I left Cape Town on Friday in the very capable hands of some twenty-plus degree weather and an air of pre-summer optimism. Twenty-five hours later (thanks, Emirates routing), I pulled my swollen ankles and even more swollen suitcase onto the mean streets of Bournemouth and gazed expectantly at the sky.
Raining.
Previous to this, every Brit on the plane with me had queued up obediently in the same line at Passport control. I walked past the line straight to the open window of the neighbouring, queueless waiting official. “You British?” he asked. I handed over my passport. “It’s just that I’m going to ‘ave to check that; every bleedin’ day the sheep stick to the left and I ‘ave to call ‘em over. You can’t be that British.”
After satisfying himself that, for the purposes of entry, I was ‘British enough’, he asked me what I was coming over to do. I thought briefly about saying my chief purpose was finding his lost glottal stops, but wisely stuck to the generic ‘holiday’ and he waved me on.
You might think, from reading this, that I’m not having a good time.
You’d be wrong.
There are very few things I find as uplifting as being immersed in a good, comfortable chav culture. Give me self deprecating humour any day, pass a little moody with the mayonnaise.
If Americans are a nation of irrepressible Tiggers, Brits are all-Eeyore. We’re* a cynical nation of moaners, true, but take away our thistles for dinner and we wouldn’t be very pleased. There’s a special delight that’s reserved for the dry, a merriment in the maudlin. We do depression and we do it very, very well. Lost the Ashes again? Chin up, old chap. Rebekah Brooks paddling the NOTW up shit creek? All in a day’s work.
I cannot tell you, for example, how gleeful it makes me to spend a weekend in a town where the local shop’s cheery window displays picture an orthopaedic skeleton pushing a motorised shopping vehicle. It makes my day when I trot past the local chippy and Turkish takeaway and get to the classy strip, where – in a fit of culture clash meeting irony blindness – they’ve seen fit to name the most expensive restaurant ‘Alcatraz Brasserie’. I almost lose my nut when I flick through the telly guide and see the ‘must watch’ page leading with a show described as ‘an animated journey of the history of the cabbage’.
So let the yanks be endlessly and painfully chipper, let the French rolls their eyes together with their r’s. There’s something rather magnificent about the mundane. You only have to look at the chav skills of riding the seaside entertainment ponies with fizzy pink candyfloss stick in one hand and can of Guinness in the other, to realise that the nation is in safe hands. That’s skill, mate. Mad skill.
* I know I use ‘we’. Don’t be offended, I’m proudly SA too. But, as a SABrit. I reckon I can use ‘we’ indiscriminately until someone finally lets me vote.
