This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land, part two

Learning about Britain from a Hungarian, shunning objectivity and seeing what goes around, comes around

Having borrowed the title of this Substack from Willian Blake I need to acknowledge that this whole exercise is very much inspired by the incomparable George Mikes whose seminal work, How to be an Alien, first published in 1946, provided a guide to British life through the eyes of a foreigner who had the temerity to display not only a total command of English but an unnervingly deep understanding of his new home within just a few years of arriving. Mikes, who by unfortunate coincidence died in 1987, the year I left Britain, was, of course, a Hungarian. The of course refers to the fact that Hungarians are notoriously ubiquitous and tend to be promiscuously multi-lingual.

Back in 1946 Mikes observed that ‘a criminal might improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot improve. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. There is no way out for him. He may become British; he can never become English’. I, however, am not a goddam foreigner so foolishly assumed that I had something of an advantage over Mikes.

Like Mikes I am also firmly committed to be being subjective. Do not expect objectivity here because I tend to be suspicious of writers who claim to be ever so objective. These lofty protestations of dispassion are found at their most pompous in the grand newspapers that litter American newsstands and are enshrined in the proliferation of university journalism courses.

Anyway what’s the fun of solemnly confining yourself to allegedly objective and factual information? The most objective writing that I have seen are contained the old telephone directories, but I rather doubt that they provided a source of fascinating reading.

Surely, it’s better to make your prejudices visible to all. Let’s begin with a so called objective example: Where is the best place to live in Britain? According to a survey conducted by The Sunday Times in January 2022 the number one spot was occupied by Stroud. This may or may not be valid but only   for those who like Stroud, as opposed to, say, Woodbridge which was ranked second. The point being that a survey of this kind can only seriously be considered to be objective as long as you agree with the criteria within which it was conducted. 

Personally, I barely know where Stroud is but that’s largely because I used to be a Londoner (the rest of Britain was always a mystery) and have now relocated to St Albans (back then a place I thought of as being in the far North). This fine city is sufficiently close to London to avoid capital-distance-anxiety syndrome while being sufficiently far away to be spared the claustrophobia of living in a major conurbation. Therefore, at least for the time being, I enthusiastically nominate St Albans as the best place to live while not even vaguely expecting anyone in Stroud to agree with me. So, that’s the objectivity test flunked at the first hurdle. Other hurdles will follow.

In addition to scrupulously avoiding objectively I am aware of the danger of viewing Britain through the prism of the ‘in my day’ route or making comparisons on the basis that the past was always better.

Although I have been around for quite some time, I was not around during the apparently halcyon period when Britain ruled the seas, but I did, by virtue of living in Hong Kong, catch the tail end of British colonialism in the most vibrant of its few remaining colonies. It is also true to say that even though Hong Kong was a colony there was much queasiness attached to the use of this ‘c’ word, so I seem to have missed being on the premises when colonialism was considered to be a jolly good thing, although it was surprising that remnants of some of the least edifying aspects of the old order confronted me when I arrived.

Most of these remnants were people. Some were on tattered display in the environs of the snotty Hong Kong Club. Others, I am embarrassed to say, lurked in the recesses of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of which I was not only a member but went on to mistakenly become President. They quickly identified themselves by uttering sentences that began: ‘it’s all changed now and not for the better’.

Missing stuff is often a cause for regret, but I think I was lucky enough, thanks to the exquisite timing of my parents, to have been born exactly the middle of the twentieth century. That meant I grew up with free school milk, which I never drank, free university education that I liked so much that I lingered on for more studies and was around in time for the discovery of sex in the 1960s (the poet Philip Larkin pinpointed 1963 as the kick off date, so I was a bit young to have been there from the very start but just in time to see it develop and did my best to catch up).

I missed the end of World War II by exactly five years but still have in my possession a ration book bearing my name because, remarkably, food rationing continued until 1954 but I can’t say I remember it.

Yet what goes around, comes around because as soon as I got back to Britain in 2021 rationing was again in place due to Covid-induced and Brexit-related shortages. However the government did not install a general rationing regime, preferring to opt for the magnificently British method of haphazardly and arbitrarily contracting out the task to retailers whose frontline staff had the dubious pleasure of dealing with irate members of the British public demanding non-existent supplies of things like toilet rolls, escalating to widespread shortages of key supplies such as game consoles, crisps and chemically enhanced chicken at places such as Nandos and KFC.

As an added bonus I arrived back in time to take part in one of Britain’s greatest and most enduring pastimes––queuing. A true Brit quickly discovers that queuing is like riding  a bicycle, once you know how, you will never forget. I would quibble with the assertion that no other nation queues better because the Covid pandemic taught the world that queues are an equal opportunity global phenomena (except for the rich, obviously). However, the argument is made that Brits do it more stoically than perennially excitable foreigners.

Having seen reports of some nasty outbreaks of non-stoicism on petrol station forecourts I am not so sure this is still the case. That said I joined lines like a trooper and spent many happy hours exchanging woes with fellow queuers who, were in generally good spirits. Being a dog owner (more of which later) also helped wile away the time because talking about the cute and annoying things that dogs do breaks all known forms of ice.

Standby for next week’s seminal insights into some things that have been happening more recently.