Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  The anti-earnestness rules state that you can talk with colleagues or work-mates about an important project or problem in the pub, but pompous, self-important or boring speeches are not allowed. You may, if you are senior enough, get away with these in workplace meetings (although you will not be popular), but in the pub, if you become too long-winded, too serious or too ‘up yourself’, you will be summarily told to ‘come off it’ or ‘put a sock in it’.

  The polite-egalitarianism rules prescribe not exactly a dissolution of workplace hierarchies, but a much more jocular, irreverent attitude to distinctions of rank. After-work drinks sessions are often conducted by small groups of colleagues of roughly the same status, but where a mixing of ranks does occur, any deference that might be shown in the workplace is replaced in the pub by ironic mock-deference. Managers who go for after-work drinks with their ‘team’ may be addressed as ‘Boss’, but in a jokey, slightly insolent way, as in ‘Oi, Boss, it’s your round!’ We do not suddenly all become equals in the pub, but we have a licence to poke fun at workplace hierarchies, to show that we do not take them too seriously.

  The rules of after-work drinks, and of pub-talk generally, are deeply ingrained in the English psyche. If you ever find that a business discussion or interview you are conducting with an English person is somewhat stilted, over-formal or heavy going, ask the person to ‘just talk as though we were in the pub,’ or ‘tell me about it as you would if we were in the pub’. Everyone will know exactly what you mean: pub-talk is relaxed, informal, friendly talk, not trying to impress, not being too serious. Of course, if you can actually take the person to the nearest pub, so much the better, but I have found that even just ‘invoking’ the social microclimate of the pub in this way can reduce tensions and inhibitions.

  OFFICE-PARTY RULES

  The same principles apply, in intensified form, to office parties (I’m using this, as most people do, as a generic term, covering all parties given by a firm or company for its employees, whether white- or blue-collar) – particularly the annual Christmas party, an established ritual, now invariably associated with ‘drunken debauchery’ and various other forms of misbehaviour. I have done a couple of studies on this, as part of SIRC’s wider research on social and cultural aspects of drinking, and I always know when the run-up to Christmas has officially started, as this is when I start getting phone calls from journalists asking, ‘Why do people always misbehave at the office Christmas party?’ The answer is that we misbehave because misbehaviour is what office Christmas parties are all about: misbehaviour is written into the unwritten rules governing these events; misbehaviour is expected, it is customary.

  By ‘misbehaviour’, however, I do not mean anything particularly depraved or wicked – just a higher degree of disinhibition than is normally permitted among the English. In my SIRC surveys, 90 per cent of respondents admitted to some form of ‘misbehaviour’ at office Christmas parties, but simple over-indulgence was the most common ‘sin’, with nearly 70 per cent confessing to eating and drinking too much. We also found that flirting, ‘snogging’, telling rude jokes and ‘making a fool of yourself’ are standard features of the office Christmas party.

  Among the under-thirties, 50 per cent see the office Christmas party as a prime flirting and ‘snogging’ opportunity, and nearly 60 per cent confessed to making fools of themselves. Thirty- and forty-somethings were only slightly more restrained, with 40 per cent making fools of themselves at Christmas parties, often by ‘saying things they would never normally say’. Although this festive ‘blabbing’ can sometimes cause embarrassment, it can also have positive effects: 37 per cent had made friends with a former enemy or rival, or ‘made up’ after a quarrel, at a Christmas party, and 13 per cent had plucked up the courage to tell someone they fancied them.

  But even the most outlandish office-party misbehaviours tend to be more silly than sinful. In my more casual interviews with English workers, when I asked general questions about ‘what people get up to at the office Christmas party’, my informants often mentioned the custom of photocopying one’s bottom (or sometimes breasts) on the office photocopier. I’m not sure how often this actually occurs, but the fact that it has become one of the national standing jokes about office parties gives you an idea of how these events are regarded, the expectations and unwritten rules involved – and how the English behave under conditions of ‘cultural remission’.

  I will have much more to say about different kinds of ‘cultural remission’, ‘legitimised deviance’ and ‘time-out behaviour’ in later chapters, but we should remind ourselves here that these are not just fancy academic ways of saying ‘letting your hair down’. They do not mean letting rip and doing exactly as you please, but refer quite specifically to temporary, conventionalised deviations from convention, in which only certain rules may be broken, and then only in certain, rule-governed ways.

  English workers like to talk about their annual office parties as though they were wild Roman orgies, but this is largely titillation or wishful thinking. The reality, for most of us, is that our debauchery consists mainly of eating and drinking rather too much; singing and dancing in a more flamboyant manner than we are accustomed to; wearing skirts cut a bit too high and tops cut a bit too low; indulging in a little flirtation and maybe an illicit kiss or fumble; speaking to our colleagues with rather less restraint than usual, and to our bosses with rather less deference – and perhaps, if we are feeling really wanton and dissolute, photocopying our bottoms.

  There are exceptions and minor variations, but these are the permitted limits in most English companies. Some young English workers learn these rules ‘the hard way’, by overstepping the invisible boundaries, going that little bit too far, and finding that their antics are frowned upon and their careers suffer as a result (particularly if they are stupid enough to post photos or descriptions of their indiscretions on internet social media sites). But most of us instinctively obey the rules, including the one that allows a significant degree of exaggeration in our accounts of what happened at the office Christmas party.

  WORK RULES AND ENGLISHNESS

  Looking at the guiding principles identified at the beginning of this chapter, and trying to figure out what they tell us about Englishness, I am immediately struck by all the ambivalence and contradictions in English attitudes to work. The ‘muddle rules’ seem to be full of ‘buts’. We are serious but not serious, dutiful but grudging, moaning but stoical, inventive but also stuffily set in our ways. I would not go so far as to say that we have a ‘love/hate’ relationship with work. That would be too passionate and extreme and un-English. It is more a sort of ‘quite like/rather dislike’ relationship – a somewhat uneasy compromise, rather than an angst-ridden conflict.

  There is something quintessentially English, it seems to me, about all this middling, muddling and fence-sitting. English work-culture is a mess of contradictions, but our contradictions lack the sense of dramatic tension and struggle that the word normally implies: they are generally half resolved, by means of a peculiarly English sort of grumpy, vague, unsatisfactory compromise. We can neither embrace work with wholehearted Protestant zeal, nor treat it with Latin-Mediterranean insouciant fatalism. So we sit awkwardly on the fence, somewhere in the middle ground, and grumble about it all – quietly.

  The concept of compromise seems to be deeply embedded in the English psyche. Even on the rare occasions when we are roused to passionate dispute, we usually end up with a compromise. The English Civil War was fought between supporters of the monarchy and supporters of Parliament – and what did we end up with? Well, er, both. A compromise. We are not keen on dramatic change, revolutions, sudden uprisings and upheavals. A truly English protest march would see us all chanting: ‘What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!’

  When in doubt, which would seem to be much of the time, we turn to our favourite, all-purpose coping mechanism: humour. I think that the workplace humour rules have added a new dimension to
our understanding of English humour and its role in our cultural codes. We already knew that the English put a high value on humour, but we had only seen this ‘in operation’ in purely social contexts, where there is perhaps less need for clarity, certainty and efficiency than in the workplace. We can only calculate the value of humour now that we have seen what the English are prepared to sacrifice in its honour – things like clarity, certainty and efficiency.

  The workplace humour and modesty rules have also helped us to get ‘inside’ another stereotype, that of English anti-intellectualism, which we stuck under our microscope and broke down into its component parts – namely prohibitions on earnestness and boastfulness. Having got anti-intellectualism in my Petri dish, I’ve now poked away at it a bit more and tweezered out another component, which looks awfully like ‘empiricism’, particularly the anti-theory, anti-dogma, anti-abstraction elements of the English empiricist tradition, our stolid preference for the factual, concrete and common-sense, and deep mistrust of obscurantist, ‘Continental’ theorising and rhetoric. There is something fundamentally empiricist about the English ‘Oh, come off it!’ response. In fact, there is something essentially empiricist about most aspects of the English sense of humour.86 I’ve got a feeling we’ll be coming back to this.

  The modesty rule seems to be yet another consistently recurring theme – and, as with humour, the workplace provides a useful and revealing ‘test’ of the strength of this rule. We found that when the requirements of advertising and marketing are at odds with the English modesty rule, the rule wins, and advertising must be reinvented to comply with the prohibition on boasting.

  The polite-procrastination rule highlights another familiar trait, the one I have taken to calling the English ‘social dis-ease’, as a shorthand way of referring to our chronic inhibitions, our perverse obliqueness, our congenital inability to engage in a direct and straightforward fashion with other human beings. The money-talk taboo, a symptom of this dis-ease, brings us back to the usual-suspect themes of class-consciousness, modesty and hypocrisy – all increasingly strong candidates for defining-characteristic status, along with our penchant for excessive moderation.

  I have a hunch that fair play will also turn out to be a fundamental law of Englishness. Like humour and ‘social dis-ease’, the fair-play ideal seems to pervade and influence much of our behaviour, although it is often manifested as polite egalitarianism, suggesting that hypocrisy is an equally powerful element.

  More familiar themes recur in the workplace moaning rules, but with some new twists. We find that even our constant Eeyorish moaning is subject to the ubiquitous humour rules, particularly the injunction against earnestness. And the ‘Typical!’ rule reveals what may be a modern variant of the ‘stiff upper lip’ – a distinctively English quality, which for the moment I am calling ‘grumpy stoicism’.

  Finally, the after-work-drinks and office-party rules bring us back again to the theme of English social dis-ease, in particular to our need for ‘props’ and facilitators – such as alcohol and special settings with special rules – to help us overcome our many social inhibitions. More of these in the next chapter.

  80. If the work ethic is very strong in the UK but negligible or absent in Britain, as they appear to be saying, then the nation’s entire ‘supply’ of work ethic must be concentrated in Northern Ireland. With no disrespect to the Irish, this seems rather unlikely.

  81. A salty, dark brown spread made from the yeast by-products of the beer-brewing process.

  82. For those who do not speak Yorkshire: ‘owt’ means ‘anything’ and ‘nowt’ means ‘nothing’.

  83. Not least by the Englishman Michael Young, who coined the term ‘meritocracy’ in 1958 – and never intended the positive connotations it has acquired. In 2001, he wrote: ‘If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get. They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.’

  84. Although I’ve always wondered: how do we know that no two snowflakes are identical? I mean, has someone actually checked them all?

  85. This is not universally the case: in many cultures, specifically those with a healthier, more ‘integrated’ attitude to drinking, alcohol is equally used to mark the transition from home/play to work. In parts of France and Spain, for example, men may stop at a bar or café on their walk to work for a ‘fortifying’ glass of wine, calvados or brandy – although recently this practice has been dying out, a worrying sign of a shift towards a more ‘ambivalent’, ‘episodic’ drinking culture. I discuss these differences in more detail in Rules of Play (page 377).

  86. When I wrote this somewhat throwaway little observation about the essentially empiricist nature of English humour, I had not come across Anthony Easthope’s fascinating book, Englishness and National Culture, in which I now discover that he makes much the same point, albeit at much greater length and in a far more scholarly manner.

  RULES OF PLAY

  I am using the term ‘play’ here in a very broad sense, to mean any leisure activity: pastimes, hobbies, holidays, sport – anything that is not work, anything that we do in our spare time (with the exception of the specific things covered in later chapters on food, sex and rites of passage).

  The English have three different approaches to leisure, relating to our three main methods of dealing with our social dis-ease, our incompetence in the field – minefield might be a better term – of social interaction:

  •First, there are private and domestic pursuits, such as DIY, television, the internet, gardening and hobbies (the ‘go home, shut the door, pull up the drawbridge’ method).

  •Second, we have public, social activities such as pubs, clubs, sports and games (the ‘ingenious use of props and facilitators’ method).

  •Third, we have anti-social pursuits and pastimes, such as getting very drunk and fighting (our least attractive way of dealing with social dis-ease, the ‘become loud, aggressive and obnoxious’ method).

  PRIVACY RULES – PRIVATE AND DOMESTIC PURSUITS

  Like ‘humour rules’, this heading can be read to mean ‘rules of privacy’ but also in the (now somewhat dated) graffiti sense of ‘Privacy rules, OK!’ – conveying the way in which the English obsession with privacy dominates our thinking and governs our behaviour. The easiest way for the English to cope with our social dis-ease is to avoid social interaction altogether, by choosing either leisure activities that can be performed in the privacy of one’s own home, or outdoor pursuits that require no significant contact with anyone other than one’s immediate family, such as going for a walk, or to the cinema, or shopping – anything that takes place in environments governed by the ‘denial rule’, which covers almost all public places.

  In surveys, over half of all the leisure activities mentioned by respondents are of this private/domestic type, and of the top ten pastimes, only two (having friends round for a meal or drinks, going to the pub and chatting on the internet) could be unequivocally described as ‘sociable’. The most domestic pursuits are the most popular: watching television, ‘sofalising’ on the internet, listening to the radio, reading, DIY and gardening. Even when the English are being sociable, the survey findings show that most of us would much rather entertain a few close friends or relatives in the safety of our own homes (or chat online from inside this sanctuary) than venture out among strangers.

  Homes and Gardens

  I have already discussed at some length (in Home Rules, page 185) the English home-fixation and privacy-obsession, but it is worth repeating here my theory that ‘home is what the English have instead of social skills’. Our love-affair with our homes and gardens is, I believe, directly related to our obsession with privacy, which in turn is due to our
social dis-ease.

  Watching television is a universal pastime – nothing uniquely English about this. Nor is there anything peculiarly English about the other main domestic leisure pursuits mentioned here, such as reading, gardening and DIY, or at least not per se. There is, however, something distinctive about the phenomenal extent of their popularity, particularly in the case of DIY and gardening. On any given evening or weekend, in at least half of all English households, someone will be ‘improving’ the home, with bits of wood or tins of paint, or the garden, by digging or just ‘pottering’. In my SIRC colleagues’ studies on English DIY habits, only 12 per cent of women and two per cent of men said that they never did any DIY. In the latest national census survey, at least half of the entire adult male population had been DIYing in the four weeks before the census date. Nearly a third of the female population had also been busily improving their homes, and our obsession with our gardens was equally evident: 52 per cent of all English males and 45 per cent of females had been out there pruning and weeding.

  Compare these figures with those for church attendance, and you will find the real national religion. Even among people claiming to belong to a particular religion, only eight per cent attend religious services every week. The rest of us are more likely to be found on Sundays at our local garden centre or DIY superstore. And when we want a break from obsessing about our own homes and gardens, we go on mini-pilgrimages to gawp at bigger and better houses and gardens, such as the stately homes and gardens opened to the public by the National Trust and the Royal Horticultural Society. Visiting grand country houses consistently ranks as one of the most popular national pastimes. This is not at all surprising, as these places have everything an English person could wish for in a Sunday outing: not just inspiration for home and garden improvements (‘Oooh, look, that’s just the sort of pinky-beige colour I was thinking of for our lounge!’) and indulgence in class-obsession and general nosiness, but also reassuring queues, refreshing cups of tea, and a sense that the whole thing must be virtuously educational – or at least a lot more so than going to the DIY store or garden centre – because it is, after all, ‘historic’.87 This little puritanical streak, this need to show that one’s leisure activities are more than just mindless consumerist pleasure-seeking, is most evident among the middle classes; the working classes and upper classes are generally more open and honest in their consumption of pleasure, being less fussily concerned about what others might think of them.