How to be a Brit

just signal by showing two millimetres of your finger-tips.
It is great fun when motorists do not notice your signal and run into your huge
bus with their tiny cars.
    2. Hide and seek. Whenever you approach a request stop hide behind a large lorry or another bus
and when you have almost reached the stop shoot off at a terrific speed. It is
very amusing to see people shake their fists at you. It is ten to one they miss
some important business appointment.
    3. Hospital game. If
you have to stop for one reason or another, never wait until the conductor
rings the bell. If you start moving quickly and unexpectedly, and if you are
lucky — and in slippery weather you have a very good chance — people will fall
on top of one another. This looks extremely funny from the driver’s seat.
(Sometimes the people themselves, who fall into a muddy pool and break their
legs, make a fuss, but, alas! every society has its bores who have no sense of
humour and cannot enjoy a joke at their own expense.)

HOW TO PLAN A TOWN
     
    Britain, far from being a ‘decadent
democracy’, is a Spartan country. This is mainly due to the British way of
building towns, which dispenses with the reasonable comfort enjoyed by all the
other weak and effeminate peoples of the world.
    Medieval warriors wore
steel breast-plates and leggings not only for defence but also to keep up their
fighting spirit; priests of the Middle Ages tortured their bodies with
hair-shirts; Indian yogis take their daily nap lying on a carpet of nails to
remain fit. The English plan their towns in such a way that these replace the
discomfort of steel breast-plates, hair-shirts and nail-carpets.
    On the Continent doctors,
lawyers, booksellers — just to mention a few examples — are sprinkled all over
the city, so you can call on a good or at least expensive doctor in any district.
In England the idea is that it is the address that makes the man. Doctors in
London are crowded in Harley Street, solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
second-hand-bookshops in Charing Cross Road, newspaper offices in Fleet Street,
tailors in Saville Row, car-merchants in Great Portland Street, theatres around
Piccadilly Circus, cinemas in Leicester Square, etc. If you have a chance of
replanning London you can greatly improve on this idea. All greengrocers should
be placed in Hornsey Lane (N6), all butchers in Mile End (E1), and all
gentlemen’s conveniences in Bloomsbury (WC).
     

     
    Now I should like to give
you a little practical advice on how to build an English town.
    You must understand that an
English town is a vast conspiracy to mislead foreigners. You have to use
century-old little practices and tricks.
     
    1. First of all, never
build a street straight. The English love privacy and do not want to see one
end of the street from the other end. Make sudden curves in the streets and
build them S-shaped too; the letters L, T, V, Y, W and O are also becoming
increasingly popular. It would be a fine tribute to the Greeks to build a few φ and θ -shaped streets; it would be an ingenious compliment to the
Russians to favour the shape Я , and I am sure the Chinese would be more
than flattered to see some 樽 -shaped thoroughfares.
    2. Never build the houses
of the same street in a straight line. The British have always been a
freedom-loving race and the ‘freedom to build a muddle’ is one of their most
ancient civic rights.
    3. Now there are further
camouflage possibilities in the numbering of houses. Primitive continental
races put even numbers on one side, odd numbers on the other, and you always
know that small numbers start from the north or west. In England you have this
system, too; but you may start numbering your houses at one end, go up to a
certain number on the same side, then continue on the other side, going back in
the opposite direction.
    You may leave out some
numbers if you are superstitious; and you may continue the numbering in a side
street; you may also give the same number to two or three houses.
    But this is far from the
end. Many people refuse to have numbers altogether, and they choose names. It
is very pleasant, for instance, to find a street with three hundred and fifty
totally similar bungalows and look for ‘The Bungalow’. Or to arrive in a street
where all the houses have a charming view of a hill and try to find ‘Hill
View’. Or search for ‘Seven Oaks’ and find a house with three apple-trees.
    4. Give a different name to
the street whenever it