Some of the more right-wing papers have tried to capitalize on this trend by running provocative stories about restaurants and cafés that served halal meat, implying that any adherence to traditional Muslim forms of slaughter (for commercial reasons) was the thin end of a wedge, the fat end of which was Britain becoming an Islamic nation. Naturally the stories spent a lot of time discussing the method of execution in tones of mock outrage, and these are the stories that sell their papers.
They may be overheated examples, but they’re driven by a hard commercial truth: the British love animals and they will set the dogs on anyone who dares to claim otherwise.
WHAT TO SAY: “If you want to be in a dependent relationship with someone far needier than you, get a dog. If you want to be the dog, get a cat.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I’m sorry, you can’t let him sit there. I have allergies.”
The British Christmas
Note the qualifier there. This isn’t about the universal joy of Christmas, as observed in all participating cultures in exactly the same way all over the world. No, while the Brits are as sentimentally attached to the idea of a season of goodwill—and end-of-year blowout, the birthday of Jesus Christ and a big pile of presents under a sparkly tree—as anyone, they do things their own way, maintaining their own traditions and looking rather blankly at yours.
They have even invented their own extra day to add to the festivities: Boxing Day, the day after Christmas Day. It was originally a day put aside for the servants of well-to-do households to see their own families, and for St Stephen’s Day offerings to be left at the local church, but these days it is simply a day for recovering from the excesses of Christmas Day. Some families leave the opening of presents until Boxing Day, but this is very rare and must result in early-onset stress ulcers for the children involved.
Boxing Day is also the first day of the sales, so shops can get rid of all the stock they brought in especially for Christmas. So while some Brits will blearily rise at noon on Boxing Day and try as hard as they can to focus on the kettle, others will have been up since 4:00 A.M., queuing to grab a bargain cashmere cardigan or fancy jacket. But that’s all in the post-Christmas lull. There’s a wealth of festive tradition to wade through before we even get to Boxing Day. Here are ten things it would not be a British Christmas without:
Mince Pies
For the uninitiated, these are not made from actual minced meat, but sweet mincemeat—a black jam made of dried fruit, citrus peels and sugar (see: Desserts with Unappetizing Names). Brits talk fondly of the first mince pie of the season (which can begin any time from late September on, depending on how quickly the supermarkets can clear their summer stock from the shelves); then comes the excitement of the first mince pie on Christmas morning, accompanied by a glass of Buck’s Fizz; and the regret with which the very last one is eaten before it is time to turn over a new leaf on 1 January. After that, it’s back to the Eccles cakes and fly pie.
Hoping for Snow
Opinions vary sharply on snow depending on whether you’re in the north or the south of the UK. Southerners tend to wish for a white Christmas, and news stories and special weather reports will be crossing fingers and scanning the sky for the peculiar bruising that snow clouds carry. Northerners, particularly those in Scotland, tend to accept the months of sleet and snowdrifts with weary resignation, as if to say, “Yes, a white Christmas is very nice, but a white always is just annoying.” And because it doesn’t happen very often, people living on the south coast, particularly down in the far west, tend to find the experience of actual snow, even for Christmas, to be deeply unsettling (pun intended).
Pantomime
The season for panto—a British theatrical confection that predates its own association with Christmas—tends to run from the beginning of December right the way through until March (see: Cross-Dressing).
Father Christmas
The British know who Santa Claus is; they just choose to address him by his familial title instead. Okay?
Christmas Crackers
Always a fiddly thing to explain. The Christmas cracker is a shiny, colourful tube, open at either end, with three chambers that are tethered by a cardboard strip that has a tiny gunpowder charge on it.
The central chamber contains a tissue paper crown, a small toy or puzzle, and a piece of paper with a joke on it. At a specified point during Christmas dinner—it could be right at the beginning, in between courses or at the very end: family traditions vary hugely—everyone picks up a cracker at one end and offers the other end to someone across or around the table. They have a short tug-of-war and the cracker splits, making the gunpowder bit give off a slight cracking bang. The person left holding the central chamber then has to put the crown on, play with the toy and read out the joke.
Christmas cracker jokes are famously terrible and based on appalling puns. This kind of thing:
Q: What does Simon Cowell like best about his breakfast?
A: The Eggs Factor
Sometimes the joke paper has a riddle instead. These aren’t any better, but that’s part of the fun.
The anatomy of a Christmas cracker.
Christmas Dinner
Turkey is the most popular roast meat for the Christmas dinner, but even if the meat is the same across all British tables (and it’s not unheard-of for non-vegetarian families to go for duck, goose or pork instead), subtle variations are to be found in the other dishes on the table. Goopy white bread sauce, for example; parsnips; or pigs in blankets, which is, for the British, the name given to tiny sausages wrapped in bacon. Christmas dinner is also traditionally the one time of year when people are prepared to consider eating Brussels sprouts.
Christmas Pudding
The word pudding doesn’t mean the same thing in Britain that it does elsewhere. As well as being a catchall term for dessert, pudding refers to a steamed or boiled dish that is cooked in muslin; so you can have steak and kidney pudding, and it won’t be anything like a meat blancmange at all. Christmas pudding is a steamed sponge made with citrus zest and dried fruit and booze. It is traditionally served on fire, thanks to a dousing in brandy beforehand, and with coins buried in the mix for good luck. It’s important that you know both these facts before tucking in, especially if you wear dentures or an immaculately lacquered beard.
The pudding is served with either brandy butter (sweet butter with brandy in it), brandy cream (cream with brandy in it) or brandy sauce (a white custard; may contain more than trace amounts of brandy).
The Queen’s Speech
At 3:00 P.M. on Christmas Day, the queen addresses the nation, as the reigning monarch has done almost every year since 1932. It’s usually a summary of the year, pointing out particular highlights and suggesting ways in which we could all be nicer to each other in the year ahead. Time the Christmas dinner correctly and it’s also a cue for the grownups to commence snoozing in front of the TV, only waking up halfway through the big Christmas Day movie.
Christmas Cake
This is a fruitcake—often drenched in brandy—covered in marzipan and thick white icing. The sort of thing you might have at a wedding, except the bride is a snowman and the groom is a tree.
Christmas Songs
Every year songwriters and pop stars try to add to the small pile of eternally popular British Christmas hits, songs that are fit to hold their elf-hatted heads up alongside such giants as “That One by Mariah Carey”, “The One about Chestnuts and Open Fires” and “White Christmas”.
The British canon includes “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” by Wizzard, “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade, “Last Christmas” by Wham! and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. But the single most popular festive song, the one that reenters the charts every year and blasts from every British shop from October onward, is “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl. It’s not the most family friendly of choices, containing ripe language from a drunken row between the two protagonists in the s
ong, but it’s got all the vinegary chagrin of real Christmas, the air of bitterness and regret that comes after a family row, and a note of optimism when the Christmas pudding is brought in. It’s the palate cleanser to go with the season’s traditional ton of creamy sweetness; and therefore, despite being written by an Irish man about two down-at-heel New Yorkers, it distils the essence of British festivities perfectly.
WHAT TO SAY: “Happy Christmas!”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “It’s okay if I just heat the Christmas pudding up in the microwave, right?”
James Bond and Sherlock Holmes
British fiction’s two most famous solvers of cryptic mysteries share a definite link, one of attitude, morality and temperament. Crudely put: they are both sods. Charming sods, delightful sods, but sods nonetheless.
Holmes is a rotter simply as a side effect of his maniacal need to instil order on everything. This compulsion not only to notice everything but also to ascribe most likely motive to it and make deductions based upon those motives drives out all possible human need for admiration, confirmation or affection. His need to be seen as the best comes from the scientific observation that everyone else is slower and less methodical than he is.
Consequently he is brash, arrogant, quick-tempered and impulsive. If his superpower were in his muscles and not his brain, he’d just be a bully; but because he’s a chippy smart-arse who solves murders, people adore him. That said, he’s the kind of man who can really sustain only one true friendship because groups of friends would not put up with him dominating the room in the way that he does. Holmes’s one acquiescence to vanity is to befriend Dr Watson, whose diaries tell the story of Sherlock’s life and work. So he’s not quite a lone wolf, but he’s certainly a packless alpha male (dragging a biographical bloodhound in tow).
Bond is slightly different, but not by much. No less of a sociopath and with no less of a cruel streak, he expects the company of women as his reward for being the best at what he does. Actually, company is perhaps the wrong word; what Bond craves is the acquisition of women, and we don’t really know whether he is the best or not, but he certainly does not recognize any rivals for the title.
The Bond franchise may have taken great steps to give the women in the films a sense of personal autonomy regarding their utter inability to resist the charms of this known player—mainly by using innuendo-laden names like Pussy Galore, Plenty O’Toole, Xenia Onatopp or Holly Goodhead. The day the producers of the Bond movies realized their best hope to replace Sean Connery in the lead role was an actor with the actual name Roger Moore must have been a fine day indeed—but his cavalier treatment of his conquests before and after the credits roll merely serves to prove that they have as much individual importance to him as a single bullet in his Walther PPK, or one good martini.
Speaking of which, Bond goes around the world gleefully dispatching henchmen and rotters with a cold disregard for human life and applying the letch fingers to almost every woman he meets—always with a one-liner ready, because a British man without a noticeable sense of humour is no kind of man at all—and yet the one thing he is guaranteed to get snippy about is if someone makes his cocktail wrong. Mr. T could not pity a fool as much as Bond does, should his martini be stirred, not shaken. The Daniel Craig rebooted Bond even got to make a gag out of this, by getting James to snap “Do I look like I give a damn?” when asked—by a bartender, no less—if he preferred his drink shaken or stirred. But he still got shirty about it. Like a sod.
So what is it about these two imperious swine that has so captured the British fancy? Well, Sherlock Holmes represents British scientific exploration. He’s a boffin, a swot, and he was created in an age when British engineering and scientific exploration were the envy of the world. Sherlock is not the toughest guy in the room—although there have been some efforts to change this, most recently in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films, where Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes is quite the bare-knuckle boxer—but he’s the smartest, and he possesses the withering scorn of the Great British Scold too.
It’s no coincidence that Holmes has been resurrected so many times recently, now that we’re in an era when science is under attack from people who feel that they know what they know, and that this is enough knowledge to be getting on with. By contrast, Holmes is a poster boy for angry facts, an arch refuter of all codswallop, and while the Brits are as susceptible to hokum as anyone else, they often like to think of themselves as rationalists first. With Holmes, the subtext is always “Well, you would believe that, wouldn’t you?” which is a very lofty perch from which to view the world.
And then there’s Bond. By no means the cleverest person in the room, or the wittiest, he succeeds because he’s the most confident, and he has no concern about the consequences of his actions. He was invented during an era of worry for the British. The Second World War had just ended, espionage was the new front line, and the most effective weapon against global superpowers (or decadent super-villains with remote island bases) was sheer nerve and a decent local phrasebook.
Manners, deportment, etiquette, the ability to play a decent hand of poker and a fairly snotty attitude towards cocktails: Bond is a cad and a rogue, but he’s cool and English and he won’t stand for any nonsense; he drives mouthwatering cars as if he doesn’t care that they’re going to get smashed up (see: Cars and Top Gear); and he always gets the girl. He can travel the casinos of the world in a tuxedo, being rude and beating off all-comers (pause; eyebrow raise to camera). Why wouldn’t the Brits love him?
Ian Fleming knew this, because he had been a kind of proto-Bond himself, and he poured all of that experience and concern into a character who would also never, ever admit to being rattled. Bond’s appeal is that he remains unsentimental even when everything is falling apart around him. He is an inspirational figure for the ideal of the welltravelled Englishman dismayed at the collapse of empire. And the films are as much a send-up of what Bond sees as the idiocies of the rest of the world as they are super action movies.
Bond and Holmes are not only antiheroes, they carry their own critics along with them, shrugging in exasperation to the audience, as if to say, “This guy, eh?” Dr Watson’s loyalty is sorely stretched at times, and yet he remains solid and dependable, while endlessly pointing out his friend’s many social flaws. Bond spends a lot more time alone in the field, but when he reports back to base, his is not a hero’s welcome. No matter that he has saved the world many times, he’ll still feel the sharp edge of the quartermaster’s tongue if that Aston Martin got blown up. And M isn’t exactly one for the high-fives either.
So the message from Holmes and Bond is partly that being extraordinary doesn’t excuse being a sod, even when you’ve saved the day, but also that being a sod does look like a hell of a lot of fun (see: Cheering the Bad Guy).
WHAT TO SAY: “The game is afoot!”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Mr. Bond, I’d like you to meet my new assistant, Jenny Talworts.”
Anyone Who Gets a Round In
In sitcoms it’s always the way the restaurant bill is divided up that causes the most interpersonal stress between friends. Some people want to split things evenly; others want to pay for only the food and drinks they personally consumed. There’s no right answer, glowering happens, and everyone ends the night feeling slightly tense and tetchy with one another.
It’s much the same in pubs, except the British pub is a community hub—whether literally, in rural areas, or socially, in urban ones—so the stakes are far higher and the consequences far greater if mistakes occur. The nature of social drinking is that the people around a pub table immediately become an exclusive gang. You get your circle together, someone offers to get a round in, and that means eventually everyone will, at some point, be expected to return the gesture. Anyone who is willing to get his (or her) round in early will automatically be considered a good sort. It’s a sign of not getting above your station, of considering yourself one of the gang, and so it’s an easy win for newcomers to an establish
ed social group and, what’s more, they’ll all have to buy you drinks all night, and that’ll make you feel popular. Considering the fact that the British are notoriously slow in offering positive feedback or effusive greetings—in many areas of the UK it is considered more than acceptable to hail anyone, from old friends to new sexual partners, with the catchall grunt “Alright?” to which the expected reply is the similarly expressive “Alright?”—this is not a feeling to be taken for granted.
Some British people still weigh up the relative worth of their fellow humans according to the willingness with which they get the drinks in. They’ll offer a warm, but brief, appraisal that concludes “And he is always quick to get his round in,” as if this were on a par with saving his platoon from certain death thanks to a particularly selfless and heroic deed.
And the reverse is also true. The very worst crime of etiquette one can commit in a pub—beyond fighting, perving, spilling drinks and being a crashing bore—is to fail to buy your round. Woe betide anyone who takes the drinks he’s offered, keeps schtum whenever someone asks who’s getting the next round in, and then leaves early before it’s his chance to offer reciprocity. Woe and raised eyebrows are also on the cards for the person who lingers just outside the pub as everyone walks in, so that he’s at the back of the pack when everyone reaches the bar. He may get away with it once—but it will be duly noted; he may get away with it twice—but it will be openly discussed behind his back. The third time, that’s when the trouble starts. He’ll get a reputation for having short arms and long pockets, for being tighter than Pavarotti’s trousers, for being (whisper it) a skinflint.
Stuff Brits Like Page 12
