English

by Ben Fogle

  We also value our personal space. Indeed we require a six-inch radius as the minimum afforded to a person in a queue, to avoid increasing our stress or anxiety.

  There are a few other important cultural notes to be observed about queuing:

  Queue jumping, skipping or barging, sparks a huge sense of injustice amongst all members of the queue. We hate unfairness and injustice more than we do queuing. It is also unEnglish and therefore inappropriate to engage in conversation whilst queuing. Another recent study found that accepting an offer to go ahead of someone in the queue is not welcomed by other queuers. It is thought of as impolite, and will lead to a lot of shuffling and grumbling behind.

  Finally, as we’ve seen at Wimbledon, there are festive queues and everyday queues. According to a study, in festive queues ‘we eat, drink and make merry. We play games. We sing songs. In a total inversion of normal English etiquette, talking to a stranger is actively prescribed: you will be regarded as rather snooty and frowned upon if you “keep to yourself” in the usual English manner. There is an atmosphere of camaraderie, a sense of solidarity … Lifelong friendships and even marriages have been initiated in these queues.’ Not so much at the hand-baskets-only checkout at the supermarket, unfortunately.

  When it comes to English quirks and traits, the one that most defines our nation apart from queuing must be our love of apologizing. Sorry …

  A recent article by Robin Edds included a list of sixty-five things that will make an English person say ‘Sorry’:

  Walking into someone.

  Nearly walking into someone.

  Being walked into.

  Nearly being walked into.

  Walking into a door.

  Not hearing what someone has said.

  Thinking you heard what someone said but being so scared of being wrong about what they said that you ask them to repeat it, just in case.

  Calling someone on the phone.

  Answering the phone in someone else’s presence.

  Being late.

  Being early.

  Being predictably punctual.

  Using too much milk.

  Not using enough milk.

  Walking across a zebra crossing.

  Letting someone walk through a doorway before you.

  Coughing.

  Sneezing.

  Swearing.

  Spilling your pint on someone.

  When someone spills their pint on you.

  When you pay for a packet of chewing gum with a tenner because you don’t have anything smaller.

  When the bartender mishears your order.

  When the bartender drops your change as they pass it back to you, even though it’s clearly their fault.

  Checking your phone.

  Not replying to an email.

  Replying to an email too quickly.

  Replying to a work email over the weekend.

  When offering your seat to someone a millisecond late.

  Not offering a drink to someone within the first ten seconds of them entering your house.

  Asking a shop assistant for help.

  Not having a stamp, lighter, and pen on your person at all times.

  Paying in coins for something.

  Asking someone in the street for anything at all (directions, lighter, etc.).

  Not having something or knowing something someone on the street asks you for.

  Sending something back to the kitchen/bar if it’s raw/wrong/likely to kill you.

  Making an early taxi driver wait until the agreed time you wanted to leave at.

  Piers Morgan.

  Making a joke.

  Making a joke someone else doesn’t get.

  Not getting someone else’s joke.

  Someone else’s baby being sick on you.

  Someone else’s dog trying to bite you.

  Someone else’s car trying to run you over.

  Someone else’s partner trying to chat you up.

  Drinking too much.

  Not drinking enough.

  Lying.

  Telling the truth.

  The weather.

  Centuries of colonial oppression and exploitation.

  Taking slightly too long to board a bus.

  Ordering any drink at the bar more complicated than a beer or glass of wine.

  Ordering any drink at a bar.

  Wanting the attention of a waiter in a restaurant.

  Asking for your bill in a restaurant.

  Walking in on your flatmate doing something ordinary in the kitchen.

  When you need to get to the fridge and someone is standing between you and the fridge.

  Coming down with an illness.

  Doing poorly on an exam.

  Doing very well on an exam.

  Asking someone on a date.

  Accidentally making eye contact with a stranger.

  Accidentally making eye contact during sex.

  Sex.

  ‘Sorry’. Can there be a better word that sums up the art of Englishness? We are eternally sorry. We are sorry about everything. We are sorry for being sorry. More often than not, we begin our sentences with it: ‘Sorry for asking, but …’ Sorry seems to reflect our feelings of inadequacy. It’s also a way of showing reverence and politeness.

  If it is the weather that defines Englishness, it is the word ‘sorry’ that describes our nation. It seems that even if we haven’t broken a rule – and we are sticklers for rules and protocol – we have to say ‘sorry’. Apologetic to a fault, we shout ‘Sorry’ all the time; for example, as we’ve been talking about Wimbledon, when playing tennis you are expected to apologize if your shot is a winner and proves too good for a rally to continue; or if your shot goes out or is a mishit or too short, wide or long for your knock-up partner to reach with ease; or lands in the next court disrupting their game – just moments after their ball has interrupted yours.

  I can remember the time I took part in a charity boxing bout for BBC Sport Relief. I couldn’t help apologizing every time I threw a punch. I even found myself apologizing when on the receiving end of an uppercut, as if it were my fault that my face was in the way – which of course it was.

  We don’t like to deliver opinions harshly. We load our sentences so they don’t cause offence. We use please, thank you and sorry as punctuation. Business English colleges, forums and websites are devoted to subjects like ‘How to be Polite in English’, with tips on softening tools for turning down invitations or proposals and saying ‘no’ euphemistically.

  We ask permission when we don’t really have to. ‘Do you mind if I … Would it be a problem if I …? I was wondering if I could … sit here/exist/breathe the same air?’ We use a softer tone of voice because we are so worried about offending the other person, and perhaps also in order that a negative reply will be similarly softly delivered. We don’t like being rejected or spoken to harshly either.

  The English don’t want to offend anyone, so we tend to mask our true feelings behind a host of euphemisms. There was a lovely little chart circulating online recently which tried to clarify the true meaning of certain English phrases.

  Politeness forbids us from being direct and saying what we mean. No wonder we had such a reputation for being devious negotiators in the nineteenth century.

  But being a polite nation makes for a quieter life. We have none of the drama of the Italians, or the gruffness of the Germans. We are calm, stiff-upper-lipped and polite. Lord Shaftesbury, writing in the first decade of the eighteenth century, said: ‘“Politeness” may be defined as a dext’rous management of our words and actions, whereby we make other people have better opinion of us and themselves.’ He was determined to make English society a more polite, genteel and cultured place and came up with the idea that ‘All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision.’

  I like to think of English politeness as an amicable collision. But most definitely not in a queue.


  CHAPTER TWELVE

  GRUB

  If there is one food that defines the nation, it is Marmite. The dark brown yeasty savoury spread manages to divide our usually compromise-seeking nation. Like the weather, it has the power to provoke conversation. There can be few other foods so unusual, and with such a polarizing effect on people.

  I never travel without a jar of Marmite. Like a cup of tea, there is a consistency in its unique flavour that can take you back to your childhood. I have a cameraman friend who has a special Marmite travel case. My wife was given a silver Marmite kid for her eighteenth birthday.

  Even Bill Nighy was stopped at the airport trying to take an extra-large jar through in his hand luggage. In fact, so numerous are the number of people trying to take jars of Marmite past security that London City Airport recently introduced a Marmite swap programme in which the airport exchanges a 100ml jar for any larger jar of Marmite. Marmite is the only product on Jeremy Clarkson’s dressing room rider; and it was also, incredibly, the centrepiece of the floral tribute at the funeral of the late reality star Jade Goody. Marmite’s name has now even become an official part of our everyday language: the label of the ‘Marmite effect’ is applied to anything that people either love or loathe; something for which there is no middle or neutral ground.

  Whether you are for or against it, Marmite is us. It is as English as they come. If a jar of Marmite could grumble, it would. It is rigid, sturdy and sensible; hardy but unsure of its social standing.

  Marmite is a thoroughly modern food. A product created from up-cycling waste.

  It was discovered in the nineteenth century with the realization that brewers’ yeast could be eaten. Burton upon Trent was the home to several large breweries, all of which produced vast quantities of yeast as a by-product. In 1902, the Marmite Food Company was founded to ‘feed’ off this yeasty effluent. The recipe was simple; it combined the concentrated yeast with salt, spices and celery to produce the first variant of Marmite. According to Marmite historians – and they do exist – the spread was named after the unusual shape of the earthenware pots in which it was sold, which looked like the French cooking pot of the same name.

  Marmite’s big moment came during the First World War, when it was included in soldiers’ rations. The men loved it, and it continued to be a part of the army’s fighting chest until the end of the Second World War, leading some observers to conclude that it helped us win two world wars. Even in more recent times, homesick British peacekeeping troops in Kosovo asked for supplies to be sent out. The company duly obliged.

  Marmite had taken off to such an extent that the Burton upon Trent factory couldn’t keep up with supply and a second factory was built in London in 1927. The London factory eventually closed in the 1960s but the Burton factory still exists, producing more than 50 million jars a year. That’s almost one for every household per year.

  Up until the 1960s, a jar was included in the ‘maternity kits’ for new mothers, given away free by the NHS to help fight anaemia and help heal tissue after any heart damage. Isn’t it amazing that our taxes were used to supply not only soldiers but new mums with Marmite? Powerful stuff.

  I have spent many years travelling the globe accompanied by the bulbous black jar and its iconic yellow lid. I have eaten the spread atop mountains, on oceans, in deserts and in the jungle. I once spread it all over my skin in Alaska to ward off mosquitoes, a trick repeated in other regions of the world. Scientists have validated the defensive effect against mozzie bites, which is due to the high quantities of B12 vitamins. New research has even suggested that the high B12 content can prevent premature ejaculation, and eating just five grams of Marmite provides a quarter of our daily vitamin intake.

  Five grams? Any Marmite aficionado will recognize that that is quite a lot: most fans will tell you that one of its wonders lies in the need for only the tiniest amount for your daily ‘hit’. And as a result, the jar is a little bit like the Tardis – a lot goes into a seemingly small space.

  The oracle of all things Marmite is St John Skelton, also known as Mr Marmite. Growing up to the tangy smell in the local air, once so acrid that locals complained, St John started work at the bustling factory at the age of twenty-two. In the forty-two years since he has been responsible for tasting every single batch of Marmite to leave the factory, the equivalent of 24,000 jars. If you break down the batches, that is in fact equivalent to 840 million jars of Marmite. Okay, so he doesn’t physically eat every single jar, but due to the variability of the ingredients, his taste buds have been responsible for the uniformity of flavour in close to a billion jars. That’s a lot of yeast extract.

  ‘When I came to Burton, it was the bright lights to me, as Lindsey’ – his home town – ‘is very small. There were very different people in Burton too, as they were much more prepared to be friendly to people they didn’t know.

  ‘If people have been brought up on Marmite, they tend to be fond of it throughout their lives,’ explains St John. ‘I’ve always loved it. From when I was a baby, I liked savoury foods over sweets. At kids’ parties, while everyone else was eating jelly and blancmange, I preferred the Marmite sandwiches they made for the grown-ups.’ According to St John the quality of Marmite has improved over the years. The best way to eat it, he insists, is between two slices of white bread, with a thin layer of butter and slices of cooked chicken.

  St John has stepped out of retirement to show me round the cavernous factory. It feels a little like a school during the holidays. A building that should contain far more people than it does. Like many across the country, the Marmite factory workers have succumbed to technology, been replaced by robots. Now just fifty people work in a factory that once employed thousands.

  Dozens of ‘yeast tankers’ are lined up in the yard ready to be ‘milked’ of their yeast, harvested from the huge Coors and Marston breweries nearby. Industrial hoses suck the yeast into massive silos. It’s like a dairy farm for robots as up to a dozen trucks are relieved of their yeast. The yeast is then transferred into copper vessels where it is spun by a centrifuge into which water and salt are both added. The solution is then heated.

  As the yeast begins to digest itself with the heat, it starts to break down into a rich fluid which is then sieved to remove the hops; the resulting by-product of slurry is sold off as a fertilizer for the agricultural industry. The remaining fluid effluent is converted into a flammable gas which is used to heat the factory. I told you it was ahead of its time.

  The soup simmers for several hours before it is thickened into a paste in tall towers in a process of evaporation which turns the liquid from 6 per cent solid into 50 per cent solid; and the process is repeated until it reaches a solidity of 75 per cent solid. Now stable, the paste is transferred into one tin vat. These are then used as the blends to ensure the consistency of the product.

  Consistency is a huge factor in Marmite production. There are so many variables: the varying quantities and qualities of yeast from various breweries is an obvious challenge. But there are some unusual – perhaps unique – social factors too, because Marmite is directly affected by the nation’s consumption of alcohol. Christmas and World Cup football matches all instigate a rise in the consumption of beer, with the result that there is more yeast to work with.

  Once the product is stable, the blending can begin. Like all the best products, of course, the exact ingredients of Marmite remain a tightly guarded secret. The secret blend is hidden in a plain box marked ‘Premix 8897523’. This is the magic that converts the yeast extract into the nation’s most loved – or loathed – spread. It has an aroma of roasted vegetables, herbs and citrus. Even Marmite stalwart St John doesn’t know the exact ingredients. As the secret mixture is added, a large label announces that from this point the product is known as Marmite. Without the secret premix, the naked product becomes another iconic brand, Bovril. The factory divides production between the two in an 80/20 split, producing 6,000 tons of Bovril every year.

  Once the
Marmite has been piped it is warmed once again to 40°C so that the brown, sticky paste is runny enough to be packaged. In its ‘shelf’ form, it would be too solid to pack. Here robotic arms swing and glide effortlessly and efficiently as hundreds of empty black jars are unpacked from boxes ready to be filled.

  While Marmite itself has a unique taste, the jars too have an unmistakable appearance. In fact they are pharmaceutical-quality jars that have been made by the same German company, Gerresheimer, for many years. Two hundred and fifty jars are swept down the line by giant robotic arms that then check every single jar for the tiniest flaw. Twenty-eight filler heads carefully fill each jar, the lids of which are then screwed on faster than the human eye can see. Above me a vast tower of Marmite jiggles and wriggles around a circular machine as this latest batch makes its way to the final packing area.

  St John was such a fixture that to celebrate his forty-two years at the factory he was presented with a limited-edition jar of Marmite bearing his face. His colleagues had organized the manufacture of 3,000 jars of Marmite XO, and St John said he was honoured by the gesture. Despite retirement he continues in his role of Lord Marmarati – leader of a secret group of Marmite fanatics, The Marmarati, which now claims to have 350 members. When he retired in November 2016, he created a tasting vacuum and had to search for a new dedicated group of tasters with buds refined enough to taste the minute differences between batches. Marmite developed an exam in which you need to get at least 19 out of 24 points to become a taster. Did I take it? Of course I did.

  I was ushered into a small, stark, white laboratory. Eight small beakers of colourless liquid had been carefully placed on the surface, in front of which was an examination paper. Men in white lab coats walked around looking scientific and important. ‘You must identify each liquid before rating them in order of strength,’ explained St John, suddenly looking fearsomely academic.

  The paper in front of me bore strict instructions:

  Please do not communicate with, or distract other people taking part.