More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘pikeys
Tony Blair’s New Labour,
C2DEs
This is because when you are surfing, Googling, blogging, tweeting or gaming you really are giving a gadget – an inanimate object – priority over your human companions.
The only exception to this rule is when the internet is used to look something up as part of the conversation –
Taking a call will certainly cause less offence if you say, ‘I’m so sorry, but I really have to take this,’ and
aloofness
pantomime
Ingmar Bergman film
liminal
banter.
tacit
hindrance.
(belligerent
(mock-outraged
(ditto
earnestness
when we depart from convention we do so in a controlled, orderly manner.
social inhibition might be among the defining characteristics of Englishness.
‘polite egalitarianism’.
snooty,
pruning and weeding.
gawp
haughtily
crockery.
‘bogside reading’
commuters
The English do not like extremism, in politics or any other sphere:
No need to worry about what to wear, whether to make eye contact, whether to shake hands or kiss cheeks or just smile. No awkward pauses or embarrassing false starts; no need to fill uncomfortable silences with weather-speak; no polite procrastinating or tea-making or other displacement activity; no need for the usual prolonged goodbyes.
express themselves more freely, with less reserve, in cyberspace than in what they invariably call ‘real life’ encounters:
hedonistic,
Most of the shopping we do is ‘provisioning’ – buying the mundane necessities of life
(one woman asked, ‘Do you mean the baked-beans-and-nappies sort of shopping or the girly-day-out sort?’
teleological:
Among anxious heterosexuals, it is tacitly understood that only gay men – and a few ultra-politically-correct, New Man, feminist types – take pride in their shopping skills.
‘klutzing out’ –
“Well, it’s made of tomatoes, isn’t it?” So I go, “Yes, but it’s not much bloody use in a salad!” Men! Typical!’ The man positively glowed with pride, laughing delightedly at this confirmation of his virility.
Moan Options
The ‘bling’ culture is not so much an exception as a deliberate challenge to mainstream rules of Englishness;
mainstream bling is no longer about displaying wealth.
The more secure, less class-anxious upper-middles will even boast about this, in much the same way as they display their charity-shop purchases with an air of virtuous pride.
means of drawing attention to their secure higher-class status.
soppy
Have you seen how we treat people? It would be unthinkable to be so cold and unfriendly to an animal.
No wonder animals are so important to the English: for many of us, they represent our only significant experience of open, unguarded, emotional involvement with another sentient being.
boisterous
solecism
We grant them all the freedoms that we deny ourselves:
Our pets are our alter egos, or perhaps even the symbolic embodiment of what a psychotherapist would call our ‘inner child’
Our animals represent our wild side; through them, we can express our most un-English tendencies: we can break all the rules, if only by proxy.
