“Hopefully it’ll hold off for the weekend. I want to get out in the garden.”
The getting-worse conversation is more of a lament:
“What happened to all that sunshine, eh?”
“I know! It was lovely yesterday and now look!”
“I was checking the forecast and they say it’s going to be like this for a couple of days.”
“Oh, well, I might just stay under my blanket for the duration.”
So it’s not so much a summary of how things are as a kind of prediction of the future, a way to read significance into signs from on high, but on a beautifully banal and yet entirely practical level.
Every nation’s people believe they are in some way favoured by their creator, and the British like to use the weather as a litmus test to see how acidic (or otherwise) that relationship has become.
WHAT TO SAY: “Ooh, listen to that rain!”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I notice there is a dense layer of cumulonimbus clouds over Salisbury; this means an increased likelihood of precipitation.”
Keep Calm and Carry On
It’s a mug’s game (etc.).
There aren’t many meme crazes that start with the threat of invasion and death raining from the sky on a nightly basis and end with oven gloves. But then, Keep Calm and Carry On is not like other meme crazes.
In spring of 1939, a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, the British government commissioned a special poster, knowing that dark times were ahead. The slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” appeared in white on a regal red background, set in a specially commissioned typeface to prevent forgery and with a Tudor crown above. The intention was to put the posters up in areas where German bombers would do the most damage, in order to encourage the population not to lose heart. But despite printing around two and a half million copies, the British government kept them in storage, caught between a concern that the slogan would be taken as patronizing—or even frustratingly obvious—and waiting for a moment of sufficiently dire need, such as a full invasion.
This never transpired, and so the posters were eventually destroyed, apart from a few exceptions. In 2000, one survivor made its way, in a dusty box of old books, to a magical secondhand bookshop in Alnwick, Northumberland, owned by Stuart and Mary Manley. They framed it and put it behind their till, to the delight and curiosity of their customers, who began to enquire if they could buy a poster like it. Eventually the Manleys decided to print their own copies, and slowly the design and slogan began to spread, that special font proving to be no deterrent whatsoever.
Now there are Keep Calm and Carry On mugs and notebooks, coasters and T-shirts in almost every gift shop in Britain, in all the colours of the rainbow and with constant variations to the slogan to serve some marketing need or other. Keep Calm has become an iconic British thing in an astonishingly short space of time. And yet, if you talk to anyone British about it, the most likely response is eye-rolling frustration that it remains quite as popular as it is.
They’ll bemoan the fact that most of the hilarious phrases don’t make sense—“Keep Calm and Cupcake”, “Keep Calm and Swag” and even one that says “Keep Calm and Eventually the Keep Calm Epidemic Will Die Out”—and that you can’t walk past a gift shop without seeing that regal branding and the big white letters of officialdom plastered across everything from teapots to toilet seats.
But despite becoming a target for sneers, the reason all these items exist is simple: secretly, the British love Keep Calm. There is something quintessential in the way the posters do not say “Don’t Panic” or “We Will Prevail” or anything about duty, insubordination or cold, dead hands. They say “Keep Calm”, and what that means is “We may be suffering something of an invasion at the moment, but that’s no reason to start acting in a rash and hot-headed manner. We may be a subjugated nation—temporarily—but we are not about to start acting like savages.”
And what of “Carry On”? It’s a world of subtle insubordination in just two words: “The Germans may take over our towns, ruin our cricket pitches, enforce the chilling of the ale in our pubs, put cabbage in with the pickled eggs, but we shall not pay them the slightest mind. As a nation, we have been trained to look past the bad behaviour of our rudest guests, especially the uninvited ones, and rather than cause a scene, we shall just go about our daily business as if nothing has happened.”
Granted, if you take either of these sentiments out of that specific context and apply them to the modern world, they very quickly become meaningless, and if you start mucking about with them to make comedy screen savers, it’s not surprising that some Brits claim to find the whole affair reductive, witless and exasperating.
But deep down they also love that so much historical information and national identity can be wrung out of five short words and a crown. It’s the very model of British reserve, even in the face of total annihilation.
WHAT TO SAY: “Oh, these things are everywhere, how ghastly.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Wait, I’ve got one . . . ‘Keep Calm and Doughnuts!’”
British History
The important thing to realize about the way the British view their history is that while opinions about the significance of various events may be wildly different, the method of justification for having those opinions is exactly the same. When seeking to prove a point, British thought takes the legal view: if you can cite precedence—point to a thing that has happened before that suits your argument—then you’re in the right.
And the great thing about the broad buckshot spray of British historical events is that there is almost always a precedent for any opinion, if you go back far enough. Not keen on the royal family? There was a civil war that ended with the execution of Charles I. Keen on the royal family? His son Charles II was eventually restored to the throne. Seeking proof that British women have always been strong enough to hold their own against the oppressive forces of patriarchy? I give you Boudicca, Queen Elizabeth I, Emmeline Pankhurst, Queen Victoria, and Margaret Thatcher. Need to identify an essential pluckiness of British society that binds everyone together for the common good in times of trouble, no matter how bleak things may appear to be? The phrase you want is “spirit of the Blitz”.
You’ll find people using the legal-precedent trick for all manner of reasons: to prove their right to call themselves local, to justify their support for a football team that hasn’t won a championship in years, and to make fashion decisions based on crazy ideas from the past—polka dots, beards, moustache wax (the Brylcreem revival is surely only a few months away).
People used to believe Richard III had a deformed spine and a withered hand and was a rotten king, largely because Shakespeare said so and there wasn’t enough evidence to disprove him. Then they believed that this was actually Tudor propaganda, designed to bolster the dynasty’s claim to the throne, and that he was a fairly decent king with a fully working body after all, because that also made sense according to the scant records of the time. And then Richard’s actual skeleton was found under a car park in Leicester and guess what? He had scoliosis as an adolescent (but his arms were fine), so his back was bent, and this was reported on the national news. Naturally, now people are arguing over whether it’s really him or not, despite some compelling DNA evidence.
Then there are all the ruined castles—and former monasteries—left lying about the landscape like burst pimples. In parts of Cumbria you can still see the remains of the great wall the Roman emperor Hadrian built to keep the indomitable Scottish out of his face. Can you imagine the kind of psychological mark it leaves upon a nation to have been put on the wrong side of the Roman VIP rope for almost two thousand years? United, y’say? Kingdom? Aye, well, we’ll see about that, pal.
Small wonder cultural traditions and regional pride have grown as intertwined as they have, not just in local and eccentric events (see: Weird Traditions) but also in the big statements of national identity. There are the eisteddfods, festivals that celebrate Welsh culture,
literature and music, keeping alive centuries of tradition and maintaining the Welsh language for future generations; there are also the Highland games in Scotland, which do exactly the same thing for Scottish literature and arts (and allow beefy men to throw a big stick in case Nessie wants to play fetch). And as you can’t ever separate the cultural from the political in British folk history, it’s probably worth adding that the Highland games in particular took on their modern form in Victorian times, after a highly unpopular campaign to drive smalltime farm holders off the hills, in order to use the land to rear sheep. Nothing fuses communities together like adversity.
Then of course there are the commemorative customs, most notably the wearing of a paper poppy in the days preceding the annual Remembrance Day service—which takes place on the Sunday nearest to 11 November—and observing two minutes of silence at 11.00 A.M. on the day itself. A constant interest remains in those wartime years, particularly the first and the second world wars, because it’s unthinkable now that such events could ever have happened in so short a space of time. Or that only twenty years passed between V-E Day—the heyday of the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller—and the release of Help!, the Beatles’ fifth LP.
The past is well served by British TV too. Costume dramas are a sure ratings winner, especially if they bring out an all-star cast of highly regarded thespians in nightshirts and starched collars—particularly if they are dishevelled and a bit damp, like Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice. And thanks to the work of the National Trust, these dramas are never short of an immaculately kept location for whichever era they are attempting to re-create.
Not that all of British history is given equal billing. In fact, if you were to go purely by TV drama alone, the complete history of England would go something like this: Roman times—King Arthur times—Medieval times—Robin Hood times—Tudor times—Jane Austen times—Charles Dickens times—Downton Abbey times—Charleston times—Blitz times—Rock ’n’ Roll times—Yuppie times—Pre-Internet times—Nowadays.
Or if you were hoping to find out what the Scots were up to in all that time, it goes: Pictish times—Jacobean times—Today.
WHAT TO SAY: “Is there a historical drama about Welsh times?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Whatever did happen to those princes in the Tower?”
Offal
These are the only British people to whom one could put the question “Do you like offal?” and expect an honest response:
1. Vegetarians and vegans
2. People who like offal
Everyone else is probably fibbing to a greater or lesser degree, and they probably don’t even know it. Put the blanket suggestion that the British love offal to a decent majority of British people and they will almost certainly argue the toss. However, the sheer availability of the unprime cuts of various commonly eaten animals in everyday British meals would seem to suggest otherwise.
And this isn’t even necessarily a sepia-toned jaunt down memory lane to a time when the Brits regularly ate tripe and sweetbreads—bits of cow stomach and various internal glands, respectively—although that wasn’t as far back as you may like to imagine. It is also not a searing Jamie Oliver–style comment on the processes involved in making the average burger or chicken nugget. Let’s just say that more than a few British meat dishes make use of the bits of the animal that are not commonly used for a roast dinner.
Like sausages, for example. The Brits love a banger. They love them sticking out of mashed potatoes and dripping with gravy (bangers ’n’ mash); they love them providing a perimeter wall for the beans in a fry-up (see: The Great British Fry-Up); they love them encased in batter and roasted (toad in the hole); and they love them mineralized black on the outside and raw in the middle, in a badly cut finger-roll at a rainy-day weekend barbecue in August. And while there’s a strong market for the kind that are made with only the finest meats, hand ground and delicately spiced, there’s also a lot of love out there for the kind that you don’t ask too many questions about.
Then there’s the glorious steak and kidney pie. It’s a pie; a delicious pie with steak and onions and gravy in it. And kidneys. So widely adored a combination of flavours that it is also available as a steamed pudding. The classic Melton Mowbray pork pie may contain the very best meat available, hand shaped and baked to perfection, but it is encased in a jelly made from the pig’s trotters. And not every pork pie is a Melton Mowbray, if you get my drift.
A steak & kidney pudding for one.
In the Midlands and South Wales, there’s a lot of schoolboy fun to be had in the unfortunate but very traditional name of meatballs made of minced pork offal (liver, lungs and spleen, principally) and served with gravy and peas. They’re called faggots. They just are. Let’s not be childish or offensive about this.
To add extra offal value (and keep the balls round), each faggot is wrapped in caul fat, which is the membrane found around the pig’s internal organs. Not so funny now, eh?
And how about oxtail soup? You’ll never, ever guess what oxtail soup is made from. And even if you did, while it’s safe to assume that the beef tails in soups served by high-end organic restaurants are of the highest quality, just imagine the kind of stringy bovine wagglers that go in the cheaper tins on the supermarket shelves.
The dish that probably looms largest in the popular imagination when talking about Britain and offal is haggis, Scotland’s culinary masterpiece. People get peculiar about haggis in a way that they never would about sausages—although the reaction to black pudding comes close. They harp on about the ingredients—the minced heart, liver, lungs and rolled oats; they gag over the sheep stomach into which the haggis is traditionally encased (although it tends to come wrapped in a sausage skin these days); and they make terrible retching noises without so much as trying a mouthful. Which seems a shame, given that haggis is actually not unlike a peppery meat loaf.
Still, you’d be hard put to convince a good deal of the Brits who live south of the Scottish border that haggis is a stuff Brits like, but it remains hugely popular in Scotland—you can even get it in fish and chip shops, deep-fried in batter—and in January, when Hogmanay rolls on towards Burns Night, you can get haggis in supermarkets from Inverness to Penzance, so it’s clearly more popular than anyone is prepared to admit.
Scotland is also home of the fish dish crappit heid (no, really, it’s food), in which the descaled head of a large cod or haddock is stuffed with a mixture of oats, suet, onion and fish liver. And while we’re on fish: jellied eels, anyone?
Certain dishes exist in legend only—the foods people really don’t eat, the ones that Brits who don’t work in animal farming aren’t even aware of any more, the really out-there foodstuffs, like muggety pie.
Muggety pie is just a pie made from entrails; that’s all it is. It’s a tripe pie, and it used to be popular in the West Country, especially Gloucestershire and Cornwall. And if there are no entrails, there’s an alternative recipe that involves the umbilical cords of lambs and/or calves. To the unsqueamish dairy farmer, this dish is a thrifty use of all available protein and one that suddenly makes haggis look like a T-bone from God’s own herd.
Another good place to find offal is between two slices of bread. There’s pâté, which Brits have only just decided to abandon calling meat paste and feeding almost exclusively to children in their packed school lunches, and then there’s tongue—most commonly pork or beef, chicken tongue being quite hard to slice. Confusingly, tongue sandwich is also a slang term for a particularly passionate snog, so you should always check what you are being offered before you open your mouth.
WHAT TO SAY: “I have never eaten that. Can I try some?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “They make it from what?! That’s gross!”
Apologizing Needlessly
With so many enormously confident British people in the world, it’s a shock to think that their international reputation remains that of a wet and eager-to-please race, just because they have the grace and good manners to try t
o make amends if they have made a social gaffe of some kind.
Being quick to apologize is a fine quality, especially if no offence was intended in the first place. It’s a mark of a strong character, but only when used sparingly and from the heart. The trouble is, that is not how Brits like to say sorry. They like to apologize before every statement of personal need, whether it’s a trip to the bathroom or taking their turn in a revolving door. They’ll apologize for falling asleep, apologize for waking up, apologize for being hungry, apologize for being full.
And this is driven by awkwardness and panic, because if they don’t do it, there’s a chance a complete stranger might think the worse of them—on even the most spurious of grounds—and that would simply never do. Should that person find needless apologies annoying too, well, things are only going to escalate.
Here are just some of the many situations for which British people will find the need to say sorry:
When forced to brush past a man on a train who is sitting with his legs far apart, as if his genitals are swollen and potentially explosive.
When boiling the kettle in a shared kitchen and finding out there isn’t enough water for the person who has only just walked into the room to make tea.
Having been smacked in the face by the arm of a tall man who has suddenly pointed at something across the street.
Having to interrupt a stranger’s day to tell her she has dropped her phone on the floor.
Just before hanging up after having been cold-called at home, during an important family meal, by a company selling an unwanted product or service.
Having been barged into by someone who is (a) drunk and (b) flailing his arms around and (c) walking backward.
When confronting a stranger who has suddenly appeared in the garden.
Stuff Brits Like Page 2
