Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

And anyway, from my sojourns in pub, hotel and tea shop, they were just as likely to read the Guardian. For Ben Page, they’re ‘a bit Pooterish – a bit Margo from The Good Life; they are conservative but with a small “c”. They may well be fiscally conservative, but they are mostly socially liberal.’ It seems they hold lots of different opinions at the same time, and change their mind more often. More Muddle England than Middle England.

  For instance, another contradiction. All those colonels risking thrombosis as they read the new crime figures in the Daily Mail are in fact criminal masterminds and Middle England itself is nothing like as law-abiding as it claims. A report, ‘Law Abiding Majority? The everyday crimes of the middle classes’, co-authored by criminologists Dr Stephen Farrall and Professor Susanne Karstedt, found that: ‘Contempt for the law is as widespread in the centre of society as it is assumed to be rampant at the margins and among specific marginal groups. Antisocial behaviour by the few is mirrored by anti civil behaviour by the many … Neither greed nor need can explain why respectable citizens cheat on insurance claims or in second-hand sales, and do not hesitate to discuss their exploits in pubs.’

  According to their research, more than a third of the law-abiding majority beloved of politicians has paid cash to a cleaner, plumber or other tradesman to cheat the tax man. One in five has taken something from work, and a third if handed too much change in a shop would just keep it. One in ten doesn’t pay their television licence. As the report concludes: ‘These are the crimes and unfair practices committed at the kitchen table, on the settee and from home computers, from desks and call centres, at cashpoints, in supermarkets and restaurants, and in interactions with builders and other tradespeople.’

  It seems that, having learned to love its foibles, I’ve been rather hard on Middle England for a paragraph of two. So while I warm up for my concluding eulogy, let me reflect, sadly, on another entry in the debit column: Middle England’s capacity and appetite for censoriousness, a new zeal for judgement encouraged by the more rabid tub-thumpers of the press and TV. As I was coming to the end of my travels, the papers – some of them at least – seemed daily full of complaints. The red top tabloids are still bracingly judgemental, which is exactly what they should be. The Times, ‘The Thunderer’, still thunders, I’m glad to say, albeit in a thoughtful, circumspect 21st century way. But somewhere in the middle lie writers and columnists and papers for whom ‘The Whinger’ would be a better nickname. Now a certain plaintive but stoic grumbling is part of our national make-up as our best comic writers have always known. It is there in Reggie Perrin’s melancholy daily recital of the absurd reasons given for his delayed arrival by train at the office: ‘Eleven minutes late, overheated axle at Berrylands.’ ‘Eleven minutes late, somebody had stolen the lines at Surbiton.’ ‘Twenty-two minutes late, badger ate a junction box at New Malden.’ ‘Twenty-two minutes late, escaped puma, Chessington North.’ It is there in the quiet raging despair of Basil Fawlty’s phone call: ‘Ahh, yes, Mr O’Reilly, well, it’s perfectly simple. When I asked you to build me a wall I was rather hoping that instead of just dumping the bricks in a pile you might have found time to cement them together … you know, one on top of another, in the traditional fashion.’

  But that small, clear, wry voice wasn’t much heard at the end of 2009. It was drowned out by a clamour of outrage, sometimes justified maybe, but often babyish. Some bad jokes on a late evening radio show and the machinations of a celebrity ballroom dancing programme fought for coverage – and won – against the the horrific murder of a child called Baby P and the collapse of the world’s economies. In a zeal to whinge, it seemed that some sections of Middle England’s wailing media muezzin could not tell the difference between some puerile remarks on the radio and child abuse, could not distinguish the serious from the silly and the very same people who bleat about the nanny state seemed to need a nanny themselves to protect themselves from a few rude words or tasteless jokes.

  I found this odd and slightly pathetic. This, after all, is the Middle England, the beating heart of the brave little country that once stood alone against the darkest, most malevolent evil the modern world has ever seen. When it gets its knickers in a twist over litter or Polish plumbers or lapses of taste, it lessens us all.

  Late in the writing of this book I spoke at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Towns do not come much more Middle England than this handsome Regency spa town, and as I lounged in my room at the Hotel Du Vin, strolled along the floodlit lawns before the town hall on the Saturday night, wandered in and out of the tents and bookstalls and venues of the festival or bought delicious fresh figs and paella at the continental market on the Sunday morning, I thought, again, I could live here.

  This was interesting because the reason I was in town was to talk about a book of mine called Pies and Prejudice, a travelogue about the new north that is really a love letter. After the talk, I took questions from the audience and was surprised that many came from Leeds, Sheffield, Bury, Oldham, Bolton and the like. Had they come all this way just to hear me prattle? And of course they hadn’t. These smart people were part of a diaspora. They were proud of their roots but they also loved living, for now maybe but quite happily, in Oxford or Chipping Norton, Moreton-in-Marsh or Cheltenham, surrounded by figs and paella and Jane Austen and loveliness.

  Of course they were. They’d be mad not to be. These were not those folk, the worst of the north, who bang on about it being God’s Country. It isn’t. There is no God’s Country. Unless it all is. Or unless it’s Einstein’s Country. Merely coming from the north per se is nothing to be proud of. You have to do something, go somewhere, be clever and beautiful and charming and, yes, maybe northern and share it with the world. Also, if you think God prefers Rotherham and Chorley to Bath and Ludlow, well, he’s got a funny way of showing it, hasn’t he?

  Some northerners, maybe the ones who hoped this book would be a sustained sneer at Middle England, will be disappointed at this treacherous turn. Sorry, guilty as charged. But the England that made Vaughan Williams and Shakespeare is dearer to me than the England that made Bernard Manning and Liam Gallagher. And even if there are no jagged peaks here, the physical beauty of the place is still intoxicating, from the misty Chilterns to the luscious Cotswolds to the dreaming reverie of the university towns.

  But the real lie about Middle England, the peddled myth that really should be exploded, is about its values. Middle England’s values, if you believe NW1, are a frenzied catechism of prejudice and rage underpinned by an ideology that’s a sinister, alchemical blending of John Craven’s Countryfile and Mein Kampf. In fact, I encountered much less casual racism and ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ bloodlust than I hear in cabs and shops and pubs across the towns and cities of the north and south. It was nice, actually, not hearing ‘paki’ or ‘twat’ or ‘bitch’ quite as regularly as I’m used to, not seeing gaggles of fifty-year-old men drunk and swearing outside pubs at midday on Tuesday, or watching toddlers being struck and manhandled and hissed at in the street by their awful parents. I didn’t see a lot of that in Middle England. Ah, they’re only being polite, some will offer. Well, I have no problem with that. All any of us are doing is being polite. Love will fail, as Kurt Vonnegut said, but courtesy will prevail.

  Almost by definition, Middle England is not extremist or lunatic. It doesn’t smear fox blood on its children’s faces or shoot little animals for fun. It doesn’t go to Eton or Sandhurst. It goes to Waitrose and M&S. It doesn’t shriek ‘PC gone mad!’ on message boards or write unhinged letters in green ink to local papers about abuse of parking discs or the loss of the word ‘gay’ to the English language. It hasn’t got the time, to be honest, what with setting the pub quiz (all proceeds to charity) and clearing out the shed and watching the backlog of episodes of Little Dorrit and The Blue Planet it’s got on Sky Plus. Maggie and Diana – blonde, remote and unknowable – are not their icons. It’s Delia and Celia, dark, sweet and wistful.

  I fell a little in love with Middle En
gland. I could quite enjoy being her ‘bit of rough’ if she’d have me. Everyone thinks they know her. But they don’t know the first thing about her. She didn’t stay with old Fred, for instance, though she’s still in touch obviously because of the kids. Trevor Howard was fun for a while but in the end she chucked him too. She’s going out tonight with the girls and, as she texts them, big gin and tonic in one hand, Nokia in the other, Radiohead and The Lark Ascending on the iPod, she looks out over those broad sunlit uplands Mr Churchill talked about and thinks maybe her finest hour is still to come.

  Could I borrow your hankie? I think I must have something in my eye.

  Stuart Maconie is a broadcaster, journalist and writer familiar to millions from his work on radio and TV. He is a stalwart of Britain’s most popular network, Radio 2, where he co-presents the Radcliffe and Maconie show during the week and his own regular Saturday show. His BBC 6 music show The Freak Zone is a global cult and he has written and presented dozens of other shows across BBC radio and TV. His work as a journalist has appeared everywhere from NME and Q Magazine to the Daily Telegraph and the Oldie. His previous books include the official biographies of Blur and James as well as the bestsellers, Cider with Roadies and Pies and Prejudice. He lives in exile in the West Midlands and is happiest fell-walking with Muffin the dog.

  ‘The perfect pop fan’s life … effortlessly articulate’ The Times

  ‘The rarest of rock memoirs – hilarious, erudite and endearingly humble … Maconie’s reminiscences are rich with both anecdote and insight’ Q Magazine

  ‘If you only read one personal music odyssey, make it this one’ GQ

  ‘Maconie makes a jovial, self-deprecating narrator. Sharp and funny’ Guardian

  ‘Stuart Maconie is the best thing to come out of Wigan since the A58 to Bolton’ Peter Kay

  ‘An heir to Alan Bennett … stirring and rather wonderful’ Antony Quinn, Sunday Times

  ‘Funnier than Bill Bryson. There’s lots to love about Maconie’s North – even for Southern Jessies’ Metro

  ‘Affectionate, informed, conversationally honest, polemical’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘One of the delights of Pies and Prejudice is Maconie’s prose … behind Maconie’s crafted wordplay is a serious thesis: that the North is more than its image’ The Times

  ‘The book succeeds … because of his care and wit in revealing something of these wonderful cities’ Observer

  ‘[Stuart Maconie’s] search for his northern soul has just the right balance of pies and prejudice to be right good’ Independent

  ‘A witty and illuminating travelogue’ Sunday Times