Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  The Weather Hierarchy Rule

  I mentioned above that certain remarks about the weather, such as ‘At least it’s not raining’ on a cold day, virtually guarantee agreement. This is because there is an unofficial English weather hierarchy to which almost everyone subscribes. In descending order, from best to worst, the hierarchy is as follows:

  •sunny and warm/mild

  •sunny and cool/cold

  •cloudy and warm/mild

  •cloudy and cool/cold

  •rainy and warm/mild

  •rainy and cool/cold

  I am not saying that everyone in England prefers sun to cloud, or warmth to cold, just that other preferences are regarded as deviations from the norm.15 Even our television weather forecasters clearly subscribe to this hierarchy: they adopt apologetic tones when forecasting rain, but often try to add a note of cheerfulness by pointing out that at least it will be a bit warmer, as they know that rainy/warm is preferable to rainy/cold. Similarly rueful tones are used to predict cold weather, brightened by the prospect of accompanying sunshine, because we all know that sunny/cold is better than cloudy/cold. So, unless the weather is both rainy and cold, you always have the option of a ‘But at least it’s not . . .’ response.

  If it is both wet and cold, or if you are just feeling grumpy, you can indulge what Jeremy Paxman calls our ‘phenomenal capacity for quiet moaning’. This is a nice observation, and I would only add that these English ‘moaning rituals’ about the weather have an important social purpose, in that they provide further opportunities for friendly agreement, in this case with the added advantage of a ‘them and us’ factor – ‘them’ being either the weather itself or the forecasters. Moaning rituals involve displays of shared opinions (as well as wit and humour) and generate a sense of solidarity against a common enemy – both valuable aids to social bonding.

  We now have yet another option for ritual humorous weather-moaning: in recent years, moans about global warming have become commonplace. The most popular form of this new moan is to say ‘Huh, so much for global warming!’ or ‘So where’s all this global warming they keep promising us?’ on a cold, grey day.

  An equally acceptable, and more positive, response to weather at the lower end of the hierarchy is to predict imminent improvement. In response to ‘Awful weather, isn’t it?’, you can say, ‘Yes, but they say it’s going to clear up this afternoon.’ If your companion is feeling Eeyorish,16 however, the rejoinder may be ‘Yes, well, they said that yesterday and it poured all day, didn’t it?’, at which point you may as well give up the Pollyanna approach and enjoy a spot of quiet moaning. It doesn’t really matter: the point is to communicate, to agree, to have something in common; and shared moaning is just as effective in promoting sociable interaction and social bonding as shared optimism, shared speculation or shared stoicism.

  For those whose personal tastes are at variance with the unofficial weather hierarchy, it is important to remember that the further down the hierarchy your preferences lie, the more you will have to qualify your remarks in accordance with the personal taste/sensitivity clause. A preference for cold over warmth, for example, is more acceptable than a dislike of sunshine, which in turn is more acceptable than an active enjoyment of rain. Even the most bizarre tastes, however, can be accepted as harmless eccentricities, providing one observes the rules of weather-speak.

  Snow and the Moderation Rule

  Snow is not mentioned in the hierarchy partly because it is relatively rare, compared to the other types of weather included, which occur all the time, often all in the same day. Snow is also socially and conversationally a special and awkward case, as it is aesthetically pleasing, but practically inconvenient. It is always simultaneously exciting and worrying. Snow is thus always excellent conversation-fodder, but it is only universally welcomed if it falls at Christmas, which it almost never does. We continue to hope that it will, however, and every year the high-street bookmakers relieve us of thousands of pounds in ‘white Christmas’ bets.

  The only conversational rule that can be applied with confidence to snow is a generic, and distinctively English, ‘moderation rule’: too much snow, like too much of anything, is to be deplored. Even warmth and sunshine are only acceptable in moderation: too many consecutive hot, sunny days, and it is customary to start fretting about drought, muttering about hose-pipe bans and reminding each other, in doom-laden tones, of the summer of 1976. Or moaning about global warming.

  The English may, as Paxman says, have a ‘capacity for infinite surprise at the weather’, and he is also right in observing that we like to be surprised by it. But we also expect to be surprised: we are accustomed to the variability of our weather, and we expect it to change quite frequently. If we get the same weather for more than a few days, we become uneasy: more than three days of rain, and we start worrying about floods; more than a day or two of snow, and disaster is declared, and the whole country slithers and skids to a halt.

  The Weather-as-family Rule

  While we may spend much of our time moaning about our weather, foreigners are not allowed to criticise it. In this respect, we treat the English weather like a member of our family: one can complain about the behaviour of one’s own children or parents, but any hint of censure from an outsider is unacceptable, and very bad manners.

  Although we are aware of the relatively undramatic nature of the English weather – the lack of extreme temperatures, monsoons, tempests, tornadoes and blizzards – we become extremely touchy and defensive at any suggestion that our weather is therefore inferior or uninteresting. The worst possible weather-speak offence is one mainly committed by foreigners, particularly Americans, and that is to belittle the English weather. When the summer temperature reaches the high twenties, and we moan, ‘Phew, isn’t it hot?’, we do not take kindly to visiting Americans or Australians laughing and scoffing and saying, ‘Call this hot? This is nothing. You should come to Texas [Brisbane] if you wanna see hot!’

  Not only is this kind of comment a serious breach of the agreement rule, and the weather-as-family rule, but it also represents a grossly quantitative approach to the weather, which we find coarse and distasteful. Size, we sniffily point out, isn’t everything, and the English weather requires an appreciation of subtle changes and understated nuances, rather than a vulgar obsession with mere volume and magnitude.

  Indeed, the weather may be one of the few things about which the English are still unselfconsciously and unashamedly patriotic. During my participant-observation research on Englishness, which naturally involved many conversations about the weather, I came across this prickly defensiveness about our weather again and again, among people of all classes and social backgrounds. Some of us may be too polite, or too inhibited, actually to express our irritation when faced with an unimpressed foreigner – although in the SIRC survey, nearly 50 per cent admitted to having ‘got a bit defensive’ when a foreigner belittled our weather.

  In my more informal interviews, contempt for American size-fixation, in particular, was widespread – one outspoken informant (a publican) expressed the feelings of many when he told me: ‘Oh, with Americans it’s always “Mine’s bigger than yours”, with the weather or anything else. They’re so crass. Bigger steaks, bigger buildings, bigger snowstorms, more heat, more hurricanes, whatever. No fucking subtlety, that’s their problem.’ Jeremy Paxman, rather more elegantly, but equally patriotically, dismisses all Bill Bryson’s monsoons, raging blizzards, tornadoes and hailstorms as ‘histrionics’. A very English put-down.

  The Shipping Forecast Ritual

  Our peculiar affection for our weather finds its most eloquent expression in our attitude towards a quintessentially English national institution: the Shipping Forecast. Browsing in a seaside bookshop, I came across an attractive large-format picture-book, with a seascape on the cover, entitled Rain Later, Good. It struck me that almost all English people would immediately recognise this odd, apparently meaningless or even contradictory phrase as part o
f the arcane, evocative and somehow deeply soothing meteorological mantra, broadcast immediately after the news on BBC Radio 4.

  The Shipping Forecast is an off-shore weather forecast, with additional information about wind-strength and visibility, for the fishing vessels, pleasure craft and cargo ships in the seas around the British Isles. None of the information is of the slightest use or relevance to the millions of non-seafarers who listen to it, but listen we do, religiously, mesmerised by the calm, cadenced, familiar recitation of lists of names of sea areas, followed by wind information, then weather, then visibility – but with the qualifying words (wind, weather, visibility) left out, so it sounds like this: ‘Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Fisher, German Bight. Westerly or south-westerly three or four, increasing five in north later. Rain later. Good becoming moderate, occasionally poor. Faroes, Fair Isle, Cromarty, Forties, Forth, Dogger. Northerly backing westerly three or four, increasing six later. Showers. Good.’ And so on, and on, in measured, unemotional tones, until all of the thirty-one sea areas have been covered – and millions of English listeners,17 most of whom have no idea where any of these places are, or what the words and numbers mean, finally switch off their radios, feeling strangely comforted and even uplifted by what the poet Sean Street has called the Shipping Forecast’s ‘cold poetry of information’.

  Some of my foreign informants – mostly immigrants and visitors who had been in England for some time – had come across this peculiar ritual, and many found it baffling. Why would we want to listen to these lists of obscure places and their irrelevant meteorological data in the first place – let alone insisting on hearing the entire pointless litany, and treating anyone who dared attempt to switch it off as though they had committed some sort of sacrilege? They were bemused by the national press, radio and television headlines, and fierce debates, when the name of one of the sea areas was changed (from Finisterre to FitzRoy), and would no doubt have been equally puzzled by the national outcry when the BBC had the temerity to change the time of the late-night broadcast, moving it back by a mere fifteen minutes (‘People went ballistic,’ according to a Met Office spokesman).

  More recently, in 2011, the BBC seemed to have learnt their lesson: when the Shipping Forecast clashed with the broadcast of the final wicket in England’s Ashes victory over Australia – a near-sacred moment in sporting history – the Shipping Forecast took priority. It was broadcast at its usual time, and cricket fans were advised to retune to digital, internet or medium-wave options to hear the end of this historic match. ‘There’s a Shipping Forecast heaving into view,’ listeners were told, as though it were an approaching storm or some other immutable force of nature, ‘Try to retune if you’re listening on long wave.’18

  ‘Anyone would think they’d tried to change the words of the Lord’s Prayer!’ said one of my American informants, of the hullabaloo over the Finisterre/FitzRoy issue. I tried to explain that the usefulness or relevance of the information is not the point, that listening to the Shipping Forecast, for the English, is like hearing a familiar prayer – somehow profoundly reassuring, even for non-believers – and that any alteration to such an important ritual is bound to be traumatic for us. We may not know where those sea areas are, I said, but the names are embedded in the national psyche: people even name their pets after them. We may joke about the Shipping Forecast (the author of Rain Later, Good19 observes that some people ‘talk back to it, “Thundery showers good? I don’t think so”’) but then we joke about everything, even, especially, the things that are most sacred to us. Like our weather, and our Shipping Forecast.

  WEATHER-SPEAK RULES AND ENGLISHNESS

  The rules of English weather-speak tell us quite a lot about Englishness. Already, before we even begin to examine the minutiae of other English conversation codes and rules of behaviour in other aspects of English life, these rules provide a number of hints and clues about the ‘grammar’ of Englishness.

  In the reciprocity and context rules, we see some signs of social inhibition, but also the ingenious use of ‘facilitators’ to overcome this handicap. The agreement rule and its exceptions provide hints about the importance of politeness and avoidance of conflict (as well as the approval of conflict in specific social contexts) – and the precedence of etiquette over logic. In the variations to the agreement rule, and sub-clauses to the weather-hierarchy rule, we find indications of the acceptance of eccentricity and some hints of stoicism – the latter balanced by a predilection for Eeyorish moaning. The moderation rule reveals a dislike and disapproval of extremes, and the weather-as-family rule exposes a perhaps surprising patriotism, along with a quirky appreciation of understated charm. The Shipping Forecast ritual illustrates a deep-seated need for a sense of safety, security and continuity – and a tendency to become upset when these are threatened – as well as a love of words and a somewhat eccentric devotion to arcane and apparently irrational pastimes and practices. There seems also to be an undercurrent of humour in all this, a reluctance to take things too seriously.

  Clearly, further evidence will be required to determine whether these are among the ‘defining characteristics of Englishness’ that we set out to identify, but at least we can start to see how an understanding of Englishness might emerge from detailed research on our unwritten rules.

  14. For stats-junkies: we (SIRC) recently did a national survey on this, in which, for example, 56 per cent said that they had talked about the weather within the previous six hours, 38 per cent within the previous hour. This suggests that, at any given moment, at least a third of us are probably talking about the weather. And that would be a conservative estimate: I suspect that the real weather-talk figures are even higher, as weather-speak is so automatic for the English that many people may not remember every instance when answering a survey question.

  15. In support of this (and as evidence of the importance of weather-speak) I would also cite the fact that of the seven synonyms for ‘nice’ in the Thesaurus, no less than five are exclusively weather-related, namely: fine, clear, mild, fair and sunny.

  16. For those unfamiliar with English culture, Eeyore is the gloomy, pessimistic donkey in Winnie the Pooh.

  17. Not all of them from the nostalgic older generations: the Shipping Forecast has many young devotees, and references to the Shipping Forecast have recently turned up in the lyrics of pop songs. I met a nineteen-year-old barman with a dog called Cromarty, after one of the sea areas.

  18. Yes, I know, the Shipping Forecast supposedly provides absolutely vital, potentially life-saving information for seafarers, and this is the ostensible reason for its immovable status. But the controller of Radio 4 himself has been quoted as saying that he would be ‘slightly worried about anybody who is bobbing up and down in the Channel whose sole way of keeping from sinking is by listening to us on long wave. My advice would be to invest in a GPS system. But I still won’t take it off because it has a glory of its own.’

  19. It is perhaps also worth noting that Rain Later, Good, first published in 1998, became an instant bestseller and has been reprinted many times (including a revised second edition in 2002, because of the controversial Finisterre name-change). More recent books about the Shipping Forecast have also been very popular.

  GROOMING-TALK

  I described weather-speak in the previous chapter as a form of ‘grooming-talk’. Most of the much-vaunted human capacity for complex language is in fact devoted to such talk – the verbal equivalent of picking fleas off each other or mutual back-scratching.

  THE RULES OF INTRODUCTION

  Grooming-talk starts with greeting-talk. Weather-speak is needed in this context partly because greetings and introductions are such an awkward business for the English. The problem has become particularly acute since the decline of ‘How do you do?’ as the standard, all-purpose greeting. The ‘How do you do?’ greeting – where the correct response is not to answer the question, but to repeat it back, ‘How do you do?’, like an echo or a well-trained parrot20 – is st
ill in use in upper- and upper-middle-class circles, but the rest are left floundering, never knowing quite what to say. Instead of sneering at the old-fashioned stuffiness of the ‘How do you do?’ ritual, we would do better to mount a campaign for its revival: it would solve so many problems.

  Awkwardness Rules

  As it is, our introductions and greetings tend to be uncomfortable, clumsy and inelegant. Among established friends, there is less awkwardness, although we are often still not quite sure what to do with our hands, or whether to hug or kiss. The French custom of a kiss on each cheek initially became popular among the chattering classes and some other upper-middle-class groups, but was regarded as silly and pretentious by many other sections of society, particularly when it took the form of the ‘air-kiss’, and was in any case only acceptable between females, or males and females, never between males. Even in the social circles where cheek-kissing became customary, one could still never be entirely sure whether one kiss or two was required, resulting in much awkward hesitation and bumping as the parties tried to second-guess each other.

  Over the past decade or so, the cheek-kissing custom has become much more widespread, and crept much further down the social scale. But most people are still just as uncertain about the ‘correct’ number of kisses (the higher social classes tend to do two kisses, the lower classes seem more inclined to stop at one, but one can never be sure) and the process is still just as self-conscious and uncomfortable. One often now sees bizarre attempts to combine a handshake, a cheek-kiss and a sort of brief, clumsy hug or back-pat. If anything, we seem to have become even more confused. Clearly, it is going to take the English a very long time indeed to arrive at a consensus on the simple matter of how to greet someone.