When walking down a narrow corridor and noticing someone at the other end, waiting to let them pass. The apology comes after a brief period of walking with comically exaggerated effort and pretend speed, as if to prove no dawdling is taking place.
When waiting patiently at the end of a narrow corridor for the person already walking down it, especially when this has caused the other person to pretend to speed up.
When arriving at a reserved airplane, theatre or train seat, only to find someone already sitting in it.
When seeing a doctor about a hugely painful or debilitating condition.
When arriving last for a meeting or social gathering, even if it has not yet started.
When crying while talking to a friend about an upsetting situation.
When listening to a friend tearfully talk about an upsetting situation.
When paying for a small, inexpensive item with a twenty-pound note. Especially before 10:00 A.M.
When telling the stranger who has just asked them for a light that they do not smoke.
When walking into an inanimate object, such as a postbox (see: Phone Boxes).
When a conversation has finished, to the mutual enjoyment and benefit of both participants, followed some hours later by a slowly rising sense of horror at one throwaway comment that clearly was not offensive at all in context, and yet could still be taken completely the wrong way, necessitating a slightly panicked text message to apologize for the comment and then apologize for the apology.
Note: None of this means that Brits go out of their way to avoid doing things for which they should be genuinely sorry. Far from it.
WHAT TO SAY: “That’s perfectly all right. Good day to you.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “No, it was all my fault. If anything, I should be the one to apologize.”
Pubs, Inns, Bars and Taverns
Your friendly local (assuming you are from around here).
Whether they go there to play darts or catch up with mates, whether it’s a stop-off on the way home from work or a night out after a hard week, the British have placed pubs at the centre of their cultural existence. It’s not a coincidence that all British soaps have a prominent pub where the characters meet. In Coronation Street it’s the Rovers Return, in Emmerdale it’s the Woolpack, in EastEnders it’s the Queen Victoria, and in Hollyoaks it’s the Dog in the Pond.
A good pub will serve a multiplicity of purposes and yet often look as if it is doing nothing more than providing a respite from the rain and the rushing about outside. Pubs, even pubs in the centre of major cities, are community hubs, places for large groups of people to exchange local news, keep up with their neighbours and celebrate their significant events—whether that’s a birth, a sporting event, a wedding or a wake. Lots of tiny villages in remote areas will be able to keep a pub going, sometimes even two, far longer than they can keep a shop. And that’s not necessarily because of the inherent drinkiness of British culture (although it certainly isn’t because of the inherent sobrietude of British culture either); a good pub is a place where time stops. It’s a place to hatch plans, a place to gather forces, a place to be among people, and also a place to observe people.
The classic British pub is slightly dark and feels like a living room with aspirations to entertain. It’s not the sort of place where you want to spend too long examining the carpet—if there is one—and the toilets are not for loitering in. If you’ve seen the drinking establishments in the movies Withnail & I and An American Werewolf in London, those places are definitely pubs. A pub is a very different place from a bar. A bar is like a pub for young people; it’s a place to become drunk at speed, not nurse a half and read the paper. It will have sharply worded slogans on the wall, and mirrors in strange places, and maybe ceiling fans and chrome trimmings. The beer may be bottled or in jugs, but it won’t be stacked up in casks, and there won’t be named tankards for regular customers to use. There will, however, be shots: lots and lots (and lots) of shots. Because of this, the British reputation for binge drinking feels a bit more like a bar thing than a pub thing.
On the other hand, the British reputation for fights in pub car parks or managing seven out of ten in a pub crawl and waking up facedown in a skip is all pub.
Where were we? Oh, yes, interior décor. A pub—even a recently refurbished one—is saggier than a bar. It’s comfy like Granddad’s armchair and most often decked out in dark wood. It’ll have chrome on the beer taps and mirrors behind the bar (to make the stock look more plentiful), but it’s a less zingy place and, in some communities, those pewter tankards hanging over the stacked glasses can go back generations within the same family. Pubs don’t strain so hard for your attention while you’re talking to your friends or sitting quietly with your pint. Their natural resting atmosphere is more muted, although clearly plenty of singing and shouting take place, given time. People go to pubs to play games—darts, dominoes, snooker and various tabletop amusements like shove ha’penny and skittles—or make music; play the gambling machines (perfectly legal in all pubs and motorway service stations); sell dodgy electrical goods, cheap cigarettes and fake designer clothes from the boot of their car; or just talk. They don’t go to watch telly (unless there’s a really important football match on).
Then there are inns and taverns. An inn is, for all practical purposes, a pub that can provide food and lodging overnight. Now that most pubs also serve food, the differentiation between the two is getting harder to spot. Taverns are indistinguishable from pubs, apart from certain legal statutes that no longer affect the patrons. And it’s not uncommon to see places called the Tavern Inn, to add further confusion to affairs. If you see a sign outside saying “Free House”, that doesn’t mean the drinks are being given away or that you get a free house; it’s a term used to describe a pub that is unaffiliated to one brewery and is therefore able to sell a range of ales (see: Real Ale).
Before smoking was banned in 2007, all pubs had a particular smell: a warm and slightly damp fug of hops and grown-ups and fagash and sour aftershave that could have been bottled and sold as the very essence of a British boozer (a term which refers to the pub, not someone drinking inside). It’s the kind of smell that takes grown-ups back to being children, waiting on a bench in the garden for two hours with a bottle of Coke, a waxy straw and a packet of crisps.
Now, with the smoke cleared and all the sharp edges restored to the eyes, pubs seem somehow a little colder, even during gasping summer or with a roaring fire in the hearth. And of course every pub now has a small gang of furtive smokers just outside. So you get an early sniff of that pub smell on the way in, and then you walk through it and it’s gone, like the skipping ghost of childhood.
Naturally this is going to recede as a problem over time, and it is certainly not worth reinstating smoking—with the attendant health risks—just so people can retain a whiff of the old days. Not that this will stop smokers campaigning for the right to spark up indoors again, but it’s hard to see how to keep everyone happy. It’s a smell, after all. The people who nostalgically want it aren’t the ones who are risking their lives making it, and the people who are making it can’t get the benefit of it in the first place, due to all the smoking. And that’s before we seek the opinions of the people who neither want it nor make it. So no matter how kindly smokers may offer to throw themselves on their lighters for the common good, that scent is best left where it is, in the past, unless the pub is particularly old and grotty and you’ve sat down too quickly on the upholstery.
WHAT TO SAY: “A pint of the usual, please, Brian.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Do you do cocktails?”
The Shipping Forecast
I’m writing this on a very special day in British broadcasting history. Today is 30 May 2014; the day one of the cornerstones of British life suffered a little wobble. It’s the only day in ninety years that there hasn’t been a shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4. There has been a technical fault, nothing disastrous in one sense, but still an unsettling shak
ing of the schedule.
This might seem like a melodramatic response to what is surely a minor hiccup in broadcasting, but the shipping forecast occupies a particularly resonant position in the audio landscape of British life. It has been broadcast four times a day—12:48 A.M., 5:20 A.M., 12:01 P.M. and 5:54 P.M.—since 1924, with the same calming litany of weather conditions in the offshore areas immediately around the British Isles, incomprehensible to most people, but still utterly bewitching.
And it’s not just a matter of people deriving pleasure from something designed to be a valuable service. BBC Radio 4 is the sole British radio station that would continue to broadcast in the event of a nuclear strike. The shipping forecast is therefore the most trusted broadcast from the most trusted broadcaster in the entire nation, and the fun part of this is that most people listening still have very little idea of what is actually being said.
To illustrate this point, this is an extract from a recent forecast. Just imagine it being read slowly and clearly in a stern but not unfriendly voice, as if it were a modernist poem by Dylan Thomas.
“North Utsire, South Utsire: Northerly or northwesterly five or six, occasionally seven for a time. Moderate. Fair. Good.
“West Forties, Cromarty: Variable four, becoming southerly four or five later. Slight. Fog patches. Moderate, occasionally very poor.
“Forth, Tyne, Southwest Dogger: Southwesterly four or five, becoming variable four. Slight. Fair. Moderate or good.”
It has a certain something, doesn’t it? The endless mild adjectives suggesting either clear waters or potential trouble ahead; the evocative names like Dogger and Cromarty; the sense that this is important information, that those numbers probably mean something that could be the difference between life and death for those traversing the dark seas. Whether you personally know the science behind each word or not is immaterial, and that’s the emotive heart of the thing. It’s like being at Bletchley Park during the war and hearing coded naval messages without the key, and letting the mind wander as to where they will be received and what sort of condition the ships will be in when they finally arrive.
As such, the 12:48 forecast in particular has taken the form of a late-night lullaby for Radio 4 listeners; one that evokes the long seafaring history of an island nation, but delivered with the poetic grace of a magical incantation.
That’s why Damon Albarn of Blur, when stuck on his first long and painful American tour, playing empty halls and drunkenly bickering with his bandmates, would tune in to the shipping forecast just to feel the security and pull of home once again. He later translated that dislocated feeling (and a good portion of the magical words from the shipping forecast itself) into “This Is a Low”, a song that delivers much of the forecast’s fathomless magic, floating upon deep and stormy musical waters.
And should any other significant events pop up at the same time as the shipping forecast—England winning the Ashes in 2011, for example (see: Cricket)—the expectation is that they will just have to wait. The last, winning ball actually went unheard by listeners, but the shipping forecast continued, as it always does.
That’s what makes the events of this morning so uncommon, to the extent that there have been newspaper stories about the missing transmission. Granted, the fuss is nowhere near as big as that surrounding the 1995 plan to move that midnight bulletin by twelve minutes. That was a colossal hoo-ha that involved petitions, scathing newspaper editorials, and eventually questions being asked in Parliament. In fact, the only similar breach of service in Radio 4’s history occurred in 2010, when a forecast was read out that was already twenty-four hours old.
And people noticed. That’s the point.
The best description of the peculiar charms in this very British institution came courtesy of a 2012 BBC News interview with Zeb Soanes, one of a team of people who read the shipping forecast every day. He described it as “vital information first and poetry incidentally”.
That’s not to suggest that it is not poetry, you’ll notice, just that it is not trying to be.
WHAT TO SAY: “Cromarty, Biscay, Lundy, and Fisher sounds like a ’70s folk-rock act.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Dude, that stuff’s all on the Internet now, isn’t it?”
Saucy Seaside Postcards
It may seem like a deliberately glib way to crowbar an old song into a new conversation, but the British honestly really do like to be beside the seaside. Oh, they do like to be beside the sea. And this is because they live on a tall, thin island with sharp edges at every extreme. The sea is never too far away, even at the very middle of the widest part of central England, and there are coastal resorts—from the cheap and cheerful to the quiet and refined—within easy reach of everyone. And so for most British people, arranging to be beside the seaside (beside the sea) has never involved much more than a short train, coach or car journey. Consequently a series of common holiday traditions and customs have grown up around the British seaside that perhaps would not exist in coastal regions of other parts of the world.
For example, if you’re on a beach—any beach—you’ll probably appreciate a shop that sells ice cream and cold drinks, inflatable items of the sort you could take into the water, and some play tools for the children: buckets, spades, and some of those plastic sand-shaping devices that look like little jelly moulds. Maybe some knickknacks made from seashells, arranged into the shape of a heart you can hang on the wall, and some cheap flip-flops and expensive sun cream and spare swimming costumes and sunglasses. Or, at a push, a decorative vial of sand.
That’s the sensible stuff. Quite why anyone would want a long pink stick of mint-flavored candy on a hot day—it’s called rock, although it’s not the same as rock candy, being more like a thick, porous candy cane—is anyone’s guess. It does have the name of the resort running all the way through it, which is a remarkable feat and guarantees sales for people wanting decent (and cheap) homecoming gifts for friends and relatives. But that’s not the real reason why sticks of rock have become such a seaside staple.
The real reason, I suspect, lies in that other grand old British seaside custom, making lewd and suggestive comments. In among the “Kiss Me Quick, Squeeze Me Slow” hats and the “Keep Calm and Kiss Me Quick” T-shirts will be a rack of suspiciously old-fashioned postcards showing red-faced men, rotund matrons, and buxom young ladies wearing next to nothing. There’s the newlyweds arriving at a guest house on a cold and rainy night, being greeted by a friendly lady who says to the wife, “Do come in, you must be dying to get something hot inside you, my dear”, or the young woman watching a strutting Scottish man on a street corner and whispering to her friend, “They say that’s the reason he wears an extra-long kilt”, or the red-faced colonel who meets a bikini-clad and buxom young mother with a young boy hanging off each hand and says, “You’ve got a couple of nice handfuls.”
Nudist camps feature heavily in seaside postcards too, not least because of the ripe possibility for saucy misunderstandings about things being too small, too big, unsatisfying, hot and spicy, big and fruity, all that stuff. The redheaded man who bends over to light the stove for a cup of tea while his wife clutches a hand to her head and exclaims, “Ginger nuts! I knew I’d forgotten something!”
And that’s the old-fashioned stuff. For more modern sexy holiday keepsakes, there are postcards showing mouse and cat faces drawn in make-up upon naked breasts, that kind of thing. Oh, and sweets in the shape of genitals. These are the items British folk traditionally send back home to make people think they’re having a proper knees-up, the kind of randy, boozy, hoorah holiday that would make anyone jealous, despite it being apparent to everyone involved that they’ve spent their time glued to a slot machine (not a euphemism, oddly) in Clee-thorpes and it’s been raining, again.
The curious thing about these postcards is they’re looked upon with utter affection, as a harmless and charming relic of a sillier time. There’s a collector’s market for them; books are devoted to them. Long after the demise of the
Punch and Judy tents, the donkey rides, the tuppenny waterfalls and the deck chair attendants, you’ll still be able to find a postcard with a caption like “Just married, it sticks out a mile”. And the phallic stick of rock fits into this overengorged and giggly mentality like, well, a throbbing prong in a moist crevice.
One old postcard—drawn by Donald McGill, the Rembrandt of seaside sauce—shows a man holding a colossal stick at groin level, pointing upwards at the reader’s eyes with the wrapping peeled back around the tip, with the caption “A stick of rock, cock?” It’s actually not quite as rude as it appears, as cock used to be a fairly harmless term of endearment between people (as opposed to nowadays, when it’s a fairly harmless term of endearment for a penis).
Still, it’s hard to imagine many families taking a postcard like that and pinning it to the notice board in their kitchen, even now. They’d probably be too busy sending homemade smartphone pictures of a penis dressed up like a stick of rock.
That’s one in the eye for so-called progress.
WHAT TO SAY: “Can you get one that says ‘Penis’ all the way through?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I bought you a hat. It says, ‘Kiss Me Quick—I’ll Alert the Authorities in a Speedy and Appropriate Fashion.’”
Speaking English When Abroad
Call it a hangover from the days of empire, but as a rule the British do not enjoy learning other languages. Or rather, they do learn other languages, but they do not enjoy putting this knowledge to use, as it makes them feel flustered. Any mistake—a missed inflection or badly chosen sentence construction—would be a huge source of embarrassment and an admission of personal weakness.
But the Brits do love to travel the world, absorbing different cultures and traditions. They bring back exotic spices and recipes, musical instruments and incantations, new habits and flaky red skin. And in order to do so, they will probably have spent a good deal of their time making apologetic faces at local shop owners and asking to buy things in increasing ripples of loud, clear and slightly tetchy English.
Stuff Brits Like Page 3
