Watching the English

by Kate Fox

Paxman wonders how ‘the English manage to be simultaneously so highly singular, yet to be forever forming clubs and societies: how could the spirit of association and the spirit of exclusion be so highly developed in the same people?’

He seems to accept de Tocqueville’s pragmatic, economic explanation, that the English historically have always formed associations in order to pool resources, when they could not get what they wanted by individual effort – and he also emphasises that joining clubs is very much a matter of individual choice.

I would argue that clubs are more about social needs than practical or economic ones, but I agree that the issue of choice is important. The English are not keen on random, unstructured, spontaneous, street-corner sociability; we are no good at this, and it makes us uneasy. We prefer to socialise in an organised, ordered manner, at specific times and places of our choosing, with rules that we can argue about, an agenda, minutes and a monthly newsletter. Above all, as with sports and games, we need to pretend that the activity of the club or society (flower-arranging, ...

we need props and facilitators to help us engage socially with our fellow humans, to overcome our social dis-ease, and we also need the illusion that we are doing something else, that we have come together for some practical purpose, to pursue a specific shared interest, to pool resources in order to achieve something we could not manage alone.

the real purpose of all these clubs is the social contact and social bonding that we desperately need, but cannot admit to needing, not even to ourselves.

have to admit that I also liked the sense of belonging, the ease of socialising with people with whom I shared an interest or a cause – compared to the awkwardness of trying to make conversation with strangers in public places or at gatherings where the sole purpose is to gather,

They start with the usual English awkward greetings and jokes and some preliminary weather-speak.

The unwritten rules prescribe slightly self-mocking tones when using official meeting-speak terms such as ‘agenda’, ‘minutes’, ‘procedures’ and ‘chairman’, to show one is not taking the thing too seriously, and eye-rolling at the long-winded speeches of the inevitable club bore who does take it all too seriously.

This might seem very odd – why would the English, with their horror of earnestness, elect such tediously earnest people to run so many of their clubs, societies, committees and associations? The answer is simple: these people are often the only ones who are eager to take on all the tiresome admin (which they insist on calling ‘management’) involved in organising meetings, agendas, rotas, minutes, guest speakers and so on – although they adopt a martyrish air about this, and regularly complain that no one appreciates all their hard work.

If you’ve seen one meeting of an English club or society, you’ve seen them all. Even

Nearly a third of the adult population are ‘regulars’, visiting the pub at least once a week, in some cases treating their ‘local’ almost as a second home.

I talk about ‘the pub’ as though they were all the same, but nowadays there is a bewildering variety of different types: student pubs, youth pubs, theme pubs, family pubs, gastro-pubs, sports pubs – as well as a number of other kinds of drinking-places such as café-bars and wine bars. Much fuss

Pubs aren’t what they used to be. It’s all trendy bars now, you can’t find a proper traditional pub. The country’s going to the dogs. The end of the world is nigh, or at least a lot nigher than it was.

The usual nostalgic moaning. The usual premature obituaries (I mean this quite literally: there was a book published about twenty years ago entitled The Death of the English Pub: I

It is true that a number of village pubs are struggling, and increasing numbers in smaller villages have had to close, which is very sad, as a village is not really a proper village without a pub.

We have the same problem with the

Death of the Village Shop: everyone wants to save their village shop; they just don’t particularly want to shop there. The usual English hypocrisies.

But the English pub, as an institution, as a micro-society, is still alive and well. And still governed by a stable...