Tag Archives: British culture

How to get a license for your goldfish, and other news from Britain 

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We all know how romantic Britain is, right? Ruined castles, foggy moors, illegal waste disposal. Yes, folks, we’ve got it all. 

Back in–hang on. How long has this article been kicking around my coffee table? Back in December 2020–in fact, just in time for Christmas–a Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, got exercised about criminal networks working in waste disposal, and (what with being criminals and all) dumping and burning large amounts of the stuff they were supposed to dispose of in the approved (if not necessarily planet-friendly) way. 

Some of it, he wrote, is hazardous.  

How could that be allowed to happen? 

He set out to demonstrate that the government has lost control of the licensing process so thoroughly that anyone can get licensed to dispose of waste. And they can use false information if they want, because it won’t be checked. 

To demonstrate, he registered his long-dead goldfish as an upper-tier carrier, broker, and dealer in waste. The fish appeared on the form as Algernon Goldfish of 49 Fishtank Close, Ohlooka Castle, Derby. 

A month later, Algernon had his license. Or to be entirely accurate, Monbiot had Algernon’s license. Algernon never opened his own mail, even when he was alive. 

Irrelevant photo: a lily

But let’s be even more than entirely accurate: Algernon may not have been male. To the casual human observer, male and female goldfish look nonbinary, which is to say, we can’t tell the difference. But the culture being what it is, most people will decide their fish is male. 

I know. But a female goldfish applying for a license might have snagged some official’s attention the way a male goldfish wouldn’t, after which they might have asked Lord Google where Ohlooka Castle is, and the whole thing would’ve fallen apart. So it was important that Algernon stay putatively male. 

As the cynical among us used to say in the–was it the seventies? Or as I think of it, last week? Yeah, it probably was. We said, “Make sexism work for you.”

It never did, really, but it sometimes kept us from throwing things.

 

What else makes Britain romantic?

Well, tea, of course. Or if it doesn’t make the place romantic, at least it makes up a huge part of people’s image of Britain. Which is a problem, because the British are buying less tea than they used to. And if they’re buying less, it follows as the night the day that they’re drinking less. 

What’s going on? 

The world’s ending, that’s what. 

On top of which Britons are switching to coffee, herbal tea, iced tea, energy drinks, and for all I know cocaine. 

Not everything on that list is available from your local supermarket, but with the exception of herbal tea all of it will wake you up.

According to Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey, which is based on conversations with at least three people who still speak to me, the British consider coffee fancier than tea. 

To be clear: I’m not talking about instant coffee here, and maybe not about the stuff I learned to drink in the U.S. as a young adult, at great cost to my taste buds and ability to sleep. I’m talking about the kind you buy at a coffee shop. The kind that comes from a machine the size of a Volkswagen. Or the kind people make at home using a non-recyclable pod that they slot into a machine the size of a small short-haired dog.

Semi-relevantly, people don’t talk about having coffee here, they talk about having a coffee, as in “I stopped in for a coffee.” I’ve lived outside the U.S. too long to remember what Americans would say, but I’m pretty sure it’s not that. A cup of coffee? Probably. But I do remember that tea’s the fancier drink in the U.S.. Or at least the one that marks you as a bit of a weirdo.  

To prove that tea isn’t the fancier drink in Britain, some whole category of people talk about builder’s tea, meaning the tea people who work in the building trades drink to fuel themselves through the damp and the wind and the hard work. I’m not sure how to describe that category of people who say call it builder’s tea, but I seem to have joined it. They didn’t do a background check before accepting me and I didn’t ask what I was signing up to. 

If that isn’t proof enough of tea’s un-fancyness–and I can’t think why it would be–there’s this: 96% of the tea that Britons slug down is made with a teabag, not from the more up-market leaf teas. 

How did they measure that 96%? By the cuppa, a non-standardized metric that can be found, in spite of the slow shift away from tea, in pretty much every household. The language has preserved a place for the question, “Would you like a cuppa?”

Or maybe that’s, “Do you want a cuppa?” I don’t really speak British. I speak something that’s vaguely related but it doesn’t allow me to write convincing dialogue. 

All comments and corrections and explanations of British English are welcome. Also all marginally appropriate mockery.

 

What else can we learn about British culture?

Why, we can learn what people leave behind at hotels. The Travelodge chain reported on that very topic, because they understand its cultural importance. The past year’s finds include:

  • A pair of feathered angel wings, six feet across
  • A dog named Beyoncé 
  • A dress made out of postcards
  • A horsebox, with the horse inside
  • A drum kit
  • A Jimmy Choo Cinderella shoe 
  • A suitcase full of Blackpool rock

Okay, a couple of those items need explanations. Blackpool rock doesn’t mean stones. Rock’s a stick-shaped hard candy with, in this case, the word Blackpool written all the way through the center. I can understand forgetting it. What I can’t understand is having a suitcase of it, but never mind, the human race is far stranger than any one mind can take in.

As for the shoe, all I can tell you is that Jimmy Choo shoes are ridiculously expensive and that Cinderella’s known for losing a shoe, so pouring that kind of money into two of them seems like a bad investment. But what do I know? I wear running shoes.

But 2021 was a pandemic year. Let’s go back to 2019, before the pandemic got its claws into us, and see what people left:

  • A five-foot unicorn made of flowers
  • A gallon of water from Loch Ness
  • Two alpacas
  • The best man from a wedding party (and that was before the wedding)
  • A dissertation (topic not specified)
  • An urn with someone’s father’s ashes
  • The deed to a shop
  • An Aston Martin
  • A cat
  • A 75-inch color TV (just try finding a black and white one these days)
  • A blood pressure monitor
  • And in a come-down from 2021, a set of angel wings that are only four feet wide

 

Meanwhile in British politics

We could learn a few things here too if we try.

With the shine having gone off the prime minister, a few people in his government are appealing to the we-don’t-like foreigners strand of the culture to see if they can’t shine him back up again. Or at least shine themselves up in case his position suddenly goes vacant.

Appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment is hardly new, but it went into bold-face type earlier this year, with the home secretary, Priti Patel, calling for asylum seekers crossing the Channel in small boats to be forced back to France, which France insisted would put their lives at risk.

Will not, Patel said.

Will so too, France said.

Don’t care, Patel may have whispered once the microphone was turned off.

Patel introduced a bill that, until public outrage forced her to modify it, looked like it would make a criminal out of anyone saving an asylum seeker’s life at sea. 

All this activated Brexiteer Nigel Farage and some of the rightest wing of the media to accuse the Royal National Lifeboat Institution of being woke. Not woke as in having had too much fancy coffee but woke as in being someone they disagree with. 

Anything can be turned into an insult if you say it in the right tone of voice.

Why was the RNLI having the evil finger pointd at it? Because it was dedicated to saving lives at sea. Anyone’s life. Lots of ink was spilled onto newsprint, and lots of vitriol was spilled onto the internet. One group of fishermen apparently tried to block a lifeboat, presumably when it wasn’t trying to save a fisherman’s life.

So how well did that work for the anti-woke, no-caffeine campaigners? The RNLI ended 2020 on track to raise the largest amount of money in its almost 200-year history. Online donations went up 50%. 

 

 

And in economics

By 9 a.m. on January 7–the year’s fourth working day in Britain–the average head of the country’s biggest companies had made more money (if you figure it on an hourly basis, which they don’t but never mind) than the average British worker will make by the end of the year. Unless of course the spaceships land before the year ends and seriously reconfigure the economic system.

To put that a different way and for a different year, in 2020 FTSE 100 chief execs were paid an average of 86 times more than the average full-time British worker made. I wouldn’t say it adds to the romance of the country, but it does tell us a lot about the culture.

 

And in other countries…

The Dutch government has put out a warning about pendants that are supposed to protect people from frequencies 5G masts emit: The pendants are radioactive, the government says. And (in case this wasn’t obvious as soon as you hit the word radioactive), they’re dangerous. 

In Canada, cats have put out a warning that Elon Musk’s satellite dishes are nice and warm when it snows. Not very warm, but warmer than snow, because they have a self-heating feature that’s supposed to melt the snow off them. It does do that. It also attracts cats.

This was reported by a customer who said his cats have a heated house of their own but they prefer the satellite dish, at least while the sun’s up. 

The cats slow his reception way down, but hey, if kitty’s happy, everyone’s happy. Or so my cats tell me.

And finally, in the United States, an eight-year-old, Dillon Helbig, slipped a hand-drawn book onto a shelf in the children’s-book section of his local library.

“I wanted to put my book in the library center since I was five, and I always had a love for books and libraries,” he said. “I’ve been going to libraries a lot since I was a baby.”

The book is The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis, and it’s by “Dillon His Self.”  

Library staff found the book and moved it to the graphic novel section, so it can be borrowed. When last heard of, it had a waiting list of 55. The library awarded Dillon the first Whoodini Award for best young novelist. The award was named after the library’s owl mascot and the category was created for Dillon. Who’s working on a sequel.

*

My thanks to Jane Whitledge for pushing me in the direction of that last story.

What people really want to know about Britain, part 21ish

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It’s time to empty the search engine questions onto the kitchen table and see what Lord Google’s sent us. The questions appear here in all their oddity. And in case you worry that I’m making fun of the people who left them, I’m 99.9% sure that not a one of them stuck around to read my answers. They came, they saw, they thought, What the hell is this?, and they left.

British History and Culture

does anyone know why the british all wore those silly-looking white wigs ?

Oh, I am so glad you asked. I hadn’t gotten a decent search engine question in weeks and I’d been starting to think Lord Google had stopped caring about me. The answer is, first, yes. I know that and, oh, so much more. Most of which I won’t tell you because, having left your question, you’re gone, aren’t you? Besides, it would scare you shitless if you knew what I do. It sure as hell worries me.

But there’s a second part of the answer, which is that they liked their wigs. They took them seriously, in no small part because the wigs allowed them to look down on the wigless–the schmucks who were so poor they had to run around–publicly yet–in their own hair. Wigs were strictly for the upper classes. Think about it. Wigs weren’t just expensive, they were in style. It’s amazing what people will wear if it’s expensive and in style.

People who could afford to had more than one. Think of the wig as the Gucci bag its day. Or if you have a Gucci bag and take it seriously and I’ve insulted  you–sorry–fill in the imaginary blank with any expensive style you do think is ridiculous.

Now, O person who’s no longer here, think about something you own and love that’s the height of fashion. Then think about yourself in forty years, looking at a picture of yourself and (or in) it. Think how silly it (and quite possibly you) are going to look. 

That’s if we’re all still around in forty years, which is looking less likely every week.

Irrelevant photo: flowers from a village produce stall. Chrysanthemums, I’m reasonably sure.

cockwomble definition scottish

Is the Scottish definition of cockwomble different than (or from) the English definition of cockwomble? Or the Welsh, Irish, or Cornish one? I’m outside my area of expertise here  –if I have an area of expertise–but that doesn’t normally stop me from sounding authoritative. So I’m going to say no, the cockwomble grew out of a kids TV show, The Wombles, which was British, not English/Scottish/etc.ish. The show grew out of a kids’ book. A band by the same name grew out of some hallucinogens. 

No, I don’t know that. I’m asserting it in complete ignorance, but I do remember a moment or two of the seventies, which is what leads me to think–

And when someone comes along and tells me I’m wrong about any of that, I’ll be happy to shove over and give them the expert’s seat.

Lord Google is besieged by people asking about a link between cockwombles and Scotland. I know this because I asked him about it myself. I can’t find any reason to think the link exists, but if enough people ask eventually a link of sorts will be cobbled together.

cockwomble oxford english dictionary

I’m sure there’s a cockwomble working at the Oxford English Dictionary. There’s one anyplace with a staff of more than six. There might even be a definition of cockwomble in there somewhere. Dictionaries have gone refreshingly lowbrow these days. But what’s the question doing here instead of at the OED?

self esteem bell ringers

Y’know, I hate the phrase self-esteem. Or maybe it’s not the phrase but the idea. It strikes me as a short answer to a long and complicated question. I don’t trust it. But when you add it to something as noisy as church bells, it gets really annoying. Can we limit the bell ringing to people who don’t feel so damn good about themselves, please?

But since I slammed the question into the British Culture section–and I take these categories seriously, I’ll have you know–I’d better explain that bell ringing is a thing here. There used to be competitions. Maybe there still are.

And with that I’ve exhausted most of what I know on the subject. I’ll just sneak out quietly before anybody notices. 

anglo-saxon england notes

It was your class, sweetie. You’re the one who was supposed to be taking notes.

what were debtors called in great britain

Debtors. Also things like Alfred, Harry, James– Occasionally you might get a Sarah or something along those lines, but with the power to contract debts solidly in the hands of men, that seems to have been less common.

why do we eat brussel sprouts for christmas

Because Santa’s moved on from that coal-in-the-stocking routine. Times change, dear.

berwick on tweed at war with germany

No, no, no. It’s Russia that Berwick on Tweed isn’t at war with even though a lot of people think it is. Germany? Berwick also isn’t at war with Germany, but nobody except one late-night person messing around on the internet thinks it might be.

Although I suppose Berwick can not be at war with one country as easily as with another. Or with all of them at once. With the state the world’s in, it’s good to hear of someplace that isn’t at war. Even if it’s not a country and doesn’t have an army.

perwick island still at war

Look! We’ve got another variation on the theme of Berwick not being at war with Russia.

Lord Google couldn’t lead me to any Perwick Islands, but he doesn’t insist on precise spelling and told me instead about three Berwick Islands. One is in (or off) Australia, one is ditto in relation to Louisiana, and the third to South Carolina. After that we get to Lerwick, on the Shetland Islands.

None of them are at war with anyone. Isn’t that marvelous?

I’m learning so much about how rumors start.

how to pronounce tunnel

This is a perfectly sensible question, given how badly English-language pronunciation aligns with English-language spelling. Unfortunately, this is not a sensible place. Try a dictionary, friend. 

British Politics

supine stem of confiteor

This is a phrase our prime minister dropped into a speech to a bunch of blank-faced school kids, apparently in an effort to convince them that education was exciting and that they’d look back on these days as–well, who knows? The best days of their lives? A time when they’ll learn useless phrases they can later throw into a speech when they have no idea what point they’re supposed to be making? 

In a career that’s long on incoherence, this wasn’t Johnson’s most coherent speech. But it did follow his pattern of being able to say stupid things in Latin. Or partially in Latin. Most of it was in English, but nobody understood that part either.

when did the uk go metric

Some time ago, in a moment of Euro-madness. Or make that several moments of Euro-madness, and I’d give you an actual date but the country crept up on metricosity in stages, giving us one date for petrol (which if you’re American is gas) and diesel, another date for certain types of alcohol, no date at all for beer, at least in pubs, because it’s still sold in imperial measures, and–well, you get the drift. 

Now that we’re leaving the European Union, will we go back to our state of pre-metric innocence? Innocence is hard to recapture and I suspect the shift would be too much trouble for even the most hard-nosed Brexiteers, but I may be underestimating them. Or overestimating them. Or I may be, as a karate teacher I once studied with liked to say, overexaggerating. 

Americans in Britain

baking powder biscuit in england

Outside of my house, you won’t find a single baking powder biscuit in England. You’ll find scones, which are made with baking powder, but they’re a different thing. You’ll also find biscuits, which we Americans–being the perverse creatures that we are–call cookies, and they’re generally with baking powder too, but they’re not baking powder biscuits, they’re just biscuits. Made with baking powder

Are you confused yet? Then you’re getting into the spirit of the thing.

Baking powder biscuits look like scones but they’re not as sweet. 

Yeah, but what about cheese scones. They’re not sweet. 

We’re leaving them out of the conversation because they’ll only leave crumbs on the floor. They’re also different from baking powder biscuits, but (other than the cheese) I can’t explain why. It’s something you just have to take on faith.

You eat baking powder biscuits like bread: with a meal, without a meal, to mop up the gravy, with butter, with jam. The only thing you can’t do with them is toast them because you’ll never get them out of the toaster in one piece. 

Baking powder biscuits are a southern thing. They’re a Black thing. They’re a wonderful thing, and mostly we just call them biscuits. What they’re not is an English thing. Or (since this is probably what the question meant) a British thing. Americans are still trying to work out the difference between England and Britain. What do you expect from us? We still haven’t figured out the difference between the United States and America in general.

Questions that Defy Categorization

Britishfonot

I thought I’d include it so you’d understand how strange it gets around here. Even without my intervention. I have no idea what it means.

how to politely reject the award

You mean on those special occasions when saying, “Fuck you, this is meaningless,” just won’t do? 

It’s not that hard. You start by saying thank you. Then you explain that you don’t do awards. If your reason is that they’re meaningless, you’ll want to keep it to yourself because you’re being polite, remember? If your reason is something inoffensive, you explain it. Then you get out of there while everyone’s still smiling. 

You’re welcome. I’m going to start an advice blog any day now, with a side of good manners and another one of cole slaw.

amazon

Somebody asked to find Amazon and Lord Google sent them to me. That must mean I rank higher than Amazon.

Would you like a side of cole slaw with that?