Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  This self-important bore quite often ends up being ‘the chair’, and uses this title at every possible opportunity, in endless bossy round-robin emails explaining at great length exactly why it really is vital for ‘all communications to be sent to myself as Chair, in accordance with Article 13 of the Association Rules . . .’ This might seem very odd – why would the English, with their horror of earnestness, elect such tediously earnest people to run so many of their clubs, societies, committees and associations? The answer is simple: these people are often the only ones who are eager to take on all the tiresome admin (which they insist on calling ‘management’) involved in organising meetings, agendas, rotas, minutes, guest speakers and so on – although they adopt a martyrish air about this, and regularly complain that no one appreciates all their hard work. The other members understand that regularly thanking and placating the chair is the price they pay for not having to do all the boring stuff themselves. Although there is always one member, usually a newcomer or desultory and infrequent attendee, who fails to grasp this unwritten rule, laughs too openly at some pomposity or other, and causes huge huffy offence (‘You may think that my responsibilities as chair are a big joke, but if you could ever be bothered to show up for meetings, you might realise that this association doesn’t just run itself.’). But as these self-aggrandising chairs tend to be socially unpopular, this role is their chance to get attention and be at the centre of things, so at the next AGM, with much huffing and puffing about expecting ‘maybe just a bit of help from other members this time’, they agree to shoulder the onerous burden for yet another year.

  Despite the efforts of some officious chairs, Englishness prevails during the actual ‘agenda’ part of club meetings as well as the preliminary socialising. There is some discussion of important matters, punctuated by jokes, bitching about enemies (or rival clubs with the same interests – MAG members bitch about the British Motorcycle Federation, for example), and polite territorial squabbling among members over largely irrelevant details. Occasionally, a decision or resolution is reached, or at least a consensus of opinion, with the actual decision deferred until the next meeting. Then more tea or alcohol, with more joking, gossiping and moaning – especially moaning: I defy you to find an English club or society whose members do not feel misunderstood or put-upon in some way. To go back to my surprisingly similar examples, the WI ladies moaned about being stereotyped as stuffy and old-fashioned (‘People still think it’s all jam and Jerusalem!’), while the bikers complained about public and media misperceptions of them as wild, irresponsible and scary (‘We’re hardly Hell’s Angels – got two lawyers and a GP here tonight: practically the bloody Rotary!’). Then the meeting winds up with the usual prolonged English goodbyes. Sometimes there is a guest speaker, who must be fêted and fussed over and politely applauded, however dull and unenlightening their speech. But the basic pattern is always the same. If you’ve seen one meeting of an English club or society, you’ve seen them all. Even an Anarchist meeting I attended followed the same sequence, although it was much better organised than most, and at the demonstration the next day the members were all dressed in uniform black, carrying professional-looking banners, chanting in unison and marching in step.

  Pub Rules

  You’ve probably got the message by now that I think pubs are quite an important part of English culture. Of all the ‘social facilitators’ that help the inhibited English to engage and bond with each other, the pub is the most popular. There are around fifty thousand or so pubs in England, frequented by three-quarters of the adult population. Nearly a third of the adult population are ‘regulars’, visiting the pub at least once a week, in some cases treating their ‘local’ almost as a second home.

  I talk about ‘the pub’ as though they were all the same, but nowadays there is a bewildering variety of different types: student pubs, youth pubs, theme pubs, family pubs, gastro-pubs, sports pubs – as well as a number of other kinds of drinking-places such as café-bars and wine bars. Much fuss has been made about these novelties, of course, much huffing and puffing, dire warnings and doom and gloom. Pubs aren’t what they used to be. It’s all trendy bars now, you can’t find a proper traditional pub. The country’s going to the dogs. The end of the world is nigh, or at least a lot nigher than it was.

  The usual nostalgic moaning. The usual premature obituaries (I mean this quite literally: there was a book published about twenty years ago entitled The Death of the English Pub: I can’t help wondering how the author feels now every time he passes a Rose and Crown or a Red Lion and sees people still happily drinking and playing darts). But a lot of this precipitate mourning is just typical English Eeyorishness, and the rest is the result of a syndrome similar to ‘ethnographic dazzle’: the doom-mongers are so dazzled by superficial differences between the new types of pub and the traditional sort that they cannot see the underlying, enduring similarities – the customs and codes of behaviour that make a pub a pub. Even if the Eeyores were right, the new pubs and bars they object to are still only a small minority, concentrated largely in city centres, and there are still tens of thousands of more traditional ‘local’ pubs.

  It is true that a number of village pubs are struggling, and increasing numbers in smaller villages have had to close, which is very sad, as a village is not really a proper village without a pub. When this happens, there are often howls of protest in the local papers, and a morose group of villagers is photographed with a handmade ‘Save Our Pub’ placard. What would save their pub, of course, would be lots of them spending lots of money drinking and eating in it, but they never seem to make this connection. We have the same problem with the Death of the Village Shop: everyone wants to save their village shop; they just don’t particularly want to shop there. The usual English hypocrisies.

  But the English pub, as an institution, as a micro-society, is still alive and well. And still governed by a stable, enduring set of unspoken rules. I have already described most of these in Pub-talk (page 129) – the pub is an institution devoted to sociability, which even among the English involves communication, so it is not surprising that most of its rules are concerned with language and body language. Some more pub rules were covered in the section on Games Etiquette (page 356) but that still leaves a few quite significant ones, such as the rules governing the consumption of alcohol. I don’t mean the official licensing laws, but the much more important unwritten codes of social drinking.

  Drinking Rules

  You can learn a lot about a culture by studying its drinking rules. And every culture has rules about alcohol: there is no such thing as random drinking. In every culture where alcohol is used, drinking is a rule-governed activity, hedged about with prescriptions and norms concerning who may drink how much of what, when, where, with whom, in what manner and with what effects. This is only to be expected. I have already pointed out that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Homo sapiens is our passion for regulation – our tendency to surround even the most basic, essential activities such as eating and mating with a lot of elaborate rules and rituals. But even more than with sex and food, the specific unwritten rules and norms governing the use of alcohol in different cultures invariably reflect the characteristic values, beliefs and attitudes of those cultures. The anthropologist Dwight Heath put it much more eloquently when he wrote that ‘just as drinking and its effects are imbedded in other aspects of culture, so are many other aspects of culture imbedded in the act of drinking’. So, if we want to understand Englishness, we need to look more closely at the Englishness of English drinking.

  The Rules of Round-buying

  Round-buying is the English form of a universal practice: the sharing or reciprocal exchange of drinks. The consumption of alcohol, in all cultures, is a quintessentially social activity, whose ritual practices and etiquettes are designed to promote friendly social interaction. There is certainly nothing uniquely English about reciprocal drink-giving, or even the buying of rounds. What is distinctively English,
and often baffling or even frightening for foreigners, is the immense, almost religious significance attached to this practice among English pubgoers. Obeying the rules of round-buying is not just good manners, it is a sacred obligation. Failing to buy your round is not just a breach of drinking etiquette: it is heresy.

  When I talk to foreign visitors about this they find it all a bit extreme. Why, they ask, is round-buying so desperately important to English pubgoers? I tell them that round-buying is important to us because it prevents bloodshed. This often sounds even more extreme, at least to non-anthropologists, so I try to explain a bit further. Reciprocal gift-giving has always been the most effective means of preventing aggression between groups (families, clans, tribes, nations) and between individuals. Among English drinkers, more specifically English male drinkers, this peacekeeping system is essential. This is because the socially challenged English male has a tendency to become aggressive. Male pub-talk, as we have seen, is often highly argumentative, and there is a need for an antidote to these verbal fisticuffs, a means of ensuring that the argument is not taken seriously, and does not escalate into physical aggression. Buying your ‘opponent’ a drink is a kind of ‘liquid handshake’: it proves that you are still mates. A particularly shrewd (female) publican told me, ‘If the men didn’t buy each other drinks, they’d be at each other’s throats. They can be shouting and swearing, but as long as they are still buying each other drinks, I know I won’t have a fight on my hands.’ I have personally witnessed many apparently heated slanging matches which were amicably concluded with ‘And, anyway, it’s your round!’ or ‘And I suppose it’s my bloody round again an’ all, right?’ or ‘Oh, put a sock in it and get the beers in, will you?’

  As well as preventing carnage and mayhem, round-buying is also vitally important because it is an Englishman’s substitute for the expression of emotion. The average English male is terrified of intimacy, but he is also human, and therefore has a need to bond with other humans, particularly with other males. This means finding some way of saying, ‘I like you’ to other males, without, of course, actually having to utter anything quite so soppy. Fortunately, such positive feelings can be expressed, without any loss of masculine dignity, by the reciprocal buying of rounds of drinks.

  The importance we attach to round-buying is also yet another indicator of our obsession with fair play: round-buying, like queuing, is all about taking turns. But, like every aspect of English etiquette, the unwritten rules of round-buying are complicated, with all the usual sub-clauses and exceptions, and ‘fairness’ is a somewhat slippery concept – it is not just a simple matter of ensuring roughly equal expenditure on drinks. The rules of round-buying are as follows:

  •In any group of two or more people, one person must buy a ‘round’ of drinks for the whole group. This is not an altruistic gesture: the expectation is that the other member or members of the group will each, in turn, buy a round of drinks. When each person has bought a round, the process begins again with the first person.

  •Unless the group is drinking at the bar counter, the person who buys the round must also act as waiter. ‘Buying your round’ means not only paying for the drinks, but going to the bar, ordering the drinks and carrying them all back to the table. If there are a lot of drinks, another member of the group will usually offer to help, but this is not compulsory, and the round-buyer may have to make two or three trips. The effort involved is as important as the expenditure: it is part of the ‘gift’. (Exceptions to this rule are often made for frail or elderly people, however, and chivalrous males will often perform this service for female round-buyers, or at least offer some assistance.)

  •‘Fairness’ in round-buying is not a matter of strict justice. One person may well end up buying two rounds during a ‘session’, while the other members of the group have only bought one round each. Over several ‘sessions’, rough equality is usually achieved, but it is extremely bad manners to appear overly concerned about this.

  •In fact, any sign of miserliness, calculation or reluctance to participate wholeheartedly in the ritual is severely frowned upon. For an English male, saying that someone ‘doesn’t buy his round’ is a dire insult. It is thus important to try always to be among the earliest to say ‘It’s my round’ rather than waiting until the other members of the group have bought ‘their’ rounds and it is quite obviously your turn.

  •Perhaps surprisingly, I found that on average ‘initiating’ round-buyers (those who regularly buy the first round) actually spend no more money in the long term than ‘waiting’ round-buyers (those who do not offer a round until later in the session). In fact, far from being out-of-pocket, ‘initiators’ often end up rather better off than those who wait, because their popularity and reputation for generosity means that others are inclined to be generous towards them.

  •One should never wait until all one’s companions’ glasses are empty before offering to buy the next round. The correct time to say, ‘It’s my round’ is when the majority of the glasses are about three-quarters empty. This rule is only partly about proving one’s generosity, more a matter of ensuring that the flow of alcohol is continuous – that no one is ever left without a drink for even a few minutes.

  •It is acceptable occasionally to refuse a drink during the round-buying process, as long as you do not attempt to make an issue or a moral virtue out of your moderate intake, but this does not exempt you from the round-buying obligation. Even if you are drinking less than the others, you should still ‘buy your round’. It would be very rude, however, to refuse a drink that is offered as a ‘peace-making’ gesture, or that is clearly a significant, personal friendship-signal.

  There is usually no excuse for failing to perform the sacred round-buying ritual, but there are a few exceptions to the round-buying rules, relating to the size of the drinking group and the demographics of its members.

  THE NUMBERS EXCEPTION—In a very large group, traditional round-buying can sometimes be prohibitively expensive. This is not, however, usually seen as a valid reason to abandon the ritual altogether. Instead, the large group divides into smaller sub-groups (nobody suggests or organises this, it just happens), each of which follows the normal round-buying procedure. Alternatively, the principle of gift-giving is maintained by having a ‘whip-round’ – collecting a relatively small sum of money from each person to put into a ‘kitty’, which is then used to buy rounds of drinks for the whole group, with the members of the group taking turns to perform the ‘waiter’ service. Only as a last resort, perhaps among students or others on very low incomes, will members of a large group agree to purchase drinks individually.

  THE COUPLE EXCEPTION—In some social groups, couples are treated as one person for the purposes of round-buying, in that only the male half of the couple is expected to ‘buy his round’. In a slightly different variation, where the group consists of both couples and singles, a couple will be treated as two people, but the male partner will buy the female’s rounds for her. These ‘couple exceptions’ are somewhat less common among younger people, so you are more likely to see these practices when the males in the group are over forty. Some older English males cannot cope with the idea of women buying them drinks at all, and extend the couple exception to cover all females in a group, whether or not they are accompanied by an attached male. When out alone with a female, these older, old-fashioned males will also insist on buying all the drinks, whereas younger males are more likely to expect a female companion to take turns buying rounds in the usual manner, or at least to offer to buy a round.

  THE FEMALE EXCEPTION—Women generally have considerably less reverence for the round-buying rules than men. In mixed-sex groups, they play along, humouring their male companions by following the prescribed etiquette, but in all-female gatherings you see all sorts of odd variations and even outright flouting of the rules. They do buy each other drinks, but round-buying is just not such a big issue for them – they don’t keep track of whose round it is, or have endless
friendly disputes about who has or hasn’t bought their round, and they tend to find the male obsession with round-buying somewhat tedious and irritating.

  This is mainly because English females have much less need for the ‘liquid handshake’ of reciprocal drink-buying than English males: the argument is not their primary form of communication, so there is no need for peacekeeping gestures, and they are quite capable of conveying that they like each other and achieving intimacy by other means, such as compliments, gossip and reciprocal disclosure. English women may not be as free-and-easy with their disclosures as women from other, less inhibited, cultures: they do not tend to tell you all about their messy divorce and what their therapist said within five minutes of meeting you. But once English females become friends, such discussions are commonplace, whereas many English males never get to this stage, even with their best and closest friends.

  Even the word ‘friend’ is a bit difficult, a bit too touchy-feely, for some English males: they prefer to use the term ‘mate’. You can be ‘mates’ with someone without necessarily knowing anything at all about his personal life, let alone his feelings, hopes or fears – except where these concern the performance of his football team or his car. The terms ‘mate’, ‘good mate’ and ‘best mate’ are ostensibly used to convey varying degrees of intimacy, but even your ‘best mate’ may know little or nothing about your marital problems – or only as much as can be conveyed in a jokey-blokey, mock-moaning manner, to which he can respond, ‘Women! Huh! Typical!’ You would, of course, risk your life for him, and he for you. Your ‘best mate’ may have a better idea of your golf handicap than the names of your children, but you actually care deeply about each other. Still, that goes without saying, right, so there’s no need to cause unnecessary embarrassment by saying it. And anyway, it’s your round, mate.