Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  They may seem very different, but the silent or apologetic complaint and the aggressive-obnoxious one are closely related. The symptoms of the English social dis-ease involve opposite extremes: when we feel uncomfortable or embarrassed in social situations, we become either over-polite and awkwardly restrained or loud, loutish, aggressive and insufferable.

  The ‘Typical!’ Rule Revisited

  Our reluctance to complain in restaurants is, however, only partly due to social dis-ease. There is also a wider issue of low expectations. I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter Paul Richardson’s observation that the English regard good food as a privilege, not as a right. Unlike other cultures with a tradition of caring about food and culinary expertise, the English on the whole do not have very high expectations when we go to a restaurant, or indeed of the food we prepare at home. With the exception of a handful of foodies, we don’t really expect the meals we are served to be particularly good: we are pleased when the food is good, but we do not feel as deeply offended or indignant as other nations when it is mediocre. We may feel a bit annoyed about an overcooked steak or flabby chips, but it is not as though some fundamental human right has been infringed. Mediocre food is the norm.

  And it’s not just food. Many of my foreign informants, Americans in particular, commented on our inability to complain effectively about incompetence or failings in most other products and services. ‘I get the impression,’ said one frustrated American, ‘that at some deep-down, fundamental level the English just don’t really expect things to work properly – do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘especially compared with America. Americans expect good service, value for money, products that do what they’re supposed to do – and if their expectations are not met they get pissed off and sue somebody. English people mostly don’t expect particularly good service or products, and when their pessimistic assumptions are confirmed they say, “Huh! Typical!”’

  ‘That’s it exactly!’ said my informant. ‘My wife’s English and she’s always saying that. We go to a hotel and the food’s crap and I want to complain and she says, “But hotel food’s always crap – what did you expect?” We buy a new dishwasher and they don’t deliver it when they said they would and she goes, “Typical!” The train’s two hours late and she says, “Oh, isn’t that just typical!” I’m like, “Well, yes, it is typical and it always will be because you people never do anything about it except sit around saying, “Typical!” to each other.’

  He is right. We do tend to treat such failings as though they were acts of God, rather than instances of human incompetence. A delayed train or an undelivered dishwasher is ‘typical’ in the same way that rain on a bank-holiday picnic is ‘typical’. These inconveniences may be frustrating, but they are normal, familiar, ‘only to be expected, I suppose’. And acts of God do not require us to engage in embarrassing confrontations with other humans.

  But there is more to it than that. I observed earlier that the quintessentially English ‘Typical!’ combines huffy indignation with a sense of passive, resigned acceptance, an acknowledgement that things are bound to go wrong, that life is full of little irritations and difficulties and that one must simply put up with it. There is a sort of grudging forbearance, a very English kind of grumpy stoicism, in ‘Typical!’. But now I see that there is also almost a perverse sense of satisfaction. When we say, ‘Typical!’ we are expressing annoyance and resentment, but we are also, in some strange way, pleased that our gloomy predictions and cynical assumptions about the ways of the world have been proved accurate. We may have been thwarted and inconvenienced, but we have not been taken unawares. We knew this would happen, we ‘could have told you’ that the hotel food would be dire, the dishwasher would not be delivered, the train would be delayed, for we in our infinite wisdom know that such is the nature of hotels, deliveries and trains. We may be useless at complaining, incapable of even the most basic assertiveness, at the mercy of incompetent providers of sub-standard goods but, hey, at least we are omniscient.

  That’s the way things are. Cars are ‘temperamental’; boilers are ‘a bit unpredictable’; washing machines ‘have off days’; toasters, kettles and doorknobs ‘have a bit of a tendency to play up’; flush mechanisms ‘only work if you pump it twice and hold it down the second time – there’s a bit of a knack to it’; computers can be guaranteed to ‘go on the blink’ at the wrong moment and wipe out your files; you always choose the slowest queue; deliveries are always late; builders never finish a job properly; you always wait ages for a bus and then three come along at once; nothing ever works properly; something always goes wrong, and on top of that it’s bound to rain. To the English, these are established, incontrovertible facts; they are on a par with two-plus-two-is-four and the laws of physics. We start learning these mantras in our cradles, and by the time we are adults this Eeyorish view of the world is part of our nature.

  Unless you fully appreciate this peculiar mindset and its implications you will never truly understand the English. Try repeating the above mantras to yourself every day for about twenty years, and you’ll get the idea. Recite them in a resignedly humorous tone, adding the odd ‘mustn’t grumble’ or ‘never mind’ or ‘better make the best of it’, and you will be well on your way to becoming English. Learn to greet every problem, from a piece of burnt toast to World War Three, with ‘Typical!’, somehow managing to sound simultaneously peeved, stoical and smugly omniscient, and you will qualify as a fully acculturated English person.

  CULINARY CLASS CODES

  Along with the lists of ingredients and calorie-counts, almost every item of English food comes with an invisible class label. (Warning: this product may contain traces of lower-middle-class substances. Warning: this product has petit-bourgeois associations and may not be suitable for upper-middle-class dinner parties.) Socially, you are what you eat – and when, where and in what manner you eat it, and what you call it, and how you talk about it.

  The popular novelist Jilly Cooper, who has a better instinctive understanding of the English class system than most sociologists, quotes a shopkeeper who told her, ‘When a woman asks for back I call her “madam”; when she asks for streaky I call her “dear”.’ Nowadays, in addition to these two different cuts of bacon, one would have to take into account the class semiotics of extra-lean, organic and ‘locally sourced’ bacon, lardons, prosciutto, pancetta, speck and Serrano ham (all favoured by the ‘madam’ class rather than the ‘dear’, but more specifically by the educated-upper-middle branch of the ‘madam’ class), as well as ‘bacon bits’, pork scratchings and bacon-flavoured crisps (all decidedly ‘dear’-class foods, rarely eaten by ‘madams’).

  English people of all classes love bacon sandwiches (the northern working classes call them ‘bacon butties’), although some more pretentious members of the lower- and middle-middle classes pretend to have daintier, more refined tastes, and some affectedly health-conscious upper-middles make disapproving noises about fat, salt, cholesterol and heart disease.

  Other foods that come with invisible labels warning of lower-class associations include:

  •prawn cocktail (the prawns are fine, but the pink ‘cocktail’ sauce is lower-middle class – and, incidentally, it does not suddenly become any ‘posher’ if you call it ‘Marie-Rose’ sauce)

  •egg and chips (both ingredients are relatively classless on their own, but working class if eaten together)

  •pasta salad (nothing wrong with pasta per se, but it’s ‘common’ if you serve it cold and mixed with mayonnaise)

  •rice salad (lower class in any shape or form, but particularly with sweetcorn in it)

  •tinned fruit (in syrup it’s working class, in fruit juice it’s still only about lower-middle)

  •sliced hard-boiled eggs and/or sliced tomato in a green salad (whole cherry tomatoes are just about OK, but the class-anxious would be advised generally to keep tomatoes, sliced eggs and lettuce away from each other)

  •tinned
fish (all right as an ingredient in something else, such as fishcakes or a tuna-mayonnaise sandwich, but very working class if served on its own)

  •chip butties (a mainly northern tradition; even if you call it a chip sandwich rather than a butty, it is about as working class as food can get).

  Very secure uppers and upper-middles, with the right accents and other accoutrements, can admit to loving any or all of these foods with impunity – they will merely be regarded as charmingly eccentric. The more class-anxious should take care to pick their charming eccentricity from the very bottom of the scale (chip butties) rather than the class nearest to them (tinned fruit in juice), to avoid any possibility of a misunderstanding.

  The Health-correctness Indicator

  Since about the mid-1980s, health-correctness has become the main gastronomic class-divider. As a general rule, the middle social ranks are highly susceptible to the latest healthy-eating fads and fashions, while the highest and lowest classes are more robust in their views and secure in their food preferences, and apparently largely immune to the blandishments and exhortations of the middle-class health police.

  Food, we are told, is the new sex. It is certainly true that food has taken over from sex as the principal concern of the ‘interfering classes’ – the nannyish, middle-class busybodies who have appointed themselves guardians of the nation’s culinary morals, and who are currently obsessed with making the working class eat up its vegetables. We no longer have the prudish Mary Whitehouse complaining about sex and ‘bad language’ on television; instead, we have armies of middle-class amateur nutritionists and dieticians complaining about all the seductive advertisements for junk food, which are supposedly corrupting the nation’s youth. By which they mean working-class youth: everyone knows that it’s mainly the Darrens and Chantelles who are stuffing their faces with fatty and sugary snack foods, not the Jamies and Saskias.

  Particularly not the upper-middle Saskias, many of whom may be borderline anorexic or bulimic, or restricting their diets because of imaginary food ‘intolerances’. None of this seems to worry the health-correctness evangelists, who are only interested in force-feeding Darren and Chantelle their five daily portions of fruit and vegetables, and confiscating their crisps.

  The upper-middle chattering classes are the most receptive and suggestible adherents of the health-correctness cults. Among the females of this class in particular, food taboos have become the primary means of defining one’s social identity. You are what you do not eat. No chattering-class dinner party can take place without a careful advance survey of all the guests’ fashionable food allergies, intolerances and ideological positions. ‘I’ve stopped giving dinner parties,’ one upper-middle-class journalist told me. ‘It’s become simply impossible. Catering for the odd vegetarian was OK, but now everyone’s got a wheat allergy or a dairy intolerance or they’re vegan or macrobiotic or Atkins or they can’t eat eggs or they’ve got “issues” about salt or they’re paranoid about E-numbers or they’ll only eat organic or they’re detoxing . . .’

  While I have every sympathy for anyone with a genuine food allergy, the fact is that only a very small percentage of the population actually have such identifiable medical conditions – far fewer than the number who believe they are afflicted. These English chattering-class females seem to hope that, like the Princess and the Pea, their extreme sensitivities about food will somehow demonstrate that they are exquisitely delicate, highly tuned, finely bred people, not like the vulgar hoi-polloi who can eat anything. In these rarefied circles, you are looked down upon if you have no difficulty digesting proletarian substances such as bread and milk.

  If you really cannot manage to have any modish food problems yourself, then make sure that your children have some, or at least fret noisily about the possibility that they might be allergic to something: ‘Ooh, no! Don’t give Tamara an apricot! She hasn’t been tested for apricots yet. She had a bit of a reaction to strawberries, so we can’t be too careful’; ‘Milly can’t have bottled baby food – too much sodium – so I buy organic vegetables and purée them myself . . .’ Even if your children are unfashionably robust, you must take the trouble to keep up with the latest food-fear trends: fat was the big bogey in the eighties, then carbohydrates were the new fat, so high-fibre diets were out, high-protein and low-GI diets were in, and so on. On the genetic-modification debate, the official chattering-class party line is still ‘two genes good, four genes bad’. As a rule of thumb, assume that there is no such thing as a ‘safe’ food, except possibly an organic carrot personally hand-reared by Prince Charles.

  The lower- and middle-middles, taking their cue from the upper-middles (and from the Daily Mail, with its regulation five health-scares per day), are rapidly succumbing to the full range of ‘posh’ food-fears. There tends to be a bit of a satellite-delay effect, a pause in transmission of a beat or two, before the latest upper-middle food fads and taboos are taken up by the inhabitants of mock-Tudor and neo-Georgian detached houses, and then another delay before they reach the 1930s semi-detacheds. Some semi-detached suburbanites have only just realised that fat-phobia and fibre-worship are passé, long since superseded by carbo-phobia and protein-mania. I said in the 2004 edition of this book that once all the current carcinogens-du-jour and other food-fear fashions were adopted by the lower-middles, the upper-middles would have to think of some new ones, as there is no point in having a wheat intolerance if all those common people who say ‘pardon’ and ‘serviette’ have one too.

  Exactly as predicted, Atkins eventually reached lower-middle suburbia and is therefore now passé, so although carbo-phobia is still the norm, fat-phobia has been resurrected and protein is no longer revered. Wheat intolerance has become much less popular among the upper-middles since the lower classes cottoned on and started using it as an excuse for being overweight. Also as predicted, the upper-middles are casting about for other food-fears to replace this. The latest fashionable upper-middle ‘intolerance’ seems to be preservatives – allowing sufferers to claim that they cannot digest, or ‘have a reaction to’, yet another proletarian food group: cheap, processed, packaged food, or indeed anything that isn’t fresh, organic and locally sourced from a named farmer.

  The working classes generally have no truck with this sort of nonsense. They have real problems, and most do not need to invent fancy food allergies to make their lives more interesting. At the opposite end of the social scale, the upper classes tend to be equally down-to-earth and sceptical about such matters. Although they may have the time and money to devote to whimsical food taboos, they do not suffer from the same insecurities about their identity as the fretful middle classes, so do not need to define themselves through conspicuous non-consumption of bread and butter. There are a few exceptions, such as the late Princess of Wales, but they tend to prove the rule by being noticeably more insecure and self-conscious than the average aristocrat.

  Timing and Linguistic Indicators

  Dinner/Tea/Supper Rules

  What do you call your evening meal? And at what time do you eat it?

  •If you call it ‘tea’, and eat it at around half past six, you are almost certainly working class or of working-class origin. (If you have a tendency to personalise the meal, calling it ‘my tea’, ‘our/us tea’ and ‘your tea’ – as in ‘I must be going home for my tea’, ‘What’s for us tea, love?’ or ‘Come back to mine for your tea’ – you are probably northern working class.)

  •If you call the evening meal ‘dinner’, and eat it at around seven o’clock, you are probably lower-middle or middle-middle.

  •If you normally only use the term ‘dinner’ for much more formal evening meals, and call your informal, family evening meal ‘supper’ (pronounced ‘suppah’), you are probably upper-middle or upper class. The timing of these meals tends to be more flexible, but a family ‘supper’ is generally eaten at around half past seven, while a ‘dinner’ would usually be later, from half past eight onwards.

  To everyone but
the working classes, ‘tea’ is a light meal taken at around four o’clock in the afternoon, and consists of tea (the drink) with cakes, scones, jam, biscuits and perhaps little sandwiches – traditionally including cucumber sandwiches – with the crusts cut off. The working classes call this ‘afternoon tea’, to distinguish it from the evening ‘tea’ that the rest call supper or dinner.

  Lunch/Dinner Rules

  The timing of lunch is not a class indicator, as almost everyone has lunch at around one o’clock. The only class indicator is what you call this meal: if you call it ‘dinner’, you are working class; everyone else, from the lower-middles upwards, calls it ‘lunch’. People who say ‘d-lunch’ – which Jilly Cooper notes has a slightly West Indian sound to it – are trying to conceal their working-class origins, remembering at the last second not to call it ‘dinner’. (I’ve noticed that they may also say ‘t-dinner’ – which confusingly sounds a bit Yorkshire – for the evening meal, just stopping themselves from calling it ‘tea’.) Whatever their class, and whatever they may call it, the English do not take the middle-of-the-day meal at all seriously: most make do with a sandwich or some other quick, easy, hand-held meal.

  The long, lavish, boozy ‘business lunch’ is nowadays somewhat frowned upon (more of that American-inspired puritanical health-correctness), which is a great shame, as it was based on very sound anthropological and psychological principles. The giving and sharing of food is universally known to be one of the most effective forms of human social bonding. Anthropologists even have a special jargon-word for it: ‘commensality’. In all cultures, the offering and acceptance of such hospitality constitutes at the very least a non-aggression pact between the parties – you do not ‘break bread’ with your enemies – and at best a significant move towards cementing friendships and alliances. And it is even more effective if the social lubricant of alcohol is involved.