Good Old Blightey

When you say you’re spending the year in Lebanon most people either look at you like you’ve just joined an al-Qaeda training camp and hug their children close to them lest they should be moved to similar lunacies, or, oblivious to Lebanon’s history, smile and say “ooh how lovely” assuming some sort of far off summer resort where floppy hats and espadrilles are the order of the day.  The truth of course is neither.  But then if you’ve been reading this blog previously, you’ve already got a fair picture of the Lebanon I’ve been getting to know.  Here instead is a blog about life abroad in England.

True, I’m English.  But as anyone who spends any reasonably long period out of the company of their compatriots will have experienced, its very easy to distort your memories of the “green and pleasant land” so that they centre around good gin and tonics, tea and rain.  I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that these were not fundamental pillars of English culture, I aim only to humbly point to some of the other less advertised but equally important elements of life on our little island, tiny but Great.

First off there is the infinite use of politeness to complete strangers.  In Lebanon people are polite to their friends and pretty curt with everyone else; in England we take the opposite approach. If someone sells you something in England you must say “thank you” (did you not buy the item? Or did the unenthusiastic teenager at the till decide to offer you that pack of cigarettes “on him?”). The unenthusiastic teenager in question is then also obliged to thank the customer (did he donate the money? No.) If you walk down a narrow corridor and only just avoid crashing into someone else walking the other way, both parties must apologise (was it either’s fault that you both chose this trajectory? Was it a one-way corridor??) And yet if your best mate calls you up and yells down the phone by way of greeting “wa***rrrrrrrrrr”, or “slaggyyyyy” do you bat an eye-lid?

And then there are the “middle-aged”. Ahh the middle-aged. Its true, every country has them in greater or lesser proportions, but it is the particular way that this irreplaceable cog of our nation describes the world it inhabits that so reminds me of home. There’s that tendency to precede all statements with “I think you’ll find…” and all orders with “love, perhaps you should….” Then there’s the inclination to entrust to men the task of assembling and mending all manner of household items while standing over them telling them what a poor job they are doing but not lifting one finger to help because “oh, it’s an estate matter.” And finally there is the most unusual habit of discussing wall colours using mysteriously obscure descriptions which turn out to be names in the Dulex range. Our TV room is apparently the colour of an elephant’s breath.  No Lebanese person ever claimed to me that their room is the colour of the exhaled gas of any large mammal, although there are still 4 months to go…

And most of all there’s the language.  International language of business English may have become, but no-one uses it like the British.  Nowhere else in the world can you “go to the loo”, “pootle on”, “murder a sarnie” or “snuggle down to Corrie with a brew.”  Nowhere else might things be “lush”, “safe”, “hunky-dory” or “rough” ‘cos you got “lashed” down the pub.

And as a sidenote, I mean Pub, not “bar masquerading as a pub”. If you can get a mojito it is not a pub.

Britain is not Britain because of the tea (although gooood GOD that tea tastes good after a few months away), nor is it Britain because of the phone boxes or the beef-eaters at Buckingham palace.  Britain is Britain for all its love of all things NOT American, for the tune to the Archers being whistled by an old lady getting off a bus, for the pleases, sorry’s and thank you’s that stumble forth at any opportunity, senseless though it may be.  Britain is Britain for the people, not just the middle class with their Dulux vernacular, but also the chavs and the preppies, the starving aristocrats and the reviled “new money.” I may feel a weeny bit foreign coming home but it’s good to be back for a bit. Cheerio for now love.