And then it’s Easter, time to start acting out a battle between St George and the Black Prince of Paradine in the middle of the street. The Pace Egg plays, once common Easter entertainment for the whole of England, were later revived in the north as a cross between street theatre—St George battles someone and dies, then is reborn—and a pub crawl, which may explain their popularity. They also feature some slapstick, some buffoonery and a cartoonish villain or two to boo at. In some places children also get to go house to house (again) and are given painted eggs to roll down a hill. Oh, and the Pace Eggers have bequeathed at least one permanent addition to the English language. Amid the common characters—Owd Bett and Miss Kitty Fair (both men dressed as women), Owd Beelzebub, Derry Doubt and the Doctor—is the fool Toss Pot, whose name lives on as a term of friendly abuse (see: Grade-B Swearwords).
On Easter Monday, the rival villages of Hallaton and Medbourne in Leicestershire take part in bottle kicking, a ritualized battle that appears to have started with a genuine punch-up two hundred years ago. The version that exists nowadays involves parading a big hare pie (see: Innuendo) through the streets of Hallaton, then taking it up to the top of a hill where it can bear witness to a big brawl in which representatives of both villages try to prevent their rivals making off with one of two barrels of beer by any means necessary, short of eye gouging. They had to make a rule about the eye gouging. In a similar party/punch-up between the villages of Haxey and Westwoodside in Lincolnshire, the fight is over a silk hood and involves the ceremonial contributions of characters called the Fool, the Lord of the Hood, and the Boggins.
There are even weird old traditions around the planting of parsley. Some claim that the herb will only germinate if planted on Good Friday by a woman, in rows aligned north to south; others say a successful crop will curse your family to have only daughters. Parsley is clearly a male chauvinist sprig.
A more recent addition to the list comes from the Bottle Inn, in Marshwood, Dorset, as a result of two farmers bragging about the height of the nettles on their land. As things do, this chat became competitive, and eventually one farmer said he would eat the nettle from his rival’s land that could beat his tallest stalk. And so he did, and before you could say “Hey, that hurts!” the pub had created the World Nettle Eating Championships, in which contestants scoff the leaves from two-foot-long nettle stalks for an hour, and the winner is the person who has consumed the most.
Brighton has its own winter solstice celebration, another fire festival, called the Burning of the Clocks. In a parade numbering up to a thousand, people carry decorative lanterns made of willow and paper, then burn them on the beach. Similar lantern parades—albeit without the fiery finish—take place at different times in different locations across the country, from Truro to Dumfries. And then there’s bog snorkelling. This is another product of idle minds: organizers in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales, dig a 120-foot trench in a peat bog; contestants then have to swim the length of the turbid water using only flippers as propulsion.
But the prize for the most unorthodox of traditional gatherings has to go to Egremont Crab Fair—named not after the first most likely interpretation of the word crab, or the second, but the third: crab-apples. There’s a parade with an apple cart, with apples being lobbed into the crowd, while the fair itself holds such delights as the climbing of the greasy pole, a pipe-smoking competition (the winner being the person who sucks the most, presumably) and some Cumberland wrestling (not, sadly, with a sausage). But that’s just the entertaining preamble to the main event: the Gurning World Championships.
Gurning is hard to explain. It’s essentially a face-pulling competition, and to frame the distorted fizzogs of the people involved they put their heads through a horse collar (or braffin). The best gurners can fold their faces up like an old leather purse, making deep ridges and strange furrows appear where there previously were none. It’s an astonishing sight, although would-be gurners should know that it does help if you’ve lost a few teeth along the way.
WHAT TO SAY: Nothing, just go with it.
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Sir! Sir! Please keep away from me with that tar barrel, as it is on fire and I do not wish to be disfigured.”
Real Ale
Ale: Not cold, not fizzy, on purpose.
The way the British like their beer is one of those standing jokes based on foreigners’ shocked firsthand experiences. It’s warm, it’s flat, it’s served in those dimpled mugs, and it doesn’t taste like beer, it tastes like the backwash from a sluiced-out bread bin.
And of course all that stuff is broadly true, or at least it probably was forty years ago, and the reputation has stuck. The thing is, this is only a problem if you’re expecting your beer to be lager. British beer—the stuff in the dimpled glasses, at least—isn’t lager, it’s ale, and ale differs from lager in much the same way that coffee differs from soup. They’re not even brewed in the same way. Lagers use bottom-fermenting yeast (which, disappointingly, isn’t a cure for trapped wind) that sinks down into the barrel and converts the malt and sugars into alcohol from there. Ales use top-fermenting yeast (which, disappointingly, isn’t a cure for baldness) that floats on the surface and does the fermenting from there.
A good many ales are less carbonated than lager, so this thing about them being flat isn’t a sign of poor quality, it’s simply what the drink is. If you want a nice frothy head from a beer, drink something with a big creamy lid on it, like stout or porter. If you want to try the taste of a British best bitter, do without the bubbles; and if you want a really fizzy drink, try British lemonade.
On the issue of temperature, yes, the beer isn’t ice cold, but here’s the thing: British ale drinkers treat their beverage (let’s be honest: beverages) with the same reverence and appreciation as wine drinkers do. They aren’t necessarily after a drink to throw down their necks as fast as possible, for maximum refreshment. In fact, the true aficionados don’t even drink ale in pints, but halves (and quite possibly out of a pewter tankard, because real ale is not, repeat not, about looking sophisticated). It’s all about the flavour, and that means the smell as well as the taste. Colder drinks are harder to taste, and don’t have that heady aroma, and so, in order to fully savour all the hoppy hops and the yeasty yeast, real ale is served at room temperature, just like good red wine. This also allows the ale to continue fermenting in the cask, and that’s something real ale drinkers particularly approve of.
So far from being hairy-handed country simpletons with no taste buds, drinkers of real ale (they even call it real ale, to distinguish it from cheaply made, easily processed beers) are true connoisseurs. They even formed a pressure group to protect the central place of the British pub in communities—be they rural or urban—and to protect the beverages they sell. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA for short) was formed in 1971, and far from being a society that just seeks to have members stick a teaspoon in a row of beer glasses and sip ’n’ spit their way down to the end, it’s been working to maintain a certain kind of British pub atmosphere (see: Pubs, Inns, Bars and Taverns). This involves keeping six or seven casks of real ale behind the bar, and very probably a couple of local ciders too, particularly if the pub is in the West Country.
On that note, it’s important to state that not all ciders are the same either. At one end are your mass-produced bottles of ice-cold Magners, served with ice, and at the other there’s scrumpy, flat and cloudy and sold in plastic vats like campsite water. Scrumpy is the West Country psychedelic; it’s a locally produced, enormously potent beverage that can, when taken in the right amounts, alter the very fabric of reality.
There’s also a tradition for giving real ales—which are by their nature not produced for supermarkets or other family-friendly retail outlets—risqué names. These will either be daft and sexist (Top Totty, Old Slapper, Booby Trap), daft and suggestive (Dog’s Bollocks, Ginger Tosser, Dorset Knob) or just plain daft (Vicar of Dribbley, Village Idiot, Fiddler’s Elbow, Wobbly Bob).
And there’s been a
recent crossover between brewers and rock bands. Iron Maiden, Elbow, Enter Shikari and Status Quo all have their own signature beers, in the same way that Beyoncé, Katy Perry and Britney Spears have their own signature perfumes. Because it never hurts to extend your brand with a product your fans would be buying anyway.
So the important lessons to draw from all this are that British beer is everything it is internationally mocked for being, and all the better for it. It’s also worth pointing out that chilled lagers of every description are also available in British pubs, and they’re incredibly popular too. It’s not as if the Brits are all devoted ale-ophiles. It takes a while to get used to the taste, after all.
But if you’re still tempted to nudge elbows with your drinking buddies and giggle about British beer, consider this: no one looks good coming out of a French restaurant complaining that their bottle of vintage red was too warm and it didn’t fizz like the champagne back home, so maybe it’s time to let ale be ale.
WHAT TO SAY: “Two pints of Bishop’s Finger, Cheryl, and have one yourself.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “It’s Miller time!”
Putting Union Jacks on Things
Only to be worn on the last night of aprons.
The British have had a turbulent relationship with their own flag over the years. For some it’s a statement of overbearing nationalism, for others a symbol of national pride and a line in the sand that people from other nations cross at their peril. Mods love it because it’s sharp and bright, in highly contrasting red, white and blue. It’s brought out at the Last Night of the Proms and at sporting events where Britain competes as one nation, rather than as England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It has flown all over the world in times of victory and in despair, so it’s bound to have picked up some cultural baggage along the way.
Until recently it was considered bad form to refer to the flag as the Union Jack, as that name applies only when it is flown on a ship. Put the same design on a mug and it’s a union flag. But no one ever gets this right, so that particular line of pedantry has been gradually, and officially, phased out. For the purposes of clarity, let’s just make a mental note of this distinction, call it a Union Jack, and move on.
And it’s not even a fully representative flag. The red cross of England’s St George is in there, as are the blue saltire of St Andrew for Scotland and the red saltire of St Patrick for Ireland. The Welsh flag—depicting the Red Dragon of Cadwaladr, King of Gwynedd—is not represented because (and this must be particularly annoying for the Welsh) Wales was considered legally part of England when the flag was made. For similar reasons there’s no space for the Cornish cross of St Piran, which is white on a black background. When the Scottish took a vote in 2014 on becoming independent from the UK there was a lot of talk about what the flag may look like if they decided to leave, and even though they voted to remain part of the United Kingdom for now, it’s unlikely that the flag will remain as it is forever.
Of course, the net result of all this bickering is the flag has become a potent symbol within pop culture, and not just on merchandise for tourists in London, although heaven knows there is enough of that too.
One early putter of a Union Jack on a thing was Pete Townshend of the Who. He—and his manager Kit Lambert—had one made into a sports jacket in the band’s first flush of chart success. It was 1965, and London was the eye of a musical storm that had ravaged across America, dragging the rest of the world in its wake. England swung, everything British was automatically cool, and here was a skinny kid with a big nose wearing the national flag as a coat, sticking an imperious two fingers up at the elder generation (who had fought a war under that very flag) and smashing his guitar on the floor. It was quite a sight.
During the early ‘70s the most prominent use of the design outside of proper ceremonial purposes was Tim Brooke-Taylor’s Union Jack waistcoat in the comedy show The Goodies. And he was playing a stuck-in-the-mud conservative. But in 1977 the queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee, and there were street parties and cakes and bunting and all manner of red, white and blue things everywhere. Because of this, punk rockers took to wearing it sarcastically, with Jamie Reid tearing his up to make Sex Pistols tour posters and generally mock the authorities. Before long, right-wing groups like the National Front were making use of both extremes—the patriotism and the righteous fury—to rally gangs of skinheads under the flag to antagonize and harass people from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan who had come to live and work in the UK.
For most of the 1980s, the Union Jack remained a polarizing symbol, still tainted by association with the National Front, but given fresh boosts by the British victory in the Falklands War and a continuation of the more traditional, less worrying strains of patriotism, especially in the affluent southeastern counties.
But then a curious thing happened. During the 1990s a huge upswing in cultural confidence, similar to that of the Swinging Sixties, gave the flag a whole new context. It didn’t mean racism or stuffy patriotism anymore; it meant British fashion, Britpop, Britart; it meant a thriving multicultural nation (the key word being union) and being really good at theatre and music and films and football (see: Movie #3: Trainspotting).
So it was as a natural extension of this mentality that Noel Gallagher had a guitar made with a Union Jack on it. It was proof of his mod affiliation too, and soon Union Jacks were cropping up on T-shirts and scooters and badges and more guitars in an entirely unironic way. Nowadays the right-wing English groups rally under the flag of St George, having decided that the Union Jack is a bit too broad for their tastes, and this has freed the union flag to appear on everything from cupcakes to Converse shoes without all of that ideological weight to carry. It’s not untainted by the past, but then, what is?
And they still wave it at the Last Night of the Proms, Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden has one onstage every night, someone made a Union Jack cake on The Great British Bake Off, and the relaunched Mini came with a Union Jack roof. There are Union Jack playing cards, pens and pencils, gloves and coats, leggings and scarves, haircuts and tattoos, socks and pants. There is even a Union Jack Dalek toy for Doctor Who fans, and those guys won’t get paint jobs for anyone.
Tim Brooke-Taylor’s waistcoat suddenly seems conservative for very different reasons.
WHAT TO SAY: “And who was this Jack fellow anyway?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Nice colour scheme, dude, but you need more stars. And stripes.”
Stags, Hens and Having a Do
Once upon a time, the correct way to toast any friends and relations who were about to jump the broom would have been a night in the pub. Just one night, just one pub, and no speeches. That’s what a stag night was; it’s what a hen night was too. And the night in question would have been the night before the wedding. One last little blowout, a moment of total freedom before the greatest day of your life and an assured future of domestic servitude, er, bliss. Job done.
Unfortunately, just like a licked lollipop rolling down a dusty hill, drunken traditions tend to pick things up along the way. So once it became a common jape to try to lure the hapless bride or groom as far away from the church as humanly possible, tie him or her to a lamppost, and take his or her trousers off (actually more of a groom thing, now I come to think about it), sensible would-be-weds started to move their prewedding parties further and further away from the big day itself, if only to give themselves time to get back from (or to) Aberdeen. And once you’ve moved the day, you’re no longer taking advantage of the fact that everyone is together in one place at the same time, so you have to start thinking about accommodation for people who simply have to be there but live farther than a late-night taxi ride away.
So, if people are going to be making a big effort to be there, it seems daft to start the occasion in the evening. Really it makes far more sense to extend it a little and make a real do of it, maybe start with lunch, and stay over somewhere. And actually, we don’t have to meet in just the one pub, not when we can do somethin
g nice beforehand, like have a nice meal all together. Or go paintballing or visit a spa or go to a comedy show or a gig.
Tell you what: we should make a weekend of it. Hang the expense, let’s get everyone together in a holiday resort and hit the town like an invading army. We can go white-water rafting, cage fighting, basket weaving—it really doesn’t matter so long as all the girls are wearing glittery pink cowboy hats and angel wings and those L plates you put on a car to show there’s a learner driver behind the wheel (eh? eh? learner driver, yeah?) and all the boys wear specially printed T-shirts with the groom’s face and a risqué slogan on the back, or dress up as Ghostbusters, and everyone gets very drunk in the evening and plays silly games and drinks and drinks and drinks and eventually we all get barred from our own hotel and have to spend the evening asleep in a park.
At some point along the way, some gifts of an alluring or sexual nature may be exchanged. This could mean a nice garter belt or a chocolate penis for the girl or a whip and handcuffs (unisex) or a pot of vitamin supplements with a name like Horny Goatweed or Leviathan for the boy. The inference is the same as it would have been if the stag/hen do were the night before the wedding: these items will be of use when the time comes. Oh, and there may be strippers, but some of the people in each party will be quietly judging the people who booked them.
The terminology for these events is exactly the same whether it’s a full weekend in the Mendips or a single night in someone’s flat around a solitary bottle of wine. You’re having a do. You could have a do for any occasion, from birthdays to retirements, but stag and hen dos are particular and special.
One last note: it’s not a shower; that’s not really a thing Brits do terribly well, although the baby version is taking off a little. Bridal showers just seem like extra gift giving, and bearing in mind gifts have already been bought for the big day (and all the money spent on the hen do as well), it’s all a bit much.
Stuff Brits Like Page 25