How to be a Brit

on every question under the sun (with the simple exception of
dietetics).
    2. If you believe in the
old glories of the Empire, all you have to do is to go to other people’s
meetings, wave rattles, make cat-calls and blow horns. If that does not
convince the world that your ideas on the Empire are sound, nothing will.
    3. If, as a poet of genius,
you are dissatisfied with selling four poems a year and living on a total annual
income of £3.12.6, your course of action is clear. Grow a picturesque
beard, put on a purple robe, prepare two sandwich-boards for yourself, stating: starving poet and fair deal for geniuses ! and start
selling your poems, printed on pillow-cases, in front of a church where a top
social wedding is just being solemnized. Your future will be safe. Your poems
will be in such demand that you will not be able to turn out enough of the
stuff. You will make millions and will continue to be revered as the ‘Starving
Bard in Purple’.
    4. Generally speaking,
organize mass marches, wave banners and sell your memoirs on the slightest
provocation. You may kill someone and — with a little bit of luck — your crime
may pass practically unnoticed in the press, but should you refuse to pay a £1
parking fine and go to prison for your principles (if any) you will find that
your publicity will far outdo anything attained by the late Dr Crippen. Suppose
you have really hit upon the Word, that you have seen the Light and can at last
give us the Creed to save erring humanity, all you have to do is go and dance a
cha-cha-cha in your bare feet for an hour or two in front of the House of
Lords, wearing a turban. The victory of your ideas is assured.
     

     

HOW TO BE FREE
     
    The modern Englishman is
jealous of his civil liberties and rightly so. Modern freedom is an English
invention — or at least an excellent English adaptation of the original Greek.
The ancient and essential liberties are well known to us all; here I only want
to say a few words on the new interpretation of some old ideas:
    1. freedom of speech. You may say whatever you like as long
as you circulate in one copy only. You may go to Hyde Park and say whatever
you fancy (with certain exceptions) as long as you do not appear in duplicate
and are not mass-produced in any shape or form. This is called Freedom of
Speech. The trouble is that it may seem a little hard to rouse millions by
delivering speeches, however eloquent they may be, in Hyde Park. To make any
real impact you would need the Freedom of the Daily Express or the
Freedom of Independent Television. But as none of us (including the Daily
Express or Independent or B.B.C. Television has anything of shattering
importance to say just now, you might as well stick to Hyde Park.
    Modern traffic has produced
a number of new freedoms, unlisted in the old statutes:
    2. the freedom of jay-walking. Englishmen in cars are prepared
up to a point to obey traffic signals; but the very idea that an English
pedestrian should wait for the green light is absolutely outrageous. The
Englishman’s right to walk under the wheels of lorries was secured in Magna
Carta and ours is not the generation to squander such ancient liberties.
    3. THE RIGHT TO REFUSE
BLOOD-TESTS — or breathing tests — is another basic right, in fact, you often
hear people defending themselves by saying that they only had three
whiskies, eight gins and five pints of beer. Anyone who tries to deprive
Englishmen of their right to kill on the road is far worse than a tyrant: he is
a spoil-sport.
    4. Zebra crossings have
produced a peculiar new type of mentality in an increasing number of people.
This has its new correlated freedom: the
right to zebra-cross. If Freud were still alive he would certainly be
able to define this new psychological trait, this zebra-complex. For those
afflicted, life is simply a huge zebra-crossing: as soon as they step into the
arena they expect all movement to come to a standstill and give way to them. In
very bad cases the patient expects people to watch him admiringly and wave to him
with friendly smiles.

IN PRAISE OF TELEVISION
     
    When
I first came
to England, television was still a kind of entertainment and not a national
disease. During the happy war years it was off the air altogether but afterwards
it returned with a vengeance.
    In the early post-war
period, television drew a peculiar dividing line in society. While people
boasted wildly of not being able to afford a half of bitter or a pair of