Regular readers of this column, of which there are none, may have noticed a subtle shift in tone, a slight mellowing of my rancour towards England and the English. This attitudinal adjustment has not come about without a price and I feel that I have not so much learned to appreciate the subtle niceties of my adopted land but experienced a gradual decay of my resistance.
After seven years of close, in some cases intimate, observation of the common and not so common inhabitants of this island I really am in no better position to comment on what exactly encompasses the essence of Englishness than I was when I first stepped off the plane from San Francisco all those years ago. The problem arises, indeed is inherent within any attempt to snap-shot a culture, that there really is no way to define The English any more than you can pinpoint The French, The Germans, or the Norwegians. Generalizations about a people tend to be written by guide-book authors or foreigners with an axe to grind. When you grow up somewhere there is little need to define what it means to live there- you just do and that’s the end of it.
Let us not forget for a moment that any white-wash generalization of a people or a county is, by it’s very nature, stereotyping and while sometimes, in the hands of a gifted writer it can be humorous, it can also lead to the most grievous of racial diatribes.
I have lost count of how many evenings I have spent in restaurants all over Europe listing to half-drunk ravings about how America was created by Satan to perpetuate subjugation and destruction, only to be told, after the rant has finished, that “you’re OK, you’re not like that.” I’m not too bothered by this, it shows that there is a separation between the actions of a government and the feelings and desires of individuals. Just today, in an Amsterdam taxi, the driver reinforced this view:
“I love Americans.” He said, “I just hate your government.”
His sentiment is one I can wholeheartedly relate to. The danger lies when the overriding distrust of a country trumps the intellectual understanding that people who live in that country do not necessarily ascribe to the views of the ruling party which means that sometimes it is easier to simply hate all Americans (or French or Russians or Germans or…) than to consider the lives and views of individuals.
The fact that I travel constantly throughout Europe has given me an insight and appreciation not only of the cities that I visit but also of the country I return to. Looking out the small, scratched, Plexiglas window as we line up for our approach to Heathrow I see a patchwork quilt of hedgerows, green pastures and villages and this somehow makes me feel that everything is right in the world.
I fully appreciate why I think this: I’m returning to London after days or weeks away, I know that when we touch down I will be able to read the street signs and I still carry with me a touch of romanticism that all Americans feel toward Mother England. However, for me that warm fuzzy feeling started to evaporate after my first visit to London when I was 13 and encountered thuggish commuters, inedible food and wax paper toilet tissue.
Home is the familiar be it a cave, a cottage or a castle. The tiny refrigerators, washing machines and streets of London which once seemed so foreign now seem more “normal” than their gigantic counterparts in the US. Yet England will never, ever, be my home with a capital “H.” I work with a dozen ex-pats and none of them, myself included, would ever think the phrase, “being home for the holidays” meant staying in the UK.
Great Britain is a small island, about the size of the state of Oregon. It’s 60 million inhabitants jostle about for elbow room on land that has been walked over, ploughed, planted, paved, deforested, mined, fought over, bombed and generally abused for a few thousand years. In the US it is quite easy to wander into the wilderness and find oneself hours, if not days, from anything resembling human habitation whereas in Britain it’s difficult to find a spot without mobile phone coverage.
This small scale and isolation has shaped the character of the English and led to a xenophobia so chronic that, if certain papers with large type and small pages are to believed, the sole unifying belief of the inhabitants is a desire to keep everyone else out.
A favoured topic at pubs throughout the country is the necessity for the government to “do something about” the wave of immigrants flooding the shores of a nation which is bursting at the seams. I have been party to numerous discussion with normally liberal-minded people who will rabbit on about the dangers of letting in more of the teaming foreign masses without once seeing the irony of having the discussion with me.
I have taken one of their jobs, fucked their women, sent thousands of pounds to foreign banks, used their health services, insulted their citizens, government and way of life and never once has my right to live in the UK been questioned; not once have I been told “go back where you came from!” Why is that? The cynical among you might say it’s because I am a white male and you would be right.
My dearest friend in the UK, a lawyer who works in Leeds (the binge drinking capital of the UK- which is saying something), raised in Britain, with an accent so posh you could cut glass with it, happened to have the bad luck of being born in Pakistan and has thus endured a life of taunts, insults and threats from people who claim superiority to her because their parents got drunk and conceived them on a council estate in Hull.
The English of course do not have a monopoly on racism and some, including me, would argue that apart from a few notable headline gabbing riots, Britain tolerates and accepts immigrants from her former colonies (read: everyone) fairly well. Just don’t peak behind the curtain and ask what John Bull feels about all those Polish Plumbers.
I should point out that even though I am British, I am not now, nor will I ever be, English and if you think there isn’t a difference, ask a Scot. “English” is an exclusive club which I, because of birthplace and accent, will always be denied membership.
I didn’t begin this entry with the intent of digressing into the subject of race relations in the UK. My premise was simply that Englishness is indefinable and any attempt at doing so will yield a shed-load of general or exaggerated traits which apply to no one. To a reader of This England (an amusingly stuffy publication which prides itself on looking backward at, rather than forward to, a more civilized Britain) those things which most define an Englishman might be summed up as follows: a quiet reserve, perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds (aka: The Battle of Britain or Agincourt), a love of county Cricket, Sunday roasts, reverence for the Queen and gardening. While I do know one or two people who fit this description perfectly, observational evidence would seem to indicate that although these traits might at one time been an apt portrait of the idealized Englishman (Englishwomen shared nearly the same traits but substituted stern common sense for Cricket) they are far from the norm at present.
Now that I once again find myself 31,000 feet over the North Sea enjoying the crisply polite service offered by British Airways (that is not sarcasm by the way- I really do think their flight and cabin crews are tops) and wishing that children had both a volume control and an off switch; I’m trying to remember when the unfamiliar became the familiar. At what point did the strangeness of Europe, specifically Britain, give way to the sensation of familiarity which allows it to feel, if not exactly like home, then at least something that will do for a time.
The answer, for me at least, is that this change is still a work in progress and something I struggle very hard against. I don’t actually want London to be Home so any advances along these lines have been happening behind the scenes of my consciousness. Stupid brain trying to make me adapt, get back to thinking about sex every 6.2 seconds.
Amsterdam. Very, very nice bar attached to a swish hotel. I am definitely not a bar person but this place is pretty chill: no loud music, no one smoking (anything) and the seats are plush leather. Sorry, slight diversion, where was I?
The English are no different than anyone else: in their most sentimental or stressed moments, what they think of as the Utopia of Home is really an idealized conglomeration of gauzy fantasizes. What’s the harm of it? When reality is hordes of concrete car parks and city centres exploding with pups the size of Zeppelin hangers, who wouldn’t want to escape to thatched roof cottages and afternoon tea?
I make mock of London and the English, for all sorts of good reasons, however I have also spent the last five Christmases in one of those thatched roof cottages surrounded by my extended English family. They have taught me to love Cricket and country walks and days out on the river Dart. As difficult as it is for me to admit, no matter how progressive, how liberal, how anti-monarchy I think I am, years of exposure to a rural and genteel England makes me want to trade in my biker jacket and Ramones t-shirt for a tweed suit and a pair of Wellies.
Almost.
No comments:
Post a Comment