Matt Rudd - The English: A Field Guide

CONTENTS

For A & A,

former proud owners of a Datsun Cherry

In memory of Amy Turner 19822012

THE BEST THING about going on holiday is coming home.

Sorry.

Too much.

The fourth best thing about going on holiday after the blue Mediterranean skies, the blue Mediterranean pool and, umm, the blue Mediterranean cocktails is coming home. It cant just be me who finds comfort in the sheeting rain welcoming you at the airport, the heavy spray sheering off the lorry failing to overtake the other lorry on the way up the M23, the abundant grey-greenness of home.

I once lived a long way from England but a very short way from a totally tropical beach, the sort of beach they use to flog Bounties. That wasnt all. I had a girlfriend who was at least 80 per cent as lovely as the Bounty ad girl. I was twenty-something, living the coconut-confectionery-based dream. Work. Beach. Sleep. Work. Beach. Sleep. Work. Beach. Throw a shrimp on a barbie. But then something awful happened. I started to miss the grey-greenness. You get tired of the blinding yellows, the gaudy blues, the sun-baked ochres of the tropics. You yearn for sludgy colours. Sludgy colours are calm and dependable. A sludgy colour wont kiss your wife all the way up her arm and then offer her a private tour of its island on the back of its Vespa.

So I gave up that tropical beach and my 80-per-cent Bounty girl with her apartment just back from the shoreline and her nice teeth. I swapped parrots for sparrows, vegemite for Marmite and thongs for mittens-on-string. I came back to the drizzle. So far, so straightforward. This is something any English person will understand, unless you claim to be an English person who likes unremittingly good weather and Christmas lunch in the cruel sunshine of the southern hemisphere in which case you are either lying, not really English or my Geordie friend Donna. But theres more to it than a lemming-like enthusiasm for bad weather. There must be.

Over the last eighteen months, I have been on a journey into the lives of the English to find out what makes us tick.

As far as possible, I have adopted the David Attenborough approach to this journey, as opposed to the Bruce Parry one. Attenborough looks at his gorillas through the undergrowth and whispers peeping-Tomishly to camera. Parry is more hands-on. If a tribesman inverts his penis, Bruce inverts his too. At no point during the making of this book have I inverted my penis although I did go to Blackpool which turned out to be almost as painful. Of course I am an Englishman so its a bit like a gorilla whispering peeping-Tomishly about gorillas. But I have tried to be an objective gorilla.

Dont be too sarcastic, the editor had said controllingly at the outset. And, if Im honest, I thought that would be a tall order because, as we have just this very minute established, I am English, not counting the strong influence of the Armenian grandmother. Ask anyone English about their fellow Englishers, and youll be hard-pushed to find an enthusiastic, glowingly complimentary response. Were just not like that. Were not like our altogether more up-beat, high-fiving, group-hugging, group-whooping cousins across the Atlantic. In very exceptional circumstances, as demonstrated every sixty years or so, we can set out the bunting and flags, and sing anthems with tears in our eyes. And we are quite capable of thinking were better than lots of other countries or that if we arent, its not our fault, its the governments or Brussels. But you will never find us climbing lampposts and chanting England, England, England like they climb street lights and chant USA, USA, USA. Not unless were coming back from a football match, but thats different.

Despite all this, I did set out with a vague hope that it might not be all bad. That the drizzle pervading the soul of English life might not be quite as unremitting or even as real as youd think. It might just be part of our weird, self-deprecatory national psyche. Miserableness could be the national glue. It is certainly the starting point of every comedian, sitcom-writer, columnist and hairdresser in the country (or maybe I just have an unusually grumpy hairdresser). Its what you talk about when you bump into someone you know only vaguely on the train how miserable everything is. But it might just be a magic kind of miserable, strong enough to bind us together but superficial. Underneath the miserableness, things might not be that bad.

This journey is not a geographical one. Well, it is I have travelled the length and breadth of this green and grey land but it is not structured that way. There will be no chapter on northerners or the Cornish or the Norfolkers or, worse, the bequiffed, beplimsolled Shoreditchers. Our regional peculiarities will emerge patchily and unpredictably, just as they do in life. Any attempt to compartmentalise a nation in that way is doomed to ridicule. If youre Cornish, you know the way you speak is funny. You dont need me pointing that out. And I dont need you coming round my house with your all right my handsums and your pitchforks.

This is also my excuse for focusing on the English as opposed to the British. Like it or not, Alex Salmond, much of what we will discover applies just as well to the Scottish or the Welsh as it does to the English. This is not a travel guide, it is a journey into our daily lives, and I would suggest, dangerously, that the biggest variations between our homes, our working lives and the way we roll at the weekend still come from class as opposed to which corner of England, or, for that matter, Britain, we inhabit. And even that generalisation is fraught with exceptions, the most significant being that we live in homogenised times. We watch the same television, buy the same BOGOF cheese from the same supermarkets, read the same S&M books. Still, there are some national differences. And frankly, the boiling rage certain elements of these fair isles will work themselves into if they are, once again, lumped into a big book of Britain suggests they feel strongly about it. So we will save Scotland and Wales and, yes, Northern Ireland but not Gibraltar, for another day. Where I use the term British rather than English, it is not because I am forgetting this solemn pledge. It is simply because whatever we are discussing applies to the lot of us. Dont get your sporran in a twist.

This is a journey not around the geography of the land but the geography of our lives. We will be snooping, whisperingly, around our homes, our offices and wherever we go at the weekends. We will be looking at how we cook, eat, drive, work, sleep and, ahem, other stuff some of you might still do in bed.

We begin on the sofa which is, by the way, an almost impossible place about which to be unsarcastic. My problem, not yours, but really, its not easy. This is the place English people spend the vast majority of time when they arent sleeping or working. Four hours a day on average. Four hours. A DAY. Not counting students. Not counting Jeremy Kyle. In the living room, we find sloth. But, is it really that bad? This is the question I will be asking, as unsarcastically as possible, as we focus our creepy binoculars on every aspect of English life. Is the metaphorical self-flagellation (it is just metaphorical, isnt it? Please tell me it is) every time we slump into the well-worn curve of our beloved zero-per-cent-financed three-seater really necessary? To find out, my fellow Hobbits, we must step into the world of sofas and sitting rooms. We will stare at people through their living room windows and decide if it really is as dire as everyone says it is.