There again, Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics in London featured a section devoted to the NHS, placing it alongside beloved children’s characters and the best of British pop music as institutions the country is proud of. And that ceremony was the single biggest catalyst for the Brits to take off their sceptical spectacles and get unreservedly excited about themselves, and therefore about the Olympics as an event, after months of moaning about traffic gridlock, bus lanes and ticket allocation. Had the inclusion of the NHS sounded as a wrong note, this would not have happened.
So, yes, there are people who treat it like a particularly frustrating safety harness on the roller coaster of life, people who have lost loved ones or been treated shabbily by NHS staff at the point of greatest vulnerability, and people who have become enraged by having to wait hours in Accident and Emergency to be seen by medical staff who simply have to keep the conveyor belt moving as fast as is humanly possible. But these criticisms, no matter how forcefully stated or righteously felt, can’t compete with the positives.
By which I mean this: find me a British person who hates the NHS after his or her partner’s life has just been saved; after she has just given birth to her first child, or her third; after he has just been told a beloved relative has come out of a coma or woken from a life-changing operation. Find me someone who set off for the day in normal shape, had an accident, and came home a month later in an entirely different condition—having spent that time being carried aloft by the dedication and diligence of doctors and nurses who are clearly doing the best they can under extraordinarily trying circumstances—and still complains of gross inefficiency and socialist handouts.
I’m not saying those people don’t exist. I’m saying they’re the ones you may have to wait longest to get a thank-you card from after Christmas.
WHAT TO SAY: “Oh, hello, are you a nurse? Can I buy you a drink?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I don’t see the need for it, as I can afford private health care.”
Dunking Biscuits
A digestive biscuit preparing to be immersed.
Note: As we are discussing a foodstuff that must, in order to be at its most orally appealing, be moist and stiff, we’re probably not going to be able to get through this without some of the sentences containing a hint of innuendo. It’s a shame to drag things down to the level of the gutter, but with dunking biscuits—as with other, less innocent pursuits—it’s not so much about what you put in, or how you put it in, it’s about what happens when you take it out, and what kind of mess it leaves behind.
If you had to find the perfect biscuit to suit the British taste buds, it would be somewhere between the moist and crumbly chocolate chip cookie, as favored by American children with their milk of an evening, and the bone-dry, gasping-for-moisture Italian biscotto.
Ideally what they like best is the kind of biscuit you could eat on its own, but which is improved by a brief dip in something hot and wet. Some biscuits really suit a dunk in a cup of tea, others work best with coffee or even hot chocolate, and some don’t work at all. There’s even a tiny subset of biscuits that don’t appear to be changed whatsoever by the experience of being dunked. These may require more of an overnight soak, and as such should be avoided unless eaten dry.
The Garibaldi, for example, is not a great biscuit for dunking. It’s a thin, glazed cracker that does not expand or even noticeably soften in liquid. A HobNob, on the other hand, could have been scientifically designed (note: it was definitely scientifically designed) to work best when plunged into a hot beverage. Without having had the chance to suck up a decent finger of tea, a HobNob is just a flattened flapjack. Moistened, it becomes, well, like a wet and crumbly flapjack with tea in it. Dunking a biscuit is not alchemy, after all.
Rich tea biscuits are also designed for dunking, but will only suit one dip, and a brief one at that. Allow a maximum of one second for your dipping, and make sure you don’t put more biscuit in the tea than you are prepared to put in your mouth in one go. Leave it too long, and you’ll wind up fishing damp gunk out of your mug with a teaspoon, and if you bite off only a portion of the wet part, the rest will just flop onto your lapel.
Digestives occupy a happy middle ground between the two. They’re structurally far stronger than rich tea biscuits, being made with bran rather than just flour. They can take a longer plunge than rich teas too, and probably won’t collapse unless placed under extreme strain (i.e. held horizontally for a while). And there are no oaty bits in a digestive, so people with dentures—or anyone who’d pick smooth peanut butter over crunchy—can enjoy them too.
To add a further frisson of excitement to an already fairly charged and slightly soggy situation,* all the biscuits discussed above (apart from the Garibaldi) are also available with one side coated in chocolate, and sometimes with caramel too. This changes everything. Suddenly the rich tea acts as if it has been given a spine, the digestive loses all pretence of being a healthy option and the HobNob attains an almost impossibly regal air. Dunk these biscuits, and you’ve got an entirely different, almost decadent taste sensation to reckon with.
Of course, some biscuits already have an extra sweet layer. Custard creams and bourbons are, like Oreos, double biscuits held together with a butter-cream-type centre. This gives them an idiosyncratic reaction to the hot liquid, with the outer biscuits becoming soft but the centre remaining quite firm. Naturally, people have their own way of eating these biscuits, whether it’s taking a layer off at a time or just jamming the whole thing in at one go. The Oreo twist, lick and dip approach, as seen on TV commercials, doesn’t seem to be that popular, though.
And then there are Jaffa cakes. While being the same size and shape as a biscuit, and fulfilling the same function as a biscuit, a Jaffa cake is not a biscuit; it is a small cake. This has been proven in court. Thanks to a differentiation in the taxation rates between cakes and biscuits, we now know that the difference between cakes and biscuits of the same size is that cakes go hard when stale and biscuits go soft. Jaffa cakes—being composed of a sponge base, with orange-flavored jelly on top, capped with a layer of chocolate—go hard when stale, and mushy when dipped in a hot drink. A dipped Jaffa is therefore not for everyone.
In more recent years, there’s been a fresh innovation. The Australians developed the Tim Tam Explosion, in which they bite the opposing corners off a Tim Tam biscuit (basically a large chocolate-covered bourbon) and use it like a straw to suck up hot tea or coffee, before jamming the whole thing into their gobs and letting everything melt into everything else. To do this in Britain you’ll need a biscuit called a Penguin, but it still works.
Curiously, while Dunkin’ Donuts outlets have begun to make their way across the British Isles, the one thing Brits aren’t commonly known to dunk is doughnuts. Maybe it’s because we were raised with different expectations: the idea of a hard, dry thing becoming a soft, wet thing is perfectly acceptable, while a soft, moist thing becoming a floppy, drippy thing is just gross.
WHAT TO SAY: “Has anyone ever tried two rich teas with jam in the middle?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “What is this, a HobNob or a coaster?”
Doctor Who
Never mind that this TV show is an international success, that there are people all over the world who know exactly what a Dalek is, what a TARDIS does, and why a sonic screwdriver is more than just an exciting innovation in the field of futuristic DIY, the British would love Doctor Who even if it were a purely parochial concern.
There are many reasons for this, some based in childhood nostalgia, some entirely to do with the quality of the ideas in the show. But when the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics left Doctor Who out of its celebration of British achievements and attitudes—a last-minute change, by all accounts, fittingly cut for reasons of time and space—there was a sense of outrage, that an old friend had been somehow left out in the cold.
To anyone unfamiliar with the setup of the show, this next bit is going to be a little bafflin
g. There’s this guy, and he’s an alien. But he’s a very British sort of alien. He is, in fact, more British than the British people he takes with him on his travels, and you know this because he most often dresses like an Edwardian dandy with a serious frock coat addiction. He’s the archetypal British eccentric, a boffin, an inventor, and because he is a figure of authority and one of the good guys (mostly), his name is the Doctor.
Note: His first name is not The and his surname is not Doctor. He is just the Doctor.
The Doctor is one of an alien (but still somehow British) race called the Time Lords, and they invented an astonishing machine that is bigger on the inside than on the outside. It’s called a TARDIS, an acronym that stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. You won’t ever need to know why this is the case; it just is. As the name suggests—but does not explain—TARDISes can travel in space and time, and they have a circuit that disguises them so they fit into their immediate surroundings.
Being something of a maverick, the Doctor stole a TARDIS and ran away from the stuffy old British Time Lords, defying their policy of non-intervention in alien worlds by repeatedly arriving in the middle of conflicts, taking sides and then making sure his side won. He ended up living in London in 1963, and his TARDIS changed to look like one of the old police telephone boxes from the early years of the twentieth century that were already being phased out of use (see: Phone Boxes). Then the doohickey that allowed the TARDIS to blend in with its background broke and it got stuck like that.
Rather than spend ages trying to fix it, the Doctor just headed off, travelling everywhere and everywhen, taking some people with him and leaving others behind. Along the way he has met despotic snot monsters that live in malevolent dustbins (that’s the Daleks), deeply unpleasant cyborgs with silver headphones on (the Cybermen) and a race of short, bald clone men with a communal Napoleon complex (the Sontarans).
It has also transpired that Time Lords can regenerate, a neat trick that allows them to entirely replace their physical form with another, should they be about to die. The replacing of one Doctor with another does dramatically alter his personality, but he’s still essentially the same excitable professor with sparkly eyes.
This means the show can survive the departure and replacement of its entire cast, which it has done many times over the last fifty years, and still cover the same basic ground without abandoning any of its fundamental qualities—simply put, it’s a horror show for all the family, dressed as a science fiction show that sometimes tries to be educational. People may have their preferences as to which era of Doctor Who they prefer, but fifty televisual years after first arriving on British screens, the Doctor is still to be found biffing around in time and space, still arriving in the middle of unsettling situations and fixing them, and still travelling in a futuristic machine that looks like a relic from the olden days.
He therefore represents the Victorian ideal of the Englishman abroad: a man with a missionary zeal to make the universe a better place using science and moral certainty, with impeccable manners and some very peculiar habits, who will outlive everyone he ever meets because he was lucky enough to have been born into a very special race.
Oh, and naturally he’s partial to cricket.
Note: It’s also important to mention the theme music to Doctor Who. Written by Ron Grainer and recorded by Delia Derbyshire for the BBC’s experimental music laboratory the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the original Doctor Who theme is a pioneering piece of electronic music, the first that most British people of a certain age will have ever been aware of, and by some distance the most popular. It’s no coincidence that the generation that grew up with Doctor Who became the first wave of synthpop pioneers in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. The current show has rerecorded the theme using an orchestra, making it sound more thrilling but, ironically, less alien.
WHAT TO SAY: “Who is better: Donna Noble or Amy Pond?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “So why can’t he go back in time to before the aliens attack and just trip them up or something?”
Arguing over What to Call Meals
This might get a little repetitive, so bear with me.
The good news is, breakfast is a given. Wherever you are in the British Isles, the first meal you have after you wake up, irrespective of the time of day, whether you’ve worked a night shift or happen to be a student or are recovering from a bout of stomach flu that kept you up all night and left you cautiously considering a cream cracker at dawn, is called breakfast.
Then there’s the meal people eat at around midday. Depending on where you are from—in class and location—that is called either lunch or dinner. Should you be tempted to eat a cooked meal in the interim period between breakfast and lunch, whether because breakfast was just a hurried sip of tea on your way out the door or because you just really like to eat food as often as possible, that meal will only ever be called brunch. There are no midmorning meal appointments where everyone settles down to enjoy a nice relaxing brinner. That doesn’t happen.
There is another term at play, however. If the midmorning meal is more like a snack—a muffin, say, or an enormous sandwich that doesn’t come with crisps or a chocolate bar—then you can officially call it elevenses. Elevenses is the light nibble British people partake of to get them from breakfast to the midday meal without making unseemly noises from the midriff area. It is to the middle of the morning what an afternoon tea is to four o’clock (see: Tea).
Oh, and in West Cornwall there’s the term croust (or crowst), which also refers to a midmorning snack, although possibly closer to the beginning of the morning than the end. But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here. Let’s go back to naming the three principal meals. Depending on your choice of name for the midday meal, the evening meal will be called dinner or tea. Or possibly supper, unless supper is the light meal you eat at nine or ten o’clock because you had an early tea (or dinner).
So, to recap, you’ve got either breakfast, lunch and dinner or you’ve got breakfast, dinner and tea. Or possibly breakfast, lunch and tea, the latter of which is served at dinnertime, with supper some hours later. Should you be concerned about offending a gracious host, a decent rule of thumb is that people who live north of Birmingham, or are working class, tend to eat breakfast, dinner and tea, and people who live in the south, or are generally well-to-do, tend to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. This is by no means definitive but it gives you a fighting chance.
If you’re unsure of where you are and what the correct nomenclature may be, just refer to any meal that is not your first meal of the day as dinner. That’s the safest bet.
WHAT TO SAY: “Now, who would like a spot of tea with their tea?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “What time is elevenses?”
Tea
Tea isn’t merely a drink. It’s a way of life. It’s the panacea that fixes all curses and cures all wounds. It’s the first thing Brits turn to in the morning and the last thing they prepare at night. Tea is a balm for the soul, a rallying spot for friends, a punctuation point for the day and, let’s not forget, a nice hot beverage that you can serve with milk and/or sugar.
Tea is the closest to a commonly agreed thing that Brits like, so much so that a British person who does not like tea—and it saddens me to have to reveal that such people do genuinely exist—creates consternation and concern whenever he or she comes to visit. Somehow the offer of a glass of water, a fruit juice or a can of Vimto feels like cheap hospitality, leaving the host or hostess to worry, and maybe even ask, “Are you sure I can’t get you a cup of tea?” as if it needs to be made clear that normal protocol for the greeting of guests has been observed even if the kettle remains unboiled.
And that’s another thing: kettles. British travellers in foreign lands—especially foreign lands where the people worship other hot beverages over the mighty cuppa—find the lack of a kettle in their hotel room disturbing. Why would you not want a kettle? What kind of barbarous society neglects to provide tea-making faciliti
es, even if its citizens don’t happen to drink tea themselves? Running the coffee machine just for the hot water feels dirty, somehow, but needs must. Tea must be brewed, or the cogs that keep the world spinning will remain unoiled.
Of course, while there’s broad agreement that tea itself is a wonderful thing, the process of making and drinking it is one that provokes hot debate. Some people are fiercely loyal not just to a particular blend—and by this I mean Darjeeling, Earl Grey, that kind of thing—but to a brand of tea bags. They’ll tell anyone who will listen that it has to be Yorkshire Tea, or PG Tips, or it’s just not tea at all. It’s like Coke versus Pepsi, but played out in fine bone china cups and saucers.
Actually even the bone china is negotiable, according to taste. The extent to which Brits can be particular about tea is truly striking. So much so that some simply will not allow anyone else to make it for them. It’s too important a matter to trust to amateur hands. Some prefer mugs—a big steaming mug of Rosie Lee (tea), that’s the only way to do it. And you need to leave the bag in until the water goes dark amber. That is, unless you prefer to use a teapot warmed with hot water before you put the bag in. Or don’t use a bag at all and go for leaves and a strainer. Oh, and you have to put the milk in after the tea has been poured. Or before, I forget which. And actually the real tea connoisseurs don’t put any milk in. Or sugar. But maybe a lemon? There again, some people heap three sugars in and like their tea really weak, so it’s important to check before you serve.
And this is before we delve into the many interpretations of the word tea. There’s the drink, of course, and the meal (see: Arguing over What to Call Meals), which may or may not be served accompanied by a cupful of the drink of the same name and derives from the term high tea, a working person’s evening meal, to be taken as soon as they get home from their labours.
Stuff Brits Like Page 7
