Watching the English

by Kate Fox

If an English person’s dog bites you, you must have provoked it;

If our pet takes against someone, even if we have no reason at all to dislike the person, we trust the animal’s superior insight and become wary and suspicious.

And pets can act as mediators or facilitators even in more established relationships:

lewder

zealous

the quickest way to an English person’s heart, no matter what their class, is through their pet.

We all have testosterone-fuelled adolescent and post-adolescent males to deal with, and we all deal with them by trying to channel their potentially destructive aggression and other disruptive tendencies into relatively harmless sports and games.

Aunt Sally, wellie-throwing, shove ha’penny, marrow-dangling, conger-cuddling and Wetton Toe Wrestling.

It has been said that if moaning were an Olympic sport, the English would win all the gold medals.

Dress is essentially a form of communication – one could even call it a social skill – so perhaps it should not be surprising to find that the socially challenged English are not terribly good at it.

so let’s join a subculture and all be eccentric in the same way, together. That way, we get the best of both worlds: the excitement of rebellion and the comfort of conformity. A delightfully English compromise. And only a tiny bit hypocritical, really.

‘townies’, ‘scallies’, ‘oiks’, ‘yobs’, ‘pikeys’ or ‘plebs’ – or, of course, the now ubiquitous ‘chavs’.

George at Asda or Tu at Sainsbury’s