Here’s how the bumps works: at the apex of a birthday party, once the party tea is finished and there are the crushed remains of biscuits, crisps and various other treats all over the floor, everyone gathers around the birthday boy or girl to sing “Happy Birthday” and watch them blow out the candles. Just after the traditional universal round of applause some bright spark will yell “Let’s give him the bumps!” and a circle will form.
The lucky recipient will then be laid on his back, and his hands and feet will be seized as if he’s about to be pulled apart by wild horses. Then he is hoisted upwards. Ideally the hoisters will achieve something approximating shoulder height, or the next few minutes won’t just be scary, they’ll be painful too.
To describe the physical movement in the bumps is not the easiest, but if you imagine one of those parachute games young children play, where they’re wafting a parachute up and down, and then take the parachute out and replace it with a person, that’s basically it. The bumpee is hurled upwards once for every year he has been alive. Which means he will also fall downwards the same amount of times. This is why it’s important not to have started too close to the ground.
There again, it is equally important not to perform the bumps too vigorously upwards, or underneath any hanging light fittings. We’re celebrating a birthday here, not attempting to impale a close friend on the back of a chair or break a rib on the ceiling.
So, having been thrown a numerically appropriate number of times, the person is lowered to the ground, sobbing with relief that the ordeal is over. But is it? No. With a cry of “And one for luck” there’s a final bump to administer, and that’s the one everyone puts the big heave into. That’s the one that will pull shoulder muscles and sprain ankles.
After that, it’s back to the party.
Note: Teenagers have their own rules. It’s not unheard-of for the bumps to recede once the birthdays start to hit double figures, only to return with a vengeance when underage alcohol starts to enter the equation. British teens can legally drink at eighteen, so birthday parties can get pretty messy, and that only gets worse if you start throwing people around like human pizza dough.
WHAT TO SAY: “Oh, you guys!”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “What are you doing to my daughter? Put her down this instant!”
Portable Food
The mighty Cornish pasty (sans carrots).
A restless nation will always want to eat on the run, and this creates opportunities for utilitarian cuisine. The kind of meal you can throw down your neck in between finishing doing a thing and starting something else, without having to pause to wash up any plastic tubs or spend the day with a fork in your pocket.
To this end, all manner of meals have been encased in pastry, nature’s own Tupperware, and sold for the express delight of busy Brits on the move. There’s the sausage roll—a meeting point between a Danish pastry and a hot dog—the steak slice, the steak and kidney pie, the Bedfordshire clanger, pork pie, game pie, homity pie, cheese straws . . . just grab your dinner, jam it in your pocket and hit the road.
Some pies are runny inside and served hot. Others—like the classic pork pie—have a filling that’s encased in meat jelly and tend to be served cold. There are pies you can buy only at football matches, pies that you eat with your hands, and pies that come served with mashed potatoes and a dollop of hot green parsley sauce called liquor (the great London meal known simply as pie and mash).
Speaking of football, there’s a popular pie-related chant aimed at slightly rotund players on the opposing team, fat referees or podgy linesmen. It is set to the tune of “Knees Up, Mother Brown” and goes:
Who ate all the pies, who ate all the pies?
You fat bastard, you fat bastard!
You ate all the pies.
Because the very worst thing you could be, in a pastry-loving nation, is a pie glutton.
In Scotland, taking things up a notch, the humble boiled egg (surely a fairly portable food already) has been given an upgrade by encasing it in sausage meat, coating the ensuing ball in breadcrumbs, and deep-frying it. That’s no pool ball in your packed lunch, that’s a Scotch egg, and sometimes the sausage meat is replaced with black pudding (blood pudding) or even haggis.
Then there’s the Cornish pasty. Essentially a peppery beef stew in an edible pastry flask, the pasty is shaped like a capital D, with a folded-over crust around the curve. This is so that Cornish tin miners, who used to wind up with a lot of arsenic on their fingers, could eat most of their lunch and discard the crust somewhere deep underground. Local legend claimed that the crusts were being thrown as offerings to the spirits of the mine, called knockers.
In neighbouring Devon, there’s some argument as to the correct ingredients of the pasty. Devonians put carrots in theirs; the Cornish do not. This may seem a trifling distinction but as there’s a lot of mythology at stake—including a fondly recounted tale that the pasty once had a second chamber for mashed fruit at one end, making it even more of an all-purpose pastry lunchbox—tempers often become frayed when debating who has the more correct traditional recipe, although no one does the fruit thing any more. And possibly they never did.
Not that the people who eat pasties from motorway service stations or high street bakers are buying into the myths and legends of ancient Cornwall. They just really, really like pies.
WHAT TO SAY: “Fancy a picnic lunch? I’ll bring the sausage rolls; you bring the Tizer.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Is there anywhere I can microwave my pasty?”
Football
No sport carries the same degree of obsession in Britain as football does. Football players are national heroes, ambassadors for the country and an inspiration to British youth, even the really badly behaved ones. From its relatively humble origins as a working-class expression of community rivalry, football has grown into a colossal industry, albeit one that still largely depends on the romantic idea of like-minded people—players and fans alike—uniting together against a common foe. It’s just that, for the biggest teams, it’s no longer simply a case of local players being cheered on by local supporters.
The emotional investment in football begins at a very early age, possibly with the gift of a tiny T-shirt in the colours of your dad’s favourite team or, later on, a family kickabout in the back garden or the park or any relatively flat stretch of grass. At this point it doesn’t really matter if the heaving pile of elbowing, jostling humanity is all boys or all girls, all kids or all grown-ups; as long as there is a ball in play and the capability to fashion goalposts out of whatever portable items are at hand—jumpers, bags, prams, you name it—there will be football.
You have to pick a professional team to support fairly quickly too, especially if you are from a household that did not see fit to bequeath a firm preference from birth. This doesn’t need to be a complicated decision. It’s not unlike having a favourite book, movie or song; the answer to the question isn’t what causes the stress—it’s the fear of backing the wrong horse. So for most people there are two ways to pick a team: the old-fashioned way and the most common way.
The old-fashioned method is to find out which football club is nearest to your home and support them. There is no need to do any more than this at present. No requirement to attend matches, learn the player sheet or even follow the scores on a Saturday, all you need to know is who your team is. However, unless you happen to live near one of the Premier League teams, there’s a temptation to bolster up your champion credibility by supporting a club that has a chance of winning trophies. That’s the most common way to choose: go for the guys at the top of the Premier League.
Once you’ve cleared that hurdle, you have to decide what kind of football supporter you are going to be. It’s perfectly acceptable to support a team without going to a single match, thanks to the glory of TV coverage and the freely available merchandise that the clubs create to bolster their business (and I’m using the word freely entirely incorrectly here).
If you do go
to matches, there’s a world of ribald wit, feral aggression and roaring partisan emotion to traverse. Plus a lot of singing. Some of the finest minds in British cultural life will have put their sharpest thoughts into creating the perfect song to needle the opposition’s goalkeeper with, and with a bit of luck, it’ll get taken up by human foghorns to the left and right.
This sort of thing does tend to cause resentment. There may be fights, there will definitely be tension, but there will also be a strong sense of community (or to be more accurate, communities—one per team), because nothing brings people together like adversity, even the metaphorical adversity of sport.
Should you feel peckish after all that singing, there are hugely complicated traditions around the sort of food you can expect to buy. They sell pies; they sell pickled things; and they sell unorthodox hot drinks like Bovril to keep body temperatures up amid freezing sleet. One of your first jobs as a new supporter is to find out what the old hands like to eat, and then decide whether to join them, or grab a burger on the way in. As a constantly evolving cultural event, football carries a lot of outdated cultural jetsam in its wake, but it’s not crucial to engage with all of it.
For example, one thing I’m trying hard not to say is that football is a primarily male concern, because empirically it is not, certainly not from the perspective of the supporters. It’s probably fair to say that the British assume that men like football, and certainly women’s football has very little public profile compared to the men’s game, but there are far too many female fans to make any generalizations stick any more. Nor should anyone try. Walking out of the supermarket in an England shirt singing a song about Three Lions and carrying a slab of beer as if it’s a stag you killed with your bare hands is a treat for everyone, not just the boys.
That said, it is also possible for the myth of the Football Dad to cast a shadow over the relationship between a father and a son when neither party is remotely interested in “the beautiful game”. It arrives as a kind of social expectation, one of the things other dads are doing with their kids. Just as new mums worry about breastfeeding, new dads worry about making their children into social pariahs if they don’t get the ball out and commence keepy-uppies at the first opportunity. Or at the very least put a game on the TV once in a while; otherwise it could count as a form of neglect.
If the child comes home from school and mentions a footballer his friend likes, should the dad then rush out and buy the kit, or shrug and cue up the latest Disney or Pixar epic? There are no correct answers in a situation like this.
Of course, when a major tournament rolls around, it’s a chance for everyone to go to town. A World Cup, the FA Cup final—these are occasions for even the most timid of sporting souls to throw themselves in headfirst. Football is not a complicated game—aside from a rolling argument about the finer points of the offside rule, a slightly fiddly affair that has become a cliché even to mention—so it’s not hard to work out what is going on, and as everyone can tell good play from bad, your attempts at punditry will probably be just as insightful and effective as anyone else’s.
A World Cup is also an opportunity for Brits to express partisan patriotism in an overt manner. This isn’t something that they tend to do exhaustively, not least because there are different flags to rally around and paint on your face: the red cross of St George for England, the white X against deep blue of St Andrew for Scotland, and the fantastic red dragon of St David for Wales. Northern Ireland and Cornwall also have their own flags—and political reasons for using them—and the Union Jack is also brought out at more unified events like the Olympics (see: Putting Union Jacks on Things).
Getting the right flag out at the right time is a thorny issue, best avoided unless you have insider knowledge. As in a lot of countries, the line between patriotism and jingoism is a hard one to spot and an even harder one to agree on, so it’s best just to pick a side, settle back and enjoy the game.
WHAT TO SAY: “Come on! My nan could’ve scored from there!”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Y’know what this game needs? Cheerleaders.”
Cross-Dressing
I used to think the much-trumpeted British love of putting men in women’s clothes was an exaggeration. We’ve all seen Mrs. Doubtfire and Tootsie; we’ve all been to stag dos where boys dress as girls. It’s a fancy dress staple: put on a big T-shirt, grab a couple of balloons, try not to get too much lipstick in your beard, everyone’s happy.
But there really is a long and noble tradition of cross-dressing in British culture, and it’s one that runs largely parallel to the history of British transsexuality. Not so parallel that the two things didn’t ever intersect, of course, but there are two different histories of men dressing in women’s clothing and women dressed as men. This is the one that took place entirely under stage lighting.
To begin at a beginning: in the Elizabethan theatre of Shakespeare, no matter what the play dictated, men played all the female characters. This was simply because women were not permitted to debase themselves in such a lewd and bawdy form of entertainment. The Elizabethan court may have held masques in which prominent ladies were permitted to play-act a little, but for public consumption, particularly when the most popular plays would have contained a fair amount of base humour, it was considered to be beyond the pale.
This kind of gender stringency is bound to leave a mark on a society, and it’s tempting to conclude that the reason so many of Shakespeare’s comedies concern men dressed as women and women dressed as men is that everyone in the audience would already have been in on the gag that the woman dressed as a man is actually a man, and so’s the man dressed as a woman.
Crucially, after this period came a time of strong puritan rule, in which all theatre was banned, again because it was considered to be a debasement of fine Christian morals. And it’s probably not too fanciful to suggest that this constant association between acting and moral depravity has permanently left the British theatre audience a little too giggly in the face of any thrillingly broken—or just plain bent—rules. There are faint echoes of this in every Shakespeare audience to this day. One or two members of the audience still treat jokes whose rebellious sting has been dulled by the passing years as if they are freshly minted sex bullets of bawdy hilarity (see: The Theatre), and that’s probably because of years of conditioning at school, in which Shakespeare is treated with the same sense of reverence as the King James Bible.
To summarize: The British theatre tradition is one of naughtiness, ribaldry and men dressing as women. Small wonder these three things continue to delight audiences to this day.
After theatrical life returned during the reign of Charles II, a new hybrid form of theatrical entertainment arrived that took aspects of staging, songs and dancing from court masques and added new characters coming out of the Italian commedia dell’arte—most notably those of the harlequinade: Harlequin; his lover, Columbine; her father, Pantaloon; and his servants Clown and Pierrot—and the suggestive humour, action sequences and magic reality of mummers’ plays.
Pantomimes gathered their own internal logic slowly. After a period of fiddling about with classical Greek themes, they settled on European folk tales, delivered with great silliness and charm: Cinderella, Mother Goose, Snow White and so on. During the Victorian era a kind of Shakespearean reverse became customary, and eventually traditional; the lead female role would be played by an actress, and so would that of the lead male—or principal boy. These are the most serious parts in the production; they provide the love story that will resolve everything at the end. The biggest comedy role in a pantomime belongs to the dame, a formidable matron (or matrons, in the case of Cinderella’s sisters) with preposterous makeup and a gaudy, clashing costume. The dame is presented as a maternal force, a woman past the first budding flush of youth, the kind of woman who owns more comfortable underwear (bloomers, mostly) than lingerie, but thinks of herself as a rare and precious flower. She’s Mother Goose or Widow Twankey or the Nanny in Babes in the Wood.
And she’s always, always played by a man. Just as the shrewish scolds in Monty Python are played by men and the attractive women are played by Carol Cleveland.
This is really where the international reputation the Brits have for howling at a man in a dress comes from. Pantomimes are an eccentric institution, but as they’re linked to Christmas and general winter merriment, and they retain that mixture of cartoon violence (for the kids) and bawdy wit (for the mums and dads), they remain hugely popular as live entertainment. They’re also an echo of the days of the music hall, when cross-dressing comics like Vesta Tilley (a male impersonator) would entertain working-class audiences with sly innuendos, pratfalls and patriotic songs. All of which found its way into the humour of performers such as Benny Hill. He had the vulgarity, the sly bawdiness and the slapstick familiar to anyone who’s seen a panto.
British popular culture seems happy to accept cross-dressing provided it follows that unthreatening pantomime brief. Several entertainers made their name performing in drag, either dolled up to the nines, like Danny La Rue; glittery and frumpy like Dame Edna Ever-age (the alter ego of Australian comedian Barry Humphries); or hardbitten and tarty, like Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage. Lily—by far the most waspish character, and the least family-friendly of any of them—even wound up presenting prime-time game shows like Blankety Blank.
The most popular comedy TV show of recent years—in terms of audience size, if not critical appreciation—is Mrs Brown’s Boys, in which Brendan O’Carroll plays another woman of a certain age who acts in an unladylike, undignified fashion and wears bloomers. O’Carroll may be Irish, but it’s a BBC production and has proven to be so popular there was even a spin-off movie.
Stuff Brits Like Page 5
