...without even trying

Being English is not simply a matter of having a clever sounding accent. We have a system of beliefs and habits that only when I travel do I realise the strangeness of. So, taking a break from writing about Malaysia, I offer this not entirely serious guide as a lesson for non English readers on how to blend in with and understand our way of seeing the world.

NB I am writing this with the aim of being inclusive to each part of England, but inevitably, my being a white, middle class Londoner will probably massively influence what I write (and I'm also male). Happy for readers of this piece to chip in with their views - but I felt it would have been ridiculous and impossible to be offering region / class / race / religion / gender / sexual orientation variations on each topic.

"I don't want to impose"

I think the absolute key to understanding the English mind is the above phrase. The essence of politeness is not creating difficulties for other people. It is as if we imagine all our friends are perfectly happy reposing at home, and our arrival or phone call shatters this content tranquility. We can't bear the thought of calling someone during their bath, or requiring someone to cook us food if we show up unexpectedly. Some people in England amaze me by introducing themselves over the phone as, "Hello, it's only me"...
This not wishing to impose attitude creates huge problems for me when I travel - such as when I visited Turkey. I was visiting my friend Elif, and so first stayed with friends of her's in Istanbul, then went to the town of Dydem where her parents lived. The problem was that I instinctively didn't want any special treatment, I "didn't want to impose" - but it seemed to Turkish eyes, to have not given me special treatment would have been an insult. I offered to wash up after meals, Elif's friends shooed me away. I tried not to sit at the head of her family's table, they inform me that if I sat facing one of the daughters, that meant I had come to ask for her hand in marriage. I sat facing the father after that.

"Well REALLY"!

English people like complaining; we don't like doing it out loud. We love rules and queues (American English doesn't even have a word for queuing), but if someone pushes in (jumps the queue), the correct response is to turn to the person next to you and, too softly for the queue jumper to hear, mutter, "Well really"... Readers will notice of course that this response has no effective power at all.
We believe that the Italians are passionate and say whatever's on their mind, that the French will immediately march and strike at anything they don't like - we mock and admire them for this. Perhaps these differences explain why the French and Italian governments listened to their peoples' objections to the Iraq war, and our's listened to G Bush. The English do seem to like strong governments, we like to be ruled - our political system gives an incredible amount of power to the Prime Minister, and no one really minds. Love or hate Blair and Thatcher, but the politicians we have contempt for are the weak ones, Major and all the Conservative Party leaders that have come after him.

"Lasts as long as your diet"

Tied to this, in my opinion, is the pecular modesty of the English. "We do ourselves down" is a common thing people complain about - many English people take refuge from their imperfections by exhalting them. A friend takes up yoga? Raise an eyebrow and smile, "We'll see how long that lasts". Any attempt to improve one's self the English have a deep distrust of. We found it rather funny that John Major had once been a bus conductor, not laudable. We dislike smooth talkers and evangelicals who tell us they can make our lives better - because no one can, "Don't get above yourself". We dislike the idea of self made businessmen going into politics, "They'll run the country like a supermarket" and don't accord scientists too much respect (the word we use is "boffin"). The Sun newspaper ran a series of adverts as I was leaving the country with catchphrases like, "It (The Sun) gets you through the road works at Angel" and, "It lasts as long as your diet". I disagree with The Sun on almost everything, but there is no doubt that one thing The Sun understands is the English. Clearly there is something about us that thinks, "Yeah, I am overweight and lazy - good old Sun"!

"The English instinctively admire a man with no talent who is modest about it".

The English admire a good effort, fair play, making the best of limited ability. This is probably why we do so badly at sport. We admire people who do their best and fail - other countries seem to expect their teams to win, not to try hard.

English "vagueness"

There are many things the English don't like talking about. I think we have a massively inflated idea of the value of privacy - we don't like to raise unpleasant topics in the belief that it's kinder that way. The thought that the person suffering would love a willing ear, or for the obvious tension to be broken sometimes doesn't occur to us. "One doesn't like to pry". It's not really first nature for us to invite someone sitting alone (or two people in an obvious couple) in a bar to join our group - part of our mind thinks, "What if he / they wants to be alone"?
I think the word (s) that describes us very well is "self-conscious". We don't generally repress things - we're just very aware of all the ramifications of our actions, and sometimes paralysed by them. Anger tends to dissolve this verbal paralysis, but the typical remedy used by the English is alcohol. I've heard that the Japanese say nothing critical of each other in the workplace, wait to the trip to the bar at the end of day, have one drink and tell each other what they really think under the pretense of being drunk. This sounded very familiar to me.

Comparative to many cultures I've visited, the English are very reticent on the subject of money. Money is something to be skirted around - you don't ask how much someone earns. China was very strange to me as Chinese people would ask me as an initial conversation, "1. Where are you from? 2. What did you do in London? 3. How much money did you make"? One old Chinese guy in a Melaka restaurant sat down and quizzed me on how much I made on an annual and monthly basis, both pre and post tax... Louise finds it incredible I don't know what my parents' salaries are.
I came to face this English money reticence when working in sales for an American firm in London (my first job after Uni). There were five things I had to find out from a contact if I was going to sell him any of our consulting services - one was his budget. I found this incredibly hard to ask about, and many English managers, important people in large firms, found it equally hard to be up front with me. Again and again I'd hear, in a rather pompous tone, "That may be how you do business in AMERICA, but here we blah blah blah"... Soon it became immensely frustrating for me - these managers either had a budget to hire someone or they didn't, why couldn't we just work out if we could do business? In contrast, American managers and directors in London seemed to quite like being cold called by some unknown young sales guy - "Ok, Daniel, I've been moved over from New York to set up an ecommerce gateway and where we're at now is"...

English people don't generally effuse - for many of us, loud equals fake. If an English person starts grandiosely praising you, be careful - he or she is probably making fun of you. The steoretypical English person gets quieter as they get angrier - the worst insults are the ones that sound like they could almost be compliments. The English person calling out, "Hey shithead!" probably likes you a lot - the one gifting you a silent gaze of contempt hates you. I once told a girl in a nightclub, "I quite like you" - she found this very unromantic, which annoyed me somewhat.

The English seem to prefer many things vague. Our political system is a collection of vaguries - things that mean one thing on paper (or more likely, on a loose collection of papers) and quite something else in people's minds - what the monarch is supposed to, what our rights as citizens are. Few people seem to categorise themselves the way many Americans like to ("I'm a third generation Korean-American Baptist") - most people I speak to either say, "I'm English", meaning they were born here or grew up here, or "I'm Indian" - meaning where their family is originally from. Scientific political doctrines like Communism have never been that popular here compared to many mainland European countries - the English prefer vaguer ideals.

Things I don't like about the English

English people take a great interest in America, to the exclusion of all other countries. Our political leaders are forever aping American experiments, while only rarely European ones. We have this idea, probably due to sharing a language (sort of), that we are more like the Americans than the Europeans. In my opinion, we are massively different to Americans, whose society, to stereotype, is far, far more religious, far more about the individual and what the individual can win for themselves, far more a society at ease with sales and marketing and uttering convincing messages. Whether our government is Labour or Conservative, we seem to be perpetually hoping to turn ourselves into our rose-tinted vision of America (productivity, low taxes, Bill Gates), without really examining if the reality of America is something any of us would want.

We have an increasing obsession with celebrities that I find bewildering. Why anyone would especially want to watch a TV program with celebrities discussing their favourite books, or read an article written by Stephen Hawking's daughter on her holiday in Guatemala escapes me. If it were celebrities talking about their field of expertise, like Gordon Ramsey reviewing a new cookery book, I could see the point - but these people are on TV purely because they are (often marginally) famous, as though it is fame itself that lends a glamour and credibility to one's words and face.

English people have a tendency towards drunken violence that depresses me. Europeans have a capacity to drink alcohol without turning into a mob - why are only English young men dangerous after they've had a few? I watched in Venice as the office workers knocked back a tiny glass of wine with breakfast (they would return for more at regular intervals during the day) - so it's not that we drink more than other peoples.
Part of this is I'm sure to do with our drinking laws. Our pubs close at 11pm, so for many of us, drinking becomes a race rather than a recreation. Work finishes, go to the pub, drink with the knowledge the place closes in five hours - and "eating is cheating". Pubs kick everyone out at eleven, steaming drunk, heading for a nightclub or heading home, knocking into each other, fights start.

Things I admire about the English

I admire many of the things I've poked fun at above. I admire that we aren't as obsessed with success as many cultures, and that we try to give people a fair chance. I admire that the English place a high premium on being honest rather than being convincing.

Some of the things I admire most about the English require a somewhat dubious history and philosophy lesson. My personal view and admiration of Englishness in part stems from the solution English thinkers developed to deal with religious divides. Early in her reign, Elizabeth I decided that, given she, her advisors and quite a few English people were Protestant, while a lot, perhaps the majority of the country, were Catholic, the best solution was to pretend there wasn't a problem. The Elizabethan Church became a mixture: Protestant in theology while retaining many older ceremonies, so Catholics would feel able to participate. The point was: do and believe what you want, but don't make a fuss about it. "In the privacy of your own home", so to speak. Two monarchs later, Charles I didn't maintain this balancing act, and the country had a civil war, a republic / military dictatorship, a restoration of the monarchy, a second "civil war" (or maybe a consenting invasion) the Glorious Revolution. The thinkers that were prominent at this time included people like John Locke, arguing for a state that didn't interfere in people's private religious lives. The only solution to the recurring upheavals was to let everyone do what they wanted with their hearts, as long as they obeyed the laws. And I see this continuing into the English thinkers who I admire the most, the 19th century liberals like John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham. These were people that coined phrases like, "self regarding actions" - acts that harm no one else are not for the government to intervene in. And, "The greatest good for the greatest number" (was that Rawls?), in other words, give everyone a fair shot at getting what they want from life. Without wishing to be reductionist, I think one can see many of aspects of English character (privacy, solace in vagueness, a belief that tolerance is important) as coming from these developments - and these are things I admire and hope continue.

Disappearing pies

Many of the things, however, that I like about my own country seem to be disappearing or are in danger of doing so. Traditional English food, for example, is held up for mockery in many places in the world. But I think the problem is English eating, not English cooking. "Traditional" English food is delicious when done well: chicken and duck pies, roasts, genuine country sausages (rather than the factory scrapings supermarkets sell), cheeses, puddings... But how many of us still know how to make any of these? Lack of time keeps people from baking and cooking in general - why not just get an instant meal to watch in front of the telly? One of my goals for any return to England is to learn some of these cooking techniques - maybe bake my own bread. The whole world imagines and respects the idea that the English stop everything to take "afternoon tea" - I always feel terrible to tell people we have long been in too much of a rush to have this anymore.

The above food argument contains slightly rascist overtones perhaps - what about the English people cooking up Chicken Tikka Masala and Sweet and Sour Pork you ask? This is not an argument that everyone in England should eat yorkshire puddings instead of curries (a scary thought), just that culturally, nothing should be lost. One descends into kitsch cliche very quickly talking on this kind of topic, but my hope is just that each part of modern England is able to remember and carry forward their traditions and, well, cooking skills.

There are myths of Englishness that we English really need to look at again, to see if they still contain any truth. Is English politeness and reticence turning into not a more confident openness, but rather just an equally shielding shrill rudeness? Are ideas of giving everyone a fair chance, which are perhaps behind having low cost University education and health care, are these changing towards a more American view of the world, where you get what you can pay for? I grew up in a multi-racial city, my idea of England has always involved more than those white skinned mongrel descendants of the Celts, Italians, Danes, Germans, Scandinavians, French and who knows how many other peoples. But at times it feels like England is getting more racially divided rather than less - countering the advances of the British National Party in local elections is now a serious political issue. Is this the same nation that prides itself on tolerance, that gave refuge to so many great European thinkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? And what of our vaulted "common sense", when mobs burn doctors' clinics confusing the word "paedophile" with the word "paediatrician". Other countries don't seem to share this paranoia about constant danger to their children - is that because they love their children less, or because our newspapers have whipped us up into an obsession over these crimes - which are indeed terrible, but still very uncommon?

Travelling around the world, I've seen that cultures do change, identities grow or vanish, heritage can be preserved, can adapt with the times or can be simply lost. "Culture" is not something that exists in the ether, it lives inside us, in our way of viewing the world and how we cook dinner. We are not English just because we were born here or have come to live here, surely, but if we are not careful, one day that may be all that we can say about ourselves. "Born in England, Live in England, Die in England" runs a t-shirt of the hardcore football fan. It misses the point completely.

Daniel, 20 June 2004