Mustn't Grumble

This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land - society

I know that as one year comes to an end and another is about to commence there is a tendency for magisterial surveys of past events and predictions for the future.

As this is above my pay grade I am instead focusing on a new found conviction that the very core of British life can be summed up by the words: ‘mustn’t grumble’.

The central irony here is that grumbling is a much loved British pastime, so the brave assertion that one must not grumble is in not to be taken at face value but is better understood as a coping mechanism allowing the nation to achieve a degree of world beating stoicism.

This may be obvious to you but it’s taken me a while to work this out. My excuse is that I’ve been away from the country of my birth for over three decades and since returning have undergone a sharp learning curve to achieve reintegration. In the process I was not surprised by the fact that things have changed but by how much has not changed.

The weather is a good example, despite global warming it’s still largely miserable for most of the year. Predictable outbreaks of snow, rain and high winds continue to cause high levels of disruption. I suppose it’s not worth taking measures to prevent this happening because otherwise the great British public would be deprived of their constitutional right to express surprise over the disobliging nature of the weather. The way we cope with our wretched weather is to talk about it endlessly, mumbling, often in unison:  ‘it could be worse…mustn’t grumble’.

Another great coping mechanism is British cynicism. Displayed at its best in the way that staff respond to criticism of their company’s services. In most other parts of the world folk at the sharp end of these benighted enterprises tell you how sorry they are for whatever it is that their employers have done, but here in The Land of the Dissatisfied, you are quite likely to hear a staff member agreeing with you about the terribleness of their employers. ‘They’re like that’, they say, note deft use of the third person plural excluding the word ‘we’. So there’s no point in complaining.

But we are allowed to complain about the poor, who are always with us. Indeed it seems that there are more of them sleeping on streets and generally displaying degrees of misery that would be better confined behind closed doors. I am not entirely convinced by the idea advanced by the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman that this is a ‘lifestyle choice’. In the unlikely event that she’s proved to be wrong, maybe the best course of action is to ignore the problem because it is so intractable.

Harder to ignore is the acrid waft of urine swirling around places like car parks, lifts and stairways. Maybe this is a case of sensory preference or possibly a major incontinence issue for which Ms Braverman no doubt has a solution but we mustn’t grumble because bad odours are a way of life.

It is not just the sense of smell that is assailed by unsavoury odours there is also the extraordinary level of mess on public transportation where buses and railway carriages are festooned with litter and spillages. Choosing where to sit can be a perilous business, assuming seating is an option. Having lived so long in a place where eating and drinking on public transport is banned, I had quite forgotten about this problem but have learned not to grumble because, well because, it’s all part of the rich tapestry…

Less easy to block out is the way that religion gets dragged into Christmas. In Hong Kong, where I lived, there was little pretence that Christmas was about anything other than business. The festive season meant shopping malls filled with artificial snow, saccharine pipped music and the comforting bustle of commerce. No need to bang on about it being a season of goodwill, requiring the laughable notion of peace on earth. In Britain, where a majority of people have given up Christianity, we still insist on finding a deeper meaning for Christmas.

Frankly this kind of stubborn optimism is annoying but there are a great many other things to be optimistic about. Most of it seems to involve food now available in a variety and quality that I could not have envisaged as a teenager dazzled by the culinary excellence of Wimpey Bars. And then there’s coffee, who knew back then that it did not have to powdered?

Finally, and verging on the magisterial, I take issue with the chorus of complaints about the British system of government. People seem to get over exercised by ministers and parliamentarians getting caught up in money and sex scandals, who lie as they breathe and can be corrupted for insufficiently impressive sums of money. Get real, the British do not have an exclusive franchise on bad political behaviour and I am unconvinced that their behaviour has got much worse. What’s really changed has been the way these misdemeanours are now being revealed in toe curling detail. Most importantly, the rinky-dink system of government here is infinitely preferable to the growing authoritarian nightmare I left behind in Hong Kong. So, be thankful, it could, like the weather, be worse.