Living each day as my last.
I’ve been holding back on the tomato / tomAHto talk for nearly a year…
Until now!
I’ve been here long enough now that I think I have a few more interesting points to make than highlighting the Brits’ proclivity for tea, toast, marmite, crumpets, Victoria sponge cake, toad in the hole, bangers and mash, cheeky pints, beer coats, fancy dress parties and having a curry!
I’m reading the following book, which is unlocking the subtleties of a people who pride themselves in this trait:
The first chapter is on weather.
Apparently, Brits aren’t just obsessed with discussing weather. Instead, they use weather as:
- a simple greeting
- an icebreaker
- a default / filler conversation
The general rule is that you must always agree with someone when they make a comment… so even if I’m not feelin it when someone comments on the lovely day, sounds like I’m going to have to act the part!
There is a weather hierarchy: sunny and warm / mild being the best and rainy and cool / cold being the worst. Sounds reasonable for good weather… and not pleasant, but not the end of the world for the bad… not that I ever rowed a boat away from my house in Katrina, lived through tornadoes or woken in bed with a quake, but I’ve had my share of television programs interrupted by lower third captions of flash flood and blizzard warnings…
Which brings me to the next point. I’ve just insulted the British by saying the last part… The weather chapter has revealed the following:
“While we may spend much of our time moaning about our weather, foreigners are not allowed to criticize it. In this respect, we treat the English weather like a member of our family: one can complain about the behaviour of one’s own children or parents, but any hit of censure from an outsider is unacceptable, and very bad manners.”
“Although we are aware of the relatively undramatic nature of the English weather – the lack of extreme temperatures, monsoons, tempests, tornadoes and blozzards – we become extremely touchy and defensive at any suggestion that our weather is therefore inferior or uninteresting. The worst possible weather0speak offence is mainly committed by foreigners, particularly Americans, and that is to belittle the English weather. When the summer temperature reaches the high twenties (low eighties), and we moan, “Phew, isn’t it hot?”, we do not take kindly to visiting Americans or Australians laughing and scoffing and saying, “Call this hot? This is nothing. You should come to Texas (Brisbane) if you wanna see hot!”
“Not only is this kind of comment a serious breach of the agreement rule, and the weather-as-family rule, but it also represents a grossly quantitative appraoch to the weather, which we find coarse and distateful. Size, we sniffingly point out, isn’t everything, and English weather requires an appreciation of subtle changes and understated nuances, rather than a vulgar obsession with mere volume and magnitude.”
“Indeed, the weather may be one of the few things about with the English are still unselfconsciously and unashamedly patriotic. During my participant-observation research on Englishness, which naturally involved many conversations about the weather, I came across this prickly defensiveness about our weather again and again, among people of all classes and social backgrounds. Contempt for American size-fixation was widespread – one outspoken information (a publican) expressed the feelings of many when he told me: “Oh, with Americans it’s always “mine’s bigger than yours”, with the weather or anything else. They’re so crass. Bigger steaks, bigger buildings, bigger snowstorms, more heat, more hurricanes, whatever. No f-ing subtlety, that’s their problem.” Jeremy Paxman, rather more elegantly, but equally patriotically, dismisses all Bill Bryson’s monsoons, raging blizzards, tornadoes and hailstorms as “histrionics”. A very English put-down.”
I was a bit incredulous to read that Brits would be that touchy about this.
I tried it out on a few colleagues and whilst a few were unphased, one of my closest work friends was genuinely ruffled by me merely wondering over this… and compared it to how offended I get when people bluntly tell me that going to the US doesn’t have any appeal to them (talk about the family – may not like everyone, but you still can’t diss them – rule!!). Somehow this seems like a stretch, but I guess that’s cultural relativism for you… and guess I need to be here longer to completely understand. (if ever!)
Moving through tiny patches of homesickness. Not big ones, just little ones that catch me off-guard. Like last night, as I cycled home from the Wimbledon train station, I thought about how my colleague gushed about his trip to New York and what a visual feast the hip areas are. And I started to think of all of the bits I miss… dinners with childhood best friends, lazy Sunday brunches even if it’s after waiting in long queues, feeling like a fount of knowledge on everything from where to get the best burger to cheap massages (even if you don’t want to strip down in a large room with strangers to have Chinese women climb on the table to leverage their weight as they chat with the masseuse next to them).
