January 13-15, 2012
London, England
Reading: Alice in Wonderland by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll)
“There is no community in London,” quoted a colleague who desperately wants to move to Glasgow, a city in a place, Scotland, which is now planning a referendum on independence: breaking away from the UK; making it somewhat less united.
“True that,” I responded.
London, like New York City, is not a real representation of the soul of the nation; both are incredibly international and densely populated. If there is a “community” here it would be the world community with little pockets and groups of communities interspersed.
To dig for the soul, you have to talk to the locals, which is not always easy to do. I am allowed, via my colleagues, to get to the heart. One thing my colleague told me is that “as a child, you are brought up to believe you are the chosen people and you are the luckiest person alive to be born in Britain.” They are brought up to think of themselves as special.
In the UK, just like everywhere, where local is king, you see patterns: the same actors in like-series’ on the telly; the same over-marketed celebrity chefs, like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, saturating the market by hawking every product under the sun.
In other places, there is a known provincialism. In the U.K., the former world empire, they haven’t gotten around the self-awareness of how small their country is and how their apex of world power has waned. It is ingrained deep within the English psyche: they still think they rule the world, with their former colony, the United States, acting for them, as almost an arm of their own policy. So, for them, provincialism doesn’t exist. For them, London is still the centre of the universe. Don’t try to tell them it is not!
When you live in the UK, as a foreigner, you gather the delta in their use of the English language, and the “lay of the land” of the place; the small things, what they would call the “bits and bobs.”
They use interesting words here which I will try to translate:
- Cheeky – smarty pants.
- Bespoke – custom made.
- Bollocks – bunch of crap.
- Bloody – pejorative use close to the “F” word.
- Right – a patronizing way of agreeing.
- Cheers – not just a way to clinking glasses together, but an average greeting on the street.
- Smart – dressed nicely.
They love their crisps (potato chips) and chips (French fries) and their fish-n-chips ordered in that very chirpy way; clipping the English language.
We all know they drive on the wrong side of the road, but even the traffic lights are different. They go red to yellow to green. The little green man flashing for pedestrian, in normal worlds would mean that you have the right away, but here it just means, hurry up as the cars are now coming! The little green man flashing means “it is already too late.”
For a fashion mecca, one only 2.5 hours away from Paris, they tend to follow the lowest common denominator in the UK. With the guidance of Victoria Beckham, the “slutty girls” look, with the amalgamated fishnets and other assorted remnants of hooker clothing, makes the entire town seem like a harem or a whorehouse. And they have the topless (and usually brainless text) model to go with the splashed page 3 girl of the slimy, and morally bankrupt, Rupert Murdoch-owned SUN newspaper.
There is this interesting obsession with flash and celebrity, as represented beautifully by a show called “The Only Way Is Essex” (aka TOWIE): full of glam girls and muscled pretty boys with too much makeup. It seems the only reason for their existence is celebrity. They are followed by the local rag magazines which litter the tube (subway) and double-decker busses which also include stories about Jordan/Katie Price; Girls Aloud; Cheryl Cole; the Beckhams; the royals; and, of course Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay and the American Idol rip off “X-Factor.”
Celebrity here powers many industries. They have WAGS (“Wives and Girlfriends”) of footballers, and their tabloid press love to create catchy nicknames of concatenated names of stars and the all-hallowed, bow-before-them all cult of celebrity: for example “Jacko” for Michael Jackson. They make up the names all the time and many of them stick.
Another obsession is their history. You cannot escape 1066 – the last time they were conquered. Maybe they feel shame about the loss, even to this day? Nor can you get away from Victoria and Albert and Elizabeth (I and II) – they are everywhere! You are also constantly reminded of the First and Second World War. As these two events seared the consciousness of the land, at the time, it has led to a mass movement of collective memory. They cannot erase it and cannot forget it. It is a recurring theme here, along with their strange modern relationship with Germans.
They have loads of poor people in the UK. They live in things called council estates and/or council houses in places are morbidly boring as Slough. They are the butt of many jokes from low level, self- satisfied, meanies like Ricky Gervais and the entire comedy community centred on the misery of others. You can really see the calcified class system here the way people talk about the poor. But, the people living in council houses are paid for by those working. The income tax in the UK is quite high, so perhaps there is hostility in those forced to work for those “on the dole.”
There are constant rag-mag paper stories of “benefits scrounges” – people who jerk and con the system to get the most for them. They have their poor “chavs” and “hoodies” – or “yobs” – a group of names coined to package a group of youthful hangers-on who are unemployed and lowly educated, and seemingly everywhere. When the police come to pick up the yobs, they call this “being nicked”. They are the types that spawned the riots in the summer of 2011.
The United Kingdom is a class-based society that loves its layers and hierarchy. “They love their layers here, they do!” A friend told me about his experiences in Scandinavia and the UK. “The UK wants to maintain that upstairs/downstairs relationship as long as possible, and they do so in corporations now, as opposed to the manor house.” And the mass influx of immigrants from the former colonies and from Eastern Europe solidifies this differentness to the local and hierarchical English, although the immigrants clash with the native lower classes and it is often quite ugly.
Above all they love to trumpet their “Englishness” as often as they can, wrapping just about everything in the Union Jack. They have their Harrods tea and crumpets and scones and stuffed breakfast tables on which they place English breakfast – a huge and lovely assortment of bangers and scrambled eggs and mushrooms and toast.
They pride themselves on the men who dress smart and wear the bowler hats and carry their bumbershoots. They love to annoy foreigners by launching into bit of colloquial language which is utterly non-sensical to any non-native of that “shire” whence they can. They love their heavy inflection on words you would struggle to find in the dictionary.
They love their brands, which, oddly, are not entirely British. They love the Mini Cooper (now owned by BMW) and Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, Tesco, Asda (Walmart in the UK).
To most foreigners, the English come across as condescending, patronizing, or both. They can be, as a colleague once said to me “quite cold.” But on Thursday and Friday nights, they flock to the pubs and down pint after pint, in a spirit of camaraderie that is not so often seen in other parts of the world.
“I think they have to drink like that” said a friend… “In order to tolerate their own society.”
