Stuff Brits Like
FRASER McALPINE
Stuff BRITS Like
A Guide to What’s Great About Great Britain
First published by
Nicholas Brealey Publishing in 2015
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© Fraser McAlpine 2015
The right of Fraser McAlpine to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN: 978-1-85788-634-4
eISBN: 978-1-85788-977-2
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.
Cover art: Brtish Flag © Andrey_Kuzmin / Shutterstock; English Bulldog © Eric Isselee / Shutterstock; Crown © Katsiaryna Pleshakova / Shutterstock.
Cover design by Diana Kolsky.
Interior text design by Ellen Cipriano.
Interior images by Fraser McAlpine.
Printed in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc.
Contents
Introduction
Pedantry
Talking about the Weather
Keep Calm and Carry On
British History
Offal
Apologizing Needlessly
Pubs, Inns, Bars and Taverns
The Shipping Forecast
Saucy Seaside Postcards
Speaking English When Abroad
Sarcasm
Libraries
Puns
The Bumps
Portable Food
Football
Cross-Dressing
Movie 1: The Great Escape
Cocking a Snook
Dancing
The NHS
Dunking Biscuits
Doctor Who
Arguing over What to Call Meals
Tea
Comedy
Village Halls and the WI
The Archers
Emotional Reserve and Decorum
Marmite
Talking about Class
Taking Dogs into Pubs
Sheds
Cricket
The Underdog
Cheering the Bad Guy
Desserts with Unappetizing Names
Movie 2: The Railway Children
Innuendo
Animals
The British Christmas
James Bond and Sherlock Holmes
Anyone Who Gets a Round In
Bell Ringing
The Royal Family
Phone Boxes
Reality TV
Drawing Willies on Things
Accents
Great British Guitar Bands
The BBC
Avoiding Confrontation
Wimbledon
Grade-B Swearwords
The Charts
Coronation Street
Movie 3: Trainspotting
The Great British Fry-Up
Children’s TV
America
Desert Island Discs
Creating New Worlds
Melancholy
The Tabloids
Cars and Top Gear
Chocolate That Tastes of Chocolate
Stonehenge
Embarrassing Foreigners
Metal
Boot Fairs and Charity Shops
Rugby
Curry
Moaning about Bureaucracy
Pub Quizzes
Movie 4: Kes
Mythical Beasts
The Theatre
Banter
Ampersand Foods
Conkers
Eastenders
Regional Nicknames
Kebabs after the Pub
Downton Abbey and Sunday Night Nostalgia TV
Weird Traditions
Real Ale
Putting Union Jacks on Things
Stags, Hens, and Having a Do
Movie 5: Four Weddings and a Funeral
Feminism
Queuing
Curious Pop
Tribute Bands
The Boat Race
Crisps and Other Deep-Fried Foods
The Cheese Map of Britain
National Treasures
Bonfire Night
Quirks, Foibles and Eccentricities
Nightcaps
Camping
Scolds
Slang and Making Up Words
Introduction
Let us start this preposterous journey in the most British way imaginable: with a series of meandering apologies and caveats. I don’t know what it is about a book like this, but it seems you can’t make huge, sweeping, lawn-mower generalizations about the likes and loves of an entire nation without slicing up the odd precious and unique orchid here and there, and for that, I am truly sorry.
It would probably have been easier to write a book called Stuff Brits Don’t Like. That would have taken no time to compile and run to several volumes, such is the national zeal for complaining and taking things to task, but it’s not as if the Internet is short of people showing their displeasure, so it’s probably best to leave them to it.
And while we’re shutting doors in people’s faces, this book can only be a personal journey. It wasn’t subject to a public vote and there won’t be a chance to suggest subsequent chapters. People born and bred in the British Isles won’t always recognize themselves on every page; there will be lots of points along the way where, if this were a blog, the comments section would blaze with outrage and correction (see: Pedantry). But that’s because one book cannot hope to convey the full range of enthusiasms in a nation as endlessly and joyfully provincial as the United Kingdom.
Heck, I can’t even get them to agree on a list of favourite movies (excluding Star Wars, which is, ah, universal). So I’ve picked just five popular cinematic experiences, the ones that say something about how British people like to think about themselves. That is, if they would ever settle down and think of themselves as British in the first place.
By which I mean we need to get our definitions straight. For the purposes of brevity, if not painstaking accuracy, “Britain” and “the United Kingdom” have been used interchangeably to describe the same place (the full title is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). However, the United Kingdom is made up of four countries—England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—and Cornwall, which does not currently have nation status (it’s actually a duchy). The Cornish have been identified by the European Union as a recognized minority; they are, in other words, their own people.
Then there are the island communities: the Isles of Scilly, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Isle of Wight and so on. On some islands cars are welcome, and on others they are not allowed and the taxis all float. This must make watching Top Gear there an entirely different experience from what it is in landlocked Birmingham. So again, sweeping generalizations are hard to pull off.
Also, Britain and England are so often conflated that Welsh, Scottish a
nd Northern Irish (and Cornish) residents tend to feel left out. Make a list of British things that are principally English things and you’re sure to get on someone’s nerves.
Then again (again), you can’t ignore the English either, not least because they made such a fuss about being in charge of everything in the first place. But which England? The north is a very different place from the south. As is the east from the west. And that’s before you consider the dividing influence of class—still a hugely influential factor in British tastes—and the various experiences of people from different ethnic groups too.
In fact, the only thing British people will definitely all agree on with regard to this book is that it is hugely flawed in almost every respect. I can only offer sympathy with that view, and my humble apologies. Ideally a balance can be struck between compiling the common clichés of bowler hats and stiff upper lips and writing a huge list of things that everyone likes, delivered as if no one has ever noticed them, like saying, “Hey, this oxygen stuff isn’t bad, is it?”
Everything else, bar an eccentric glossary at the end, is yours to puzzle over and investigate further. Good luck!
FRASER McALPINE, CORNWALL, 2015
Pedantry
Let’s be honest, we all knew this was going to be the first chapter. The British have many international reputations to uphold, but the most fondly held is that of the uptight gentleman in an immaculate suit waiting politely for his turn to explain that you’ve just done something wrong. Even in the act of putting together ideas for a book about things that British people tend to enjoy—not a controversial or damning theme—I started to worry about the kindly meant corrections, the outrage at having left something out. You know, the pedants’ revolt.
Now I’m fretting that I’ve put the apostrophe in the wrong place just there. Do I mean it’s a revolt of a single pedant or a group of pedants? Does it belong to them? Do people get that the phrase is a pun on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381? Should I explain that or does it ruin the joke? It’s all very stressful.
There’s also the fact that the only people who refer to the Brits as the Brits are not Brits. Regional pride runs strong and deep in the United Kingdom, a state of affairs that is only intensified by the fragmented nature of Britain as a combined nation. As there’s a certain amount of cultural antagonism between the five nationalities involved—or, more accurately, between the other four nationalities and England—any reference to British people will draw the Pavlovian response that Britain is not England, that the two terms are not interchangeable. And that’s before we’ve even started to take into account the significant differences between individual counties, districts, and villages, some of which really do not get on well.
You can pin this intense desire for subjective accuracy down to a need to create order out of chaos—using unimprovably impatient phrases like “Why don’t you just . . .” or “Surely you’d be better off . . .” as a preface—but the British and their high standards manage to find chaos everywhere, even in places that look pretty ordered already, thank you very much.
By which I mean the Brits won’t forgive the rest of the world for driving on the right-hand side of the road, much less America for taking so many letters out of British English words—colour, catalogue, axe—just to make spellings easier.
Naturally the online environment has only intensified this state of affairs. Create any kind of Web list—Five Best Tea Shops in Rhyl, Nine Greatest Achievements of Clement Attlee, Seven Greatest Beatles Songs—and the first comment afterwards will be “You forgot Liffy’s caff” or “You forgot maintaining government order in a cabinet of strong personalities” or “You forgot ‘Nowhere Man,’”as if the omission of one runner-up deprives the whole enterprise of merit. That’s largely why people create these online lists, of course—to encourage pedants to read, snort and comment—and it’s incredibly effective.
But there are also blogs and Twitter feeds devoted to the search for spelling mistakes on handwritten signs: patiently explaining why speech marks are not used for emphasis, impatiently yelling at the poor greengrocer and his “potatoe’s,” and generally channelling the sadistic English teacher from the writer’s past who made tiny tears well up every time she read the student’s homework out loud to the class. And of course those blog posts and tweets will also contain mistakes—whether made by fat fingertips on a smartphone screen, autocorrect larking about or genuine human error—and this will provoke more snarky comments, which will also contain basic spelling mistakes or missed punctuation, betraying the glee and speed with which pedantry is applied. To be the second to point out a mistake is an unbearable shame. To have made a mistake while in the act of pointing out someone else’s, well, that’s grounds for immediate deportation from life itself.
Celebrities are invited to join the cause. Stephen Fry, as a fan of discourse and generally bashing words together to see the pretty sparks, is often encouraged to speak out against declining standards in grammar and the rising tide of neologisms. He stoutly refuses to do so, pointing out that language is a fluid thing. English teachers are wonderful, inspiring people, even the scary ones, but they only relay the basic rules of punctuation and grammar as they understand them at the time. To say the English language—something the Brits are quietly rather proud of—is on the wane because of LOL or textspeak is simply to echo the same view expressed in the 1950s with daddy-o and cool, and in the 1960s with groovy and heavy. Shakespeare coined hundreds of new words and expressions, from barefaced to courtship to puking, and you can bet that the first few times they were used, there was an unimpressed puritan within earshot, ready with a withering rebuke. And they had proper puritans in those days.
The nation’s best-known film critic is Mark Kermode. He’s a man of strong passions, very principled in his approach and firm in his point of view. And one of the reasons he is so popular is that he’s a terrific pedant. Whether he’s picking apart tiny flaws in the films he is reviewing or he’s listening to comments from his radio listeners and correcting their grammar, his endless need to correct and improve is symptomatic of a particular outlook, one that is so popular that even when he makes a mistake—and let’s be entirely honest here, there is no one so sure of their linguistic powers that they are above a little grammatical polish here and there—people rush to correct him.
The interesting thing is, these corrections still happen even when the perceived error is something that doesn’t even really exist as a rule. A lot of people have been taught that sentences should not end with a preposition, for example. So the question “Which chair shall I sit on?” is a prime target for pedants to leap at and suggest “On which chair shall I sit?” as the correct alternative. This will then provoke other pedants to point out that the preposition rule is actually a myth, that it gets in the way of conversational speech, and that people should be less persnickety about grammar in general, so long as the meaning is understood. This will then provoke a further point of pedantry, because in Britain the word is pernickety. And that’s when everyone realizes there are no more chairs.
WHAT TO SAY: “And you forgot you’re manners, sir.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Gah! Your means belonging to you. You’re means you are. Its so easy!”
Talking about the Weather
Hooray for Brollywood.
Making small talk is hard work. It’s bad enough when a companionable silence has descended between two complete strangers in a lift or in a doctor’s waiting room, but what if they sort of know each other? What if they’ve met once or twice, just enough to be aware of the other, but not enough to have shared any personal details that could spur a decent conversation? How, in a nation that prides itself on decorum and social niceties, shall we endure the pain of not knowing what to say?
Time to dig out the British cure for all awkwardness: a quick chat about the weather. This is one of the most commonly observed quirks of British social interaction; from Land’s End upwards, the British are world renowned for striking up c
onversations that, to external ears, sound worryingly like banal observations about temperature and rainfall. They know this about themselves too and yet, in the absence of a better option, seem powerless to hold back. Where two British people are gathered together, there will be some talk about the weather.
And this goes back for years and years. George Formby, the beloved wartime entertainer, with his ribald songs and cheeky wink, had for a catchphrase the opening gambit of most weather-based conversations: “turned out nice again.”
Of course, the reason the Brits are so wedded to meteorological matters is simple: there’s a lot of weather in the British Isles, it changes often, and some of the changes are quite subtle. The mist rolls in from the sea, the clouds appear as if by magic, the wind shakes the spiralling keys from the sycamore trees, the sun cooks the clouds away, hailstones pelt down upon pensioners in the bus queue, the rain drenches the topsoil and creates a sudden stream across the zebra crossing, soaking the feet of children on their way to school, who laugh delightedly and jump up and down while their parents huddle under brollies and despair at their sodden socks.
There is always something going on, weatherwise. Even overcast days have their own color: a grey sky bleeding the bright greens from the grass and trees, a white sky that lends a forensic sharpness to an autumn morning, even a low and purple sky that demands that everyone get inside before the rain begins. It’s all so very noticeable, you can’t really blame the people that live in this kaleidoscope climate for paying attention to what is going on. They store up tiny details for later, make microcomparisons between what is happening now and what was happening earlier. So when the opportunity arises, whether in a queue at the supermarket or while matching stride with a fellow dog walker in the park, a summary of recent meteorological changes can be brought to mind right away.
These will go in one of two directions: getting better or getting worse. The getting-better conversation goes something like this:
“Glad that rain stopped, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes, it was miserable out here a couple of hours ago.”
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