(Deep breath.)
Middlesborough has Smoggies, Plymouth has Janners, Nantwich has Dabbers, Bristol has Ciderheads, Dumfries has Doonhamers, Old-ham has Yonners, Barnsley has Tykes, Chesterfield has Spireites (thanks to a wonky old church spire), Coventry has Godivas, Southport has Sandgrounders, Weymouth has Kimberlins, Walshall has Saddlers, Tarbert has Dookers, Sutherland has Cattachs and Kirkcaldy (pronounced “kirk-aw-day”, locally) has Langtonians (pronounced “lang tone ians”), so named because it’s quite a long town.
The people of Wiltshire are called Moonrakers, thanks to the county’s location on the main smuggling route between the southwest (supply) and London (demand). One legendary night, some smugglers were retrieving their stash when a representative of Customs and Excise found them; playing dumb, they claimed to be trying to rake in the moon’s reflection, so as to get some cheese, and this apparently worked.
Oh, and one for the insectophobes: creepy Crawley has Insects.
But that’s not all. Thanks to the intense rivalry brought on by football and rugby, the supporters of the local team in Blackpool are called Donkey Lashers (referring to the donkey rides on Blackpool beach); Milton Keynes, home of several bovine statues, has Plastic Cow-Jockeys; Leigh has Lobbygobblers (lobby being a local stew made with corned beef); while people from nearby Wigan, where they make a lot of pies, are all Pie-Eaters.
Bolton went one stage further up the food chain, ending up as the Trotters, possibly because their training ground used to be next to a pig farm (this may be a fib, but it’s a good one), and if you want to offend someone from Burnley, call him or her a Dingle. This is a reference to a farming family in the British soap Emmerdale, and it is not a complimentary one.
Hartlepool has the best of the lot. They’re called Monkey Hangers, thanks to the possibly apocryphal tale of a monkey in a French army uniform washing ashore from a shipwreck during the Napoleonic Wars. Local myth has it that the monkey was tried as a French spy—because the locals hadn’t seen a monkey or a Frenchman before—and then executed.
Some names are even shared. Because of their fishing heritage, the residents of Grimsby and Arbroath are both called Codheads (due to the Scots accent, the latter is often spelled Codheids). Whitehaven and Workington are both Jam-Eaters, and should you be blessed with a West Country accent, even if you live in Southampton or as far as Norfolk, someone will probably call you a Carrot-Cruncher.
And finally, if you’re not from around here and you’re in Cornwall, you’re an Emmet. If you’re not from around here and you’re in Devon, you’re a Grockle.
WHAT TO SAY (WHEN IN CHESTERFIELD): “Go, Spireites!”
WHAT NOT TO SAY (ANYWHERE): “Excuse me, are you a Monkey Hanger, by any chance?”
KeKebabs after the Pub
The kebab in its natural environment.
Some decisions make sense only when you are drunk. Under normal circumstances it’s entirely possible to resist the charms of a doner kebab. It’s only a hot sandwich, after all. Very nice in its way, but only one of a huge selection of potential meals available in the cafés and restaurants of Britain’s towns and cities. There’s no reason why it should be favoured even over other kebabs. The shish is very nice, for example, or the shawarma sandwich, which observes the same basic principles of construction as the humble burrito.
So it’s not as though one tends to see British people in business suits queuing up at a sandwich bar every lunchtime, making the painstaking demand that a pita bread be stuffed with a little too much salad, too much leathery sliced meat, and a generous helping of chilli sauce (with two l’s, thanks awfully) and packed in a soggy, easily torn paper bag to take back to their desks. That would make very little sense at all. It probably happens a bit, but not to any significant degree.
But if you wait just a few hours, until all trading has ceased save for the passing of cash over pub counters, and the exchanging of liquid refreshment for mental confusion, you’ll see those same business-folk making their way to a brightly lit shop with a meat cushion rotating in front of an electric heater in the window, as if that cushion were a beacon, a grail to be tracked and claimed. The pub may have called last orders, but the night is not over, not while there’s a kebab to be had.
Some people swear by the postpub curry; some eat crisps all night long and are too stuffed to eat anything, no matter how drunk they are; and others are too far gone to push anything else into their rebellious stomachs, and have to find a quiet spot in which to exorcise their inner demons all over the floor. Rewarding as all of these pastimes can be, none casts the shadow of expectation like a kebab. It’s like waving a leash in front of a dog’s face; suddenly there is a very intense focus where previously there was just amiable chaos.
So, the Brits are out on a spree and the barman has called last orders. Everyone is standing up, slightly wavily, and trying to work out what to do with all the excess exuberance they’ve got sloshing around in their heads. Someone suggests going on to a club, but this is a divisive move. Not everyone wants to go dancing; others are mindful that there are important things to be done in the morning and don’t wish to see a diverting experience turn into an appalling shambles.
That said, it doesn’t feel as if the night has truly finished. After all, those crisps were nice, especially the way everyone opened the packets out so they were shareable, but only a couple of people really sated their appetites and now for the rest of them the booze is starting to clamour for something to soak into. You can’t just go home and eat drunken cheese on toast, that’s boring. Right now, everything in your nervous system is telling you that you are some kind of superhero/comedian/pop star hybrid and that’s the kind of mind-set that deserves a celebration. Never mind the blood pressure tablets, bugger the diet, it’s time for a kebab.
It’s worth mentioning that many other options are open to the postpub diner; chips being several of the main ones. There’s chips and curry sauce, cheesy chips, chips and gravy, and a chip butty using a kebab pita; you can even have just chips, with or without salt and vinegar. Then there are regional bread-based delicacies like stotties (the northeast and Newcastle), barm cakes (Lancashire), bread cakes (Yorkshire), cobs (East Midlands), bannocks (Scotland), nudgers (Merseyside) and batches (Shropshire). Any one of them could take something meaty or chippy, depending on your requirements, but at this point in the evening, none of them have quite the gustatory tractor beam of the doner kebab.
Suddenly the only righteous thing to do (providing you are not a vegetarian, in which case see the paragraph above for options) is to visit that strip-lit palace of disinterested greasy delights: the kebab shop. Here is where you find out that the difference between medium and large is just how much stuff gets thrown on top of your order. Here is where the meat—it’s lamb, by the way, pressed into a shape and then skewered on an industrial spit—is sliced from the rotating cushion and thrown carelessly into a metal pot. Here is where the pita is heated up on a griddle and then filled with too much salad. Here is where you will be asked if you want garlic or chilli sauce, or if you want “everything”. It’s best just to say yes.
Here is where coleslaw may or may not be applied, and the meat is shoved into and on top of the rest, which is already spilling out of the bread. Here is where they dig out a huge anaemic-looking pickled pepperoncini and jam it on the top, like a pale green cherry on a very strange cake.
It’s not the breakfast of champions or the dish they serve to the Viking soldiers of Valhalla, but to tipsy Brits—male and female—a messy, opulent kebab is all the feasting a drunken warrior needs.
WHAT TO SAY: “Extra chilli sauce on mine, please. I’m feeling defiant.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Is this place even hygienic?”
Downton Abbey and Sunday Night Nostalgia TV
The big night for British television is traditionally a Saturday. That’s when the bells and whistles are brought out, when there’s a stench of gunpowder from the confetti cannons and a vinegary whiff of excitem
ent and peril.
Entertainment shows like Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor are on, as well as big family dramas like Doctor Who, Merlin, Atlantis and Casualty. There’s a reason for this: Saturday TV is about glitz, glitter, glam and glory; it’s about Things Happening and Life-Changing Moments and Going on a Journey and generally making the most of your weekend. It’s important that the audience at home feel as if important things were happening directly to them, even though they have not so much as left the comfort of their sofa to fetch a snack.
Some of the audience will be getting ready to go out; some will be enjoying the fact that they don’t have to get ready and go out. Either way, they will be being served excitement and potential and optimism and jeopardy, because Saturday night is that kind of a night.
Sunday, on the other hand, is a night for consolidating what has already happened, putting new discoveries away, fixing that which is broken, wallowing in the past, and generally preparing a psychic shield for the rigours of the week ahead. It’s not a night for fresh information or worries about what the future may hold, and Sunday night TV caters to this need immaculately by focusing heavily on the past.
There are two long-running TV shows that could only exist on a Sunday night. More specifically, they could only exist on the BBC on a Sunday night. One is Songs of Praise—essentially just footage of people singing hymns in a cathedral, but it’s been running since 1961—and the other is Antiques Roadshow. This is a programme in which Brits visit a stately home carrying an item from their house—a family heirloom or a charity shop bargain, usually—that they believe might be worth a bob or two. It is then given the once-over by an antiques expert, who offers a valuation, which may or may not please the owners. Sometimes they go away happy, and sometimes they go away pretending to be glad they found out the interesting facts that they did, but secretly wishing for more cash. That’s about all the jeopardy anyone in Britain can handle at this point in the weekend.
Also on Sunday are the big nostalgic drama presentations, scheduled for just after the kids have been packed off to bed: Call the Midwife, Downton Abbey, Heartbeat, The Royal. Each one a step back from the worries of the present day, so viewers can worry instead about things from the olden days that have already happened. Downton Abbey is the most successful example of this type of show, being so rooted in the past and riddled with the etiquette and hidebound traditions of Edwardian England it could also have been called Antiques Roadshow.
And what drives it is partly the ripeness of the characters—Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess with her flinty judgements taking centre stage—and partly the skill with which that lost world, and its attendant class structure, has been re-created. There’s nobility and savagery, comedy and tragedy, high-mindedness and low cunning, all set in a society with values that are not those of the modern era, so no one has to worry about what it says about nowadays.
So while huge modern (bleak) detective procedurals do come along later in the evening—Prime Suspect, Broadchurch, Cracker, Inspector Morse—Sunday night nostalgia TV tends to avoid stories that end in utter misery for everyone concerned. Even when a terrible event happens, it will usually be leavened by some lighthearted japery from some of the less-photogenic members of the cast who are largely there for comic purposes. These will most commonly be refugees from a soap opera: household names in face only, and good for a daft subplot about a get-rich-quick scheme or some dodgy theatre tickets (Call the Midwife specializes in this sort of thing). For the most part, gritty realism is not required on a British Sunday, not if anyone is to get a good night’s sleep before Monday rolls around.
Also, Sunday night dramas are all rooted in the world of work as it used to be. This is another psychological trick to encourage viewers to prepare for the week ahead, and they do this by setting up scenarios across all boundaries of class. You’ll see policemen from the past driving around on old motorbikes in order to arrest local ruffians for stealing antimacassars from Lady Sourmouth’s dayroom. You’ll see a servant discussing how best to cook the hare the poacher left on the kitchen table when he came round at 1:00 A.M. to pitch woo at the wayward chambermaid. You’ll see a doctor stub out a cigarette before going to attend a dangerous birth at the bedside of a plucky but weak working-class housewife who worries how she’ll make ends meet, now her Sid is up in front of the beak on charges of wearing his hat in a saucy manner in front of a copper.
All of which are suggestive of the stresses of work without actually causing any pangs of worry about genuine modern-day work stuff. Throw in a modern drama with e-mails, balance sheets or that report that was due last Thursday and the week is ruined before it has even begun.
WHAT TO SAY: “I see Lord Favourable’s invitation has been sent to the wrong Lady Famished. This is precisely the kind of crisis they employ Blenkins in order to prevent.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Who wants to watch Breaking Bad?”
Weird Traditions
As the natural world ticks along its endless cycle of birth, growth and death, there is much to celebrate, much to commemorate and much to be superstitious about. The Brits have had a long time to work up their own unique reactions to these moments, and their customs and traditions can loosely be split into two subjective categories: those I grew up with and understand (and are therefore Not Weird) and those I do not recognize and do not understand (and are therefore Weird). Of course, if you’re not from around there, they’re all weird.
Let’s start with the customs around New Year. In first footing, someone has to knock on the door after the stroke of midnight, but there’s some local disagreement as to whom. In some places it should be the darkest and most handsome young man, and he must return with gifts—money, salt, bread or coal—to ensure a prosperous and healthy year ahead. In Yorkshire, they’ll settle for any man, unless he has red hair, and in Worcestershire he needs to be singing a Christmas carol. Yorkshire also has the tradition of people intoning “black rabbits” three times just before midnight and “white rabbits” three times just after.
Wales has an entirely different New Year tradition, based around the calennig, a small decorative twig sculpture not unlike a tripod with an apple at the top, which is coated in dried fruit, nuts and a sprig of conifer. This is displayed for good luck (presumably until the apple goes off). On New Year’s Day (Dydd Calan), children carry their calennig from house to house in the early morning and sing songs, for which they are given sweets and gifts and not, for example, a firm talking-to for waking everyone up after a hard night’s drinking.
The more fiery New Year’s celebrations include Northumberland’s Allendale Tar Barl Festival, where guisers (not to be confused with geezers, who are just normal blokes) carry burning tar-filled whisky barrels on their heads. Up in Comrie, Perthshire, a similar procession takes place but there are just eight burning torches, which are ceremonially dumped into the River Earn to cast out wicked spirits.
These are not to be mixed up with the straw bear (or strawboer) celebrations a week later. On 7 January, in the Fenland borders between Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, a man dressed from head to toe in straw goes from house to house, offering to dance for money, food or beer. That’s how they get the farming year started. On Shetland, there’s a great big Viking party called Up Helly Aa that lasts all day and all night, the peak of which is a torchlit parade in which a specially made Viking longboat is dragged through town, and then all the torches get thrown inside and it burns to the ground while they sing a song called “The Norseman’s Home”. That’s how they mark the end of Yule.
Then it’s relatively quiet until May Day, the biggest red-letter day in the calendar of strange local customs. In the ancient Celtic communities in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Cornwall the first of May was called Beltane, and it marked the first day of summer. To celebrate the end of the hardships of winter, the people would have ritual fires and dances, and these are what current May Day traditions are largely based upon. The theme is very much one of sex and repr
oduction, across humans, livestock and crops. May Day dew was said to have magical properties for a young girl, allowing her to see her future husband in the mirror, or to use as a love potion if collected in a jar. The Maypole may look suggestive, and the dance may be one intended to stimulate a good harvest and healthy, productive livestock; any recreational pleasures that may arise in the process of all that drinking and dancing are merely happy by-products, honest.
Speaking of which, on 1 May, the Wessex Morris Men lead a parade of suitably engorged revellers on a merry dance up to the Cerne Abbas Giant, to welcome the arrival of spring and life blossoming before them.
The best known of all the springtime observances is the cheese-rolling competition on Cooper’s Hill, near Brockworth, Gloucestershire. This dates back to the fifteenth century and may have evolved from a Beltane-style ritual of rolling burning bundles of wood down this dangerously steep incline and scattering bread and biscuits on the land. Nowadays they have no rolling fires, but the scattering still happens, and then there’s the small matter of the eight-pound wheel of mature Double Gloucester cheese that is ceremonially rolled down instead, reaching speeds of up to seventy miles per hour. Competitors are invited to chase the cheese down the hill, which is so steep they invariably fall over and roll down, breaking bits of themselves in the process. The first to catch the cheese wins the cheese. It says something about local commitment to this event that during the privations of the Second World War, they had to craft a ceremonial cheese out of wood in order to keep the event going. Never mind that the contestants were risking their own usefulness in the war effort by deliberately falling down a hill; that was a secondary concern.
Stuff Brits Like Page 24