and a place called Albert Square. We’ll have a decent mix of characters—gossipy laundrywomen, brassy barmaids, ruthless businessmen and a couple of wannabe gangsters, that sort of a thing—and we’ll have them all mix together in the pub in the middle of the square. Let’s call it the Queen Victoria, Gawd save ’er.
“Then we’ll have a market just outside the pub, and a café by the market, so there’s a lot of movement and people can see what’s going on from all sorts of different angles.”
“And let me guess: we’ll need to get the tone of the dialogue just right . . .”
“Woss the matter with you, sir? Are you simple? The dialogue? Dialogue, is it? Don’t talk daft! Alls we need is a lot of action and some hard-hitting story ideas. We need issues! We need a schoolgirl to get pregnant with an older man. We need gay characters . . . with HIV! We need acts of betrayal, drug addictions, prostitution, alcoholism, sex trafficking, racism . . . the lot! We need to show London as she really is, and then get rid of all the la-di-da bits, like galloping house prices and all the museums and stuff, until all that is left is unmitigated misery and the occasional singsong around the old Joanna.”
“Old . . . Joanna?”
“Strewth! Where you been all your life? The piano! In the pub! Anyway, eventually your soap will become every bit as popular as Coronation Street. The two soaps—and don’t get uppity with me, sir, ‘cos that’s what they is—will compete with each other for the greater ratings, which means bigger issues, harder-hitting story ideas and more heartache for everyone. It’s gonna be a right set-to and no mistake.”
“And what will we call it, this endless parade of urban misery?”
“There’s only one thing we can call it, sir. If we let slip the idea that this is a dramatic presentation—and not real urban life as she truly is—people won’t believe a word of it, as God is my witness. So it’s got to be EastEnders, with two capital Es, because it’s a doubly capital idea.”
“Before I decide, can I ask one thing, Mr. . . . ah . . . Dodger?”
“Whatever pleases you, your worship . . .”
“Could you please take your feet off my conference table?”
And with that, the cigar is stubbed out, the lad looks crestfallen, and silence falls for a final time.
WHAT TO SAY: “Of course, it will all go to pot when Dot Cotton dies.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Buddy, I’ve been to the real East End and they’ve got the ethnic mix all wrong.”
Regional Nicknames
This is a delicate topic, because there’s a fine line between laughingly mocking other communities in the spirit of healthy regional competition, and outright racism. Popular tastes change over time, faster than language does, and so words are often left in common use that are a throwback to an era when prejudices were so heavily engrained in culture that it seemed impossible to shift them even if the will was there. No matter how lightly thrown a word like jock, taff or sassenach may be now, it can land like a brick made of flint. And ev
en the slightest of laughingly competitive terms can be thrown around angrily by frustrated people with a nasty agenda, because that’s how bullying works.
So while the Brits tend to pride themselves on playing fair, this by no means prevents some of them from bickering among themselves in quite an unpleasant fashion or finding fairly insulting ways to demean their neighbours. That’s not to say there’s no fun to be had whatsoever, just a note to say tread carefully before you let fly.
Of course, nothing gets the creative brain fizzing like a war, and over the course of two world wars, and a lot of time spent waiting around in trenches with little to do, Allied troops managed to come up with a colossal backlog of nicknames for the Germans. These included: Dutch (a derivation of Deutsch, as in “Pennsylvania Dutch”) Cabbage Eaters, Krauts, Fritz, Jerry, the Hun, Atilla (as in: the Hun), the Boche, Ludwig, Gerboy, Germhun, Square-Heads and so on.
Some of these were quite hard to drop once peacetime arrived. In the early 1970s, when German youth were attempting to create a new musical form out of the psychological debris left by the war, they left language behind, preferring to create long jams with a theme of space exploration. And what did the British rock press charmingly decide to call this radical movement? Krautrock. Because it was made by the Krauts, you see.
The Brits do it to themselves too, of course. It’s part of that inherent tribal thing, the bonding together against a common foe that fuels all sports. Some of the names come from without; some from within. So the residents of Birmingham will be called Brummies, Liverpudlians are Scousers, the residents of Newcastle are Geordies, and nearby well-to-do Durham has Posh Geordies. Manchester has Mancunians, Sunderland has Mackems, London has Cockneys, Glasgow has Weegies, Sheffield has Steelies, Leeds has Loiners (or, magnificently: Leodensians).
Stuff Brits Like Page 23