Some Common Misconceptions About the Brits

Avoid embarrassment! Read this before you visit the UK!

You’ll read in many guidebooks that the British love queuing. That this lie has been published so many times confirms the British tendency toward malicious puckishness. The fact is that the British loathe queuing. It reminds them of a time when the only non-classical music the BBC played was the sort that made one long for deafness, the air was barely fit to breathe, and, because of rationing, one commonly had to queue outside a butcher’s stop for hours to buy pork faggots, for instance.

Spick & Span was a popular men’s magazine in a more innocent time. Then its art director didn’t have the cyan garden hose airbrushed out of this cover image, and the magazine’s readership abandoned it in droves.

Appear, at a bus stop, or outside a chemist’s, as though you intend to align yourself neatly behind an earlier arriver and someone old enough to remember rationing is likely to whack you with her cane, or bring his Zimmer frame down smartly on your foot. Should you resist, they will typically have no reservations about soliciting the help of persons too young to have suffered the privations of postwar pork faggot shortages, but resentful of the fact that it’s hard to get a decent job in modern Britain if you don’t know how to do anything other than get tattoos, drink a great deal of lager, roll your own cigarettes, and have three kids before the age of 19.

These younger persons, sort of the equivalent of American trailer trash, tend to be what are called chavs. One does not want to be set upon by a bloodthirsty half-dozen of them armed with knives and sticks and the Burberry scarves and baseball caps of which they’re inexplicably fond.

We are told also that the British are very reserved, decorous to the point of stuffiness, but London Underground commuters, for instance, actually love when a fellow passenger bursts into song, and join right in as though down their local in a time before karaoke or even jukeboxes. While such call-and-response hits of yesteryear as Manfred Mann’s 1964 hit “Doo Wah Diddy” especially delight them, Brits also such enjoy songs of colonial provenance as “If You’re Happy and You Know It (Clap Your Hands).”

What mischief one not inhibited by the Brits’ reputation as standoffish can enjoy on The Tube! In a Tube car containing only one fellow commuter, it’s splendid fun to choose a seat right beside that lone commuter and to beam at him until he can no longer pretend not to have noticed. When he puts down his free newspaper (the Metro in the morning, and the Evening Standard in the afternoon and evening) and glares at you, ask, “Will you be my fwend?” Chances are he’ll offer to buy you a kebab and a pint, even if he doesn’t mistake you for Jonathan Ross or Toyah Wilcox, a television personality and pop singer, respectfully, much loved for his and her rhotacism, or inability to pronounce the letter r.

“Arr,” say I, in homage to Robert Newton’s Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

Many antiquated or intentionally misleading guidebooks marvel too at the fact that if you step on a Brit’s toes, or otherwise cause him physical discomfort, he will reflexively murmur, “Sorry.” This is extremely not the case any longer, though. Step on most Brits’ toes and they will break your nose with their foreheads. It turns out, you see, that there is such a thing as a British martial art, popularly known as head-butting. Fearing concussion, Americans naturally hesitate to strike something as hard as an antagonist’s face with their foreheads, but years of redirecting soccer balls moving at high speeds with their noggins have made the Brits laugh disdainfully at the notion of being concussed.

You will have heard that the British find Americans’ compulsive openness off-putting, that they find revolting our penchant for pronouncing someone with whom we have conversed for 45 seconds our new BFF, as in best friend forever. Understand that this misinformation is deliberately deceptive, and intended to help save the Brit — who typically will bear his soul with no less hesitation than he’ll bin (discard) a knackered (ruined) 99p umbrella — from himself. In a world in which 78.4 percent of residents of the West don’t know their next-door neighbours’ names, the thinking goes, it might be prudent to leave at least a couple of personal details unconfided.