How to be a Brit

again the question he had asked a
million times in thirty-seven years ‘Did you enjoy your meal, sir?’
    My friend replied: ‘Not at
all. It was lousy.’
    The manager bowed with his
customary, obsequious smile: ‘Thank you very much, sir.’
    And moved on, satisfied.

BANK HOLIDAYS
     
     
    It is the sign of
a poor society that it has too many holidays. A poor society is often a
religious society: it has given up all hope that the government will improve
its lot so it puts its hope in God. England used to have five holidays per
annum and that was that. Then she added New Year’s Day because of the
prevailing ‘absenteeism’ on that day: nobody worked in any case. Soon there was
talk in some places of making Wednesday afternoons holidays, too: everyone
slipped away to watch football matches, so nobody worked in any case. Then
England started messing about with substitute, supplementary and compensatory
holidays. When Christmas Day and Boxing Day fell on Saturday and Sunday, the
Government decided that the following Monday was Christmas Day and Tuesday
Boxing Day. (Jesus was not born on December 25 in any case; and what has modern
Christmas to do with Jesus?) When New Year’s Day fell on a Saturday (as in
1977), Monday January 3 became a holiday, because what will the poor worker
gain from being an absentee, whether official or not, on a day when he would
have been absent anyway? There’d be no fun in it. In 1976-77 Christmas plus New
Year lasted for two weeks, and this is only the dawn of the shape of things to
come.
    The world looks at Britain
askance. Why don’t they work? Why don’t they, at least, pretend to work? The
world, as usual, does not understand. We, the noble British, have three
excellent reasons for acting as we do: because we are 1, realists; 2, moral;
and 3, practical.
    1. As we are a poor nation
we behave like a poor nation. We are neither snobbish (not in that way) nor
pretentious — so why act like a rich nation? Other poor nations have a lot of
holidays, so we shall have lots and lots of holidays. We shall stop work as
often as possible and become poorer still. We must be modest and give the
Germans and other industrious blokes the chance of working hard, becoming
richer and making the money we want to borrow from them.
    2. We are moral. We hate
absenteeism and the lies it involves. One way of curing theft is to make it
legal. One way of decreasing the number of violent sexual crimes is to permit
rape. One way of disposing of the nasty, dishonest habit of absenteeism is to
let employees off altogether.
    3. The final reason is
purely practical and based on sound economic assessment. Whether we work or not
makes hardly any difference. So it is only sensible to save electricity, coal,
administration, fares and effort.

     

BUSES
     
     
    Bus drivers still play the
happy games described in How to be an Alien (available in all the better
bookshops). But the buses have become much more sociable than they used to be.
    Nowadays they travel in
groups of three. You have to wait forty or fifty minutes for a bus, but then
you get three at a time, so you are amply compensated. It always makes me feel
happy and prosperous whenever I travel in three buses at one and the same time.
    Bus crews, on the other
hand, explain that they must travel in groups of three, to protect
themselves against the wrath and lynching mood of the public. ‘But why should
the public be so angry?’ — I asked. ‘Because we always travel in groups of
three.’

HOW TO GET LOST IN LONDON
     
     
    Measures to confuse the
foreigner and drive him to despair have developed greatly in the last thirty
years, largely in the shape of new one-way streets and forbidden turnings
either to the left or right. There are parts of London which even the native no
longer tries to approach by car. But these methods are employed with much
ingenuity in other countries as well, so I will confine this chapter to the
results of my continuing research into the long-established and specifically
English tricks which I first touched on thirty years ago.
    1. Some streets, like Walm
Lane in Cricklewood or Farm Lane in Fulham, take a ninety-degree turn and thus
become their own side streets. If you continue straight along Walm Lane (coming
from Shoot Up Hill) you will in fact be in another street; in order to stay in
Walm Lane you have to turn sharp left.
    2. As a number of cunning
foreigners were learning how to find their way about in spite of all