Understanding the British: A hilarious guide from Apologising to Wimbledon

by Adam Fletcher

Dad sinods (an innovative mixture of both a sigh and a nod, perfected over several decades of marriage).

He compares the potential inconvenience of being murdered with the relief of never having to do another of her chores again.

we too live on a tiny, overcrowded island. Except on ours, water keeps falling uninvited from the sky;

this is being British: doing what’s right, even if everyone loses in the process.

I’m solving the problem, she’d think. She is the problem, everyone else would think.

Faffing is the art of doing nothing, badly. We’re excellent at it.

“Oh my god, this message,” Julia said, pinching her forehead. “It was the length of War and Peace. But just full of peace. Oh, and about a dozen sorries. The actual request was in there, somewhere, but it was like she went looking for a haystack of niceties to hide it in.”

She confirms as if this makes perfect sense, is just another Saturday.

The British are into foreign languages in much the same way squirrels are into yachting.

Margaret Thatcher took elocution lessons just to be able to express all the awful things she wanted to do to our society in RP. Almost no one speaks it. It’s like the Atlantis of British accents. However, thanks to the BBC World Service, Hugh Grant romcoms, study-English CDs, and Monty Python, it has become the default accent deluded foreign types expect us to have.

The average Brit speaks English as if she’s talking through a muddy shoe. We take pride in speaking a bastard gutter-ghetto English, a messy swamp of slang and idioms and sticky swear words and lazy, lumpy pronunciation.

It was quite a shock. I was one of only two native English speakers in the company, so other departments would send me English texts for correction. That lasted two weeks, until they noticed I had no idea how the English language worked. I sent their creations back with more mistakes than they’d had when I received them. They began sending the texts to the Scandinavian team instead. They spoke such lovely English, after all.

“Ya know wot I’m sayin’?” (Not really. I think I got distracted by how bad you are at saying it.)

“I told him wot for!” (Why? Were you attempting to confuse him?)

“I’m not being funny.” (Well why the hell not? This is Britain. If we wanted a serious conversation, we’d go to France.)

If there were an Olympics for profanity, you’d not get Team GB off the podium. We’d leave with more gold than a rapper’s mouth.

The air in our pubs is one colour—blue.

A chip butty is a baffling carbception.

It’s like eating joy that’s been sequestered in silk and slathered with love.

Along with its distinctive taste, it’s most known for its tag line: “You either love it or hate it.” Which conveniently forgets that there are other options, such as, “It will kill you before you’ve formed a firm opinion.”

does succeed in confusing the body with a sharp attack of syrupy distraction. It simply WTFs it. The body goes from being mad at you to being too confused to form any strong conclusions right now.

If you’ve seen the zombie-apocalypse movie 28 Days Later, you’ll have some idea of what it was like. 3 pints later, they should have called it.

charades, where you’re reduced to describing things with your body parts, like a pop-culture cheerleader.

The Internet—always a bastion of truth in a world of Donald Trump—informs

let’s face it: we’ve all “had enough of experts . . .”

London has everything you could possibly want, buried below six feet of all the things that you don’t: congestion, pollution, crime, extortionate prices, chavs, low-quality housing,