PRIVACY RULES - PRIVATE AND DOMESTIC PURSUITS

Like 'humour rules', this heading can be read as meaning 'rules of privacy' but also in the graffiti sense of 'Privacy rules, OK!' - conveying the way in which the English obsession with privacy dominates our thinking and governs our behaviour. The easiest way for the English to cope with our social dis-ease is to avoid social interaction altogether, by choosing either leisure activities that can be performed in the privacy of one's own home, or outdoor pursuits that require no significant contact with anyone other than one's immediate family, such as going for a walk, or to the cinema, or shopping - anything that takes place in environments governed by the 'denial rule', which covers almost all public places.

In recent surveys, over half of all the leisure activities mentioned by respondents were of this private/domestic type, and of the top ten pastimes, only two (having friends round for a meal or drinks, and going to the pub) could be unequivocally described as 'sociable'. The most domestic pursuits are the most popular: watching television, listening to the radio, reading, DIY and gardening. Even when the English are being sociable, the survey findings show that most of us would much rather entertain a few close friends or relatives in the safety of our own homes than venture out among strangers.

Homes and Gardens

I have already discussed at some length (in the Home Rules chapter) the English home-fixation and privacy-obsession, but it is worth repeating here my theory that 'home is what the English have instead of social skills'. Our love-affair with our homes and gardens is, I believe, directly related to our obsession with privacy, which in turn is due to our social dis-ease.

Watching television is a universal pastime - nothing uniquely English about this. Nor is there anything peculiarly English about the other main domestic leisure pursuits mentioned here, such as reading, gardening and DIY, or at least not per se. There is, however, something distinctive about the phenomenal extent of their popularity, particularly in the case of DIY and gardening. On any given evening or weekend, in at least half of all English households, someone will be 'improving' the home, with bits of wood or tins of paint, or the garden, by digging or just 'pottering'. In my SIRC colleagues' studies on English DIY habits, only 12 per cent of women and 2 per cent of men said that they never did any DIY. In the latest national census survey, over half of the entire adult male population had been DIYing in the four weeks before the census date. Nearly a third of the female population had also been busily improving their homes, and our obsession with our gardens was equally evident: 52 per cent of all English males and 45 per cent of females had been out there pruning and weeding.

Compare these figures with those for church attendance, and you will find the real national religion. Even among people claiming to belong to a particular religion, only 12 per cent attend religious services every week. The rest of the population can be found every Sunday at their local garden centre or DIY superstore. And when we want a break from obsessing about our own homes and gardens, we go on mini-pilgrimages to gawp at bigger and better houses and gardens, such as the stately homes and gardens opened to the public by the National Trust and the Royal Horticultural Society. Visiting grand country houses consistently ranks as one of the most popular national pastimes. This is not at all surprising, as these places have everything an English person could wish for in a Sunday outing: not just inspiration for home and garden improvements ('Oooh, look, that's just the sort of pinky-beige colour I was thinking of for our lounge!') and indulgence in class-obsession and general nosiness, but also reassuring queues, refreshing cups of tea, and a sense that the whole thing must be virtuously educational - or at least a lot more so than going to the DIY store or garden centre - because it is, after all, 'historic'.45 This little puritanical streak, this need to show that one's leisure activities are more than just mindless consumerist pleasure-seeking, is most evident among the middle classes; the working classes and upper classes are generally more open and honest in their consumption of pleasure, being less fussily concerned about what others might think of them.

Television Rules

Those who do worry about such things can take comfort from the research findings showing that we are not, in fact, a nation of telly-addicted couch potatoes. At first glance, survey figures tend to give a rather misleading impression: television-watching appears to be by far the most popular domestic leisure pursuit, with 99 per cent of the population recorded as regular viewers. But when we note how the survey questions are phrased - 'which of these things have you done in the past month?' - the picture changes. After all, it would be hard, in the space of an entire month, not to switch on the news occasionally, at least. Ticking the 'yes' box for television does not necessarily mean that one has been glued to the set every night.

We do watch quite a lot of television - the national average is about three to three and a half hours a day - but television cannot be said to be killing the art of conversation. In the same survey, 97 per cent of respondents had also entertained or visited friends or relations in the past month. I am also always somewhat sceptical about television viewing figures, ever since I was involved in a research project in which a team of psychologists installed video cameras in ordinary people's sitting rooms to monitor how much television they watched and how they behaved while watching. I was only a lowly assistant researcher on this study; my job was to watch the videotapes with a stopwatch and time exactly how long our hapless subjects actually looked at the television screen, as well as making notes on anything else they might be doing, such as having sex or picking their noses. The subjects all filled in forms every day, saying what programmes they had seen and estimating how much of each programme they had actually watched.

The differences between their estimates and the reality, as clocked by my stopwatch, showed that when people tell a survey researcher that they spent an evening, or an hour, 'watching television', it is highly likely that they were doing no such thing. What they often mean is that they had the television on while they chatted with family or friends, played with the dog, read the newspaper, squabbled over the remote, gossiped on the telephone, cut their toenails, nagged their spouse, cooked and ate supper, fell asleep, did the ironing and hoovering, shouted at their children and so on, perhaps occasionally glancing at the television screen.

There are also, of course, people who grossly under-estimate the amount of television they watch, but they are usually lying, unlike our study participants who were at least trying to be accurate. The sort of people who claim that they 'never watch television' are usually trying to convince you that they are somehow morally and/or intellectually superior to the lumpen masses who have nothing better to do than 'goggle at hours of mindless rubbish' every night. You are most likely to find this attitude among middle-aged, middle-class males, suffering from the same class-insecurities as those who sneer at Mercedes drivers. This anti-telly posturing always strikes me as a particularly irrational affectation in England, where we have what is generally acknowledged to be the best television in the world, and there really is something worth watching almost every day, even for those with haughtily highbrow tastes.

For the rest of us ordinary mortals, television seems to promote the art of conversation, providing the socially challenged English with yet another much-needed 'prop'. In a recent survey, television programmes came out as the most common topic of conversation among friends and family, even more popular than moans about the cost of living. Television is second only to The Weather as a facilitator of sociable interaction among the English. It is something we all have in common. When in doubt, or when we have run out of weather-speak starters and fillers, we can always ask: 'Did you see...?' With only five terrestrial channels, the likelihood is that many of us will have watched at least some of the same recent programmes. And despite the relatively high quality of English television, we can nearly always find something to share a good moan about.

Soap Rules

Our social inhibitions and obsession with privacy are also reflected in the kind of television programmes we make and watch, particularly our soap operas. The most popular English television soap operas are highly unusual, utterly different from those of any other country. The plots, themes and storylines may be very similar - the usual mix of adultery, violence, death, incest, unwanted pregnancies, paternity disputes and other improbable incidents and accidents - but only in England does all this take place entirely among ordinary, plain-looking, working-class people, often middle-aged or old, doing menial or boring jobs, wearing cheap clothes, eating beans and chips, drinking in scruffy pubs and living in realistically small, pokey, unglamorous houses.

American soaps or 'daytime dramas' are aimed at the same lower-class audience as our EastEnders and Coronation Street46 (you can tell the market from the kind of products advertised in the breaks), but the characters and their settings and lifestyles are all middle class, glamorous, attractive, affluent and youthful. They are all lawyers and doctors and successful entrepreneurs, beautifully groomed and coiffed, leading their dysfunctional family lives in immaculate, expensive houses, and having secret meetings with their lovers in smart restaurants and luxurious hotels. Virtually all soaps throughout the rest of the world are based on this 'aspirational' American model. Only the English go in for gritty, kitchen-sink, working-class realism. Even the Australian soaps, which come closest, are glamorous by comparison with the grim and grubby English ones. Why is this? Why do millions of ordinary English people want to watch soaps about ordinary English people just like themselves, people who might easily be their next-door neighbours?

The answer, I think, lies partly in the empiricism and realism47 that are so deeply rooted in the English psyche, and our related qualities of down-to-earthness and matter-of-factness, our stubborn obsession with the real, concrete and factual, our distaste for artifice and pretension. If Pevsner were to write today on 'The Englishness of English Soap Opera', I think he would find the same eminently English 'preference for the observed fact and personal experience', 'close observation of what is around us' and 'truth and its everyday paraphernalia' in EastEnders and Coronation Street that he found in Hogarth, Constable and Reynolds.

But this is not sufficient explanation. The Swiss painter Fuseli may have been correct in his observation that our 'taste and feelings all go to realities' but the English are quite capable of appreciating much less realistic forms of art and drama; it is only in soap opera that we differ so markedly from the rest of the world, demanding a mirror held up to reflect our own ordinariness. My hunch is that this peculiar taste is somehow closely connected to our obsession with privacy, our tendency to keep ourselves to ourselves, to go home, shut the door and pull up the drawbridge. I have discussed this privacy-fixation in some detail in earlier chapters, and suggested that a corollary of it is our extreme nosiness, which is only partially satisfied by our incessant gossiping. There is a forbidden-fruit effect operating here: the English privacy rules mean that we tend to know very little about the personal lives and doings of people outside our immediate circle of close friends and family. It is not done to 'wash one's dirty linen in public', nor is it acceptable to ask the kind of personal questions that would elicit any such washing.

So we do not know what our neighbours get up to behind their closed doors (unless they are so noisy that we have already complained to the police and the local council about them). When a murder is committed in an average English street, the response from neighbours questioned by the police or journalists is always the same: 'Well, we didn't really know them...', 'They kept themselves to themselves...', 'They seemed pleasant enough...', 'We mind our own business, round here...', 'A bit odd, but one doesn't like to pry, you know...' Actually, we would dearly love to pry; we are a nation of insatiably curious curtain-twitchers, constantly frustrated by the draconian nature of our unwritten privacy rules. The clue to the popularity of kitchen-sink soap operas is in the observation that soap-opera characters are 'people who might easily be our next-door neighbours'. Watching soaps such as EastEnders and Coronation Street is like being allowed to peer through a spyhole into the hidden, forbidden, private lives of our neighbours, our social peers - people like us, but about whom we can normally only guess and speculate. The addictive appeal of these soaps lies in their vicarious satisfaction of this prurient curiosity: soaps are a form of voyeurism. And of course they confirm all of our worst suspicions about what goes on behind our neighbours' firmly closed doors and impenetrable net curtains: adultery, alcoholism, wife-beating, shoplifting, drug-dealing, AIDS, teenage pregnancy, murder... The soap-opera families are 'people like us', but they are making an even more spectacularly dysfunctional mess of their lives than we are.

So far, I have only mentioned the most popular English soaps - which are the unequivocally working-class ones: EastEnders and Coronation Street. But our television producers are a shrewd and kindly lot, and do their best to provide soaps catering to each layer of the English class system, and even to different demographic groups within these layers. EastEnders and Coronation Street represent, respectively, the southern and northern urban working classes. Emmerdale is one or two social notches up from these, with a number of significant lower-middle and middle-class characters, and also rural rather than urban. Hollyoaks is essentially a more youthful, teenage, suburban version of EastEnders, deviating somewhat from the warts-and-all norm in actually featuring some attractive-looking characters, although they are still dressed in realistically cheap high-street fashions. Even the middle- to upper-middles occasionally get their own soaps: for a while there was This Life, featuring a group of well-spoken but neurotic thirtysomething lawyers. They were fairly attractive and smartly dressed, but they did not, like American soap characters, wake up in the morning with their faces immaculately made-up and hair perfectly blow-dried; their (frequent) drunkenness was convincingly vomitous; their rows and squabbles involved a believable amount of swearing; and they had dirty dishes in the sink.

Sit-com Rules

Much the same warty-realism rules apply to English situation-comedy programmes. Almost all English sit-coms are about 'losers' - unsuccessful people, doing unglamorous jobs, having unsatisfactory relationships, living in, at best, dreary suburban houses. They are mostly working class or lower-middle class, but even the more well-off characters are never successful high-flyers. The heroes - or rather, anti-heroes, the characters we laugh at - are all failures.

This has caused a few problems in the export market: when popular English sit-coms such as Men Behaving Badly are 'translated' for the American market, the original English characters are often found to be too low-class, too unsuccessful, too unattractive, too crude - and generally just a bit too uncomfortably real. In the American versions, they are given job promotions, more regular features, better hair, smarter clothes, more glamorous girlfriends, more up-market houses and lifestyles. Their disgusting habits are toned down, and their language is sanitized along with their bathrooms and kitchens.48

This is not to say that there are no losers in American sit-coms: there are losers, but they tend to be a better class of loser; less irredeemably hopeless, squalid, grubby and unappealing than the English variety. One or two of the characters in Friends, for example, do not have glamorous careers, but nor do they ever have a hair out of place; they may get fired from their jobs, but perfect features and perfect tans must be some consolation. There is only one long-running, successful American sit-com, Roseanne, that comes close to the degree of realistic kitchen-sink seediness that is the norm in English television, and that is demanded by the empiricist, down-to-earth, cynical, prurient, curtain-twitching English audience, who want to see Pevsner's 'truth and its everyday paraphernalia' in their sit-coms as well as their soap-operas.

I am not trying to claim here that English comedies are necessarily better or more subtle or more sophisticated than American ones or anyone else's. If anything, the humour in most English sit-coms is rather less subtle and sophisticated than the Americans', and usually considerably more childish, crude and silly. In everyday life and conversation, I would maintain that the English do have a keener and more subtle sense of humour than most other nations, and this mastery of wit, irony and understatement is also evident in a few of our television comedy productions - but there are still a vast number in which farting and saying 'arse' a lot, or indeed virtually anything to do with bottoms, is regarded as the pinnacle of hilarious repartee.

We may legitimately pride ourselves on the sparkling wit of programmes such as Yes, Minister, and the English are undeniably brilliant at spoof and satire (we should be, it's what we do instead of getting angry and having revolutions), but let's not forget that we are also responsible for Benny Hill and the Carry On films, which differ from bog-standard sexual Euro-slapstick (and its American, Australian and Japanese equivalents) only in their excessive reliance on bad puns, double-entendres and innuendo - a measure of the English love of words, I suppose, but otherwise not much to our credit. Monty Python is in a different class from these, both socially and verbally, but it is still rather a childish, schoolboy form of humour.

The important question, it seems to me, is not whether our comedies are better or worse than other nations', or cleverer, or cruder, but whether they have some distinctive common theme or characteristic that might tell us something about Englishness. I've worked on this question long and hard, consulted quite a few comedy writers and other experts, dutifully watched dozens of television sit-coms, satires, spoofs and stand-ups - and thoroughly annoyed all my family and friends by insisting on calling this 'research'. But I did eventually arrive at an answer: as far as I can tell, almost all of the cruder type of English television comedy, as well as much of the more sophisticated, is essentially about that perennial English pre-occupation: embarrassment.

Embarrassment is a significant element in other nations' television comedy as well - and perhaps in all comedy - but the English seem to have a greater potential for embarrassment than other cultures, to experience it more often, and to be more constantly anxious and worried about it. We tend to make jokes about the things that frighten us (we humans, that is, not just we English), and the English have an unusually acute fear of embarrassment, so it is not terribly surprising that so much of our comedy should deal with this theme. To the socially challenged English, almost any social situation is potentially highly embarrassing, so we have a particularly rich source of comic material to play with. In the field of situation-comedy, we do not even have to invent odd or unlikely 'situations' to produce the necessary embarrassment: many of our sit-coms have no 'sit' to speak of, unless you count 'an average suburban family going about its uneventful life' (My Family, 2.4 Children, Butterflies, etc.) or 'ordinary boring days in the life of an ordinary boring office' (The Office), or even 'an average working-class family sitting around watching television' (The Royle Family), and yet they seem to generate quite enough amusingly embarrassing moments. I could be wrong, but I suspect that it would be very hard to 'pitch' these as great sit-com ideas in any other country.49

'Reality-TV' Rules

So-called 'reality TV' provides yet more evidence, if any were needed, of English social inhibitions, and what a psychotherapist would probably call our 'privacy issues'. Reality-TV bears little resemblance to what any sane person would regard as 'reality', as it generally involves putting people in bizarre, highly improbable situations and getting them to compete with each other in the performance of utterly ludicrous tasks. The people, however, are 'real', in the sense that they are not trained actors but ordinary unsuccessful mortals, distinguished only by their desperate desire to appear on television. Reality-TV is by no means a uniquely English or British phenomenon. The most famous and popular of these programmes, Big Brother, originated in Holland, and many other countries now have their own version, making it an ideal example for cross-cultural comparison. The format is quite simple. Twelve participants are selected from the many thousands who apply, and put together in a specially constructed house, where they live for nine weeks, with hidden cameras filming their every move, twenty-four hours a day, the highlights of which are shown every night on television. Their lives are entirely controlled by the show's producers (collectively known as 'Big Brother'), who set them tasks and dish out rewards and punishments. Every week, the 'housemates' each have to nominate two of their fellow participants for eviction, the viewing public then votes for the one it wants to evict, and one housemate is chucked out. At the end, the winner - the last surviving competitor - wins a fairly substantial cash prize. All participants get their fifteen minutes of fame, and some go on to become D-list 'celebrities'.

Britain and America are the only countries in which none of the Big Brother housemates has been seen having sex (I think the reasons are slightly different: we are inhibited, while the Americans are prudish). In Holland, they apparently had to be told to stop having sex all the time, as viewers were starting to find the non-stop humping rather tedious. In Britain, the newspapers went into paroxysms of excitement if two housemates so much as kissed. When, in the third series, a pair of housemates finally took things a little bit further, they made sure that they were carefully concealed under a duvet, and it was impossible to tell what was going on. Even when our Big Brother producers, in a desperate attempt to spice up the show a bit, provided a special little lovers' den, allowing couples to cavort away from the prying eyes of their fellow housemates (although still filmed by the hidden cameras), none of the inhibited housemates could be tempted. They used the den for 'private' gossip sessions instead. In 2003, a tabloid newspaper offered a reward of ?50,000 (almost as much as the prize-money for winning Big Brother) to tempt the housemates to have sex, but still nothing happened.

In other countries, Big Brother housemates regularly have screaming rows, and even stand-up fights and brawls, with broken chairs and flying crockery. On the British Big Brother, even a raised voice or a mildly sarcastic comment is a major incident, discussed and speculated over for days, both within the house and among the show's many devoted fans. Our housemates' language is often foul, but this reflects their limited vocabulary, rather than powerful emotions. Their behaviour is quite remarkably restrained and polite. They rarely express anger at a fellow housemate directly, but rather, in true English fashion, bitch and complain constantly about the person behind their back.

Although the show is a competition, any sign of actual competitiveness is severely frowned upon by our Big Brother contestants. 'Cheating' is the worst sin - a violation of the all-important fair-play ethos - but even admitting to having a game-plan, 'playing to win', is taboo, as one competitor discovered to his cost, when his boastful remarks about his clever strategy resulted in him being ostracized by the rest of the group and swiftly evicted. Had he kept quiet about his motives, pretended to be 'in it for fun' like all the others, he would have had as good a chance as any. Hypocrisy rules.

Restraint, inhibition, reserve, shyness, embarrassment, indirectness, hypocrisy, gritted-teeth politeness - all very English, and, you might say, not particularly surprising. But think for a minute about who these Big Brother participants are. The people who apply and audition to take part in this programme actively want to be exposed to the public gaze, twenty-four hours a day, for nine weeks, with absolutely no privacy, not even on the loo or in the shower - not to mention being obliged to perform idiotic and embarrassing tasks. These are not normal, ordinary people: these are the biggest exhibitionists in the country, the most shameless, most brazen, most attention-seeking, least inhibited people you could hope to encounter, anywhere in England. And yet their behaviour in the Big Brother house is largely characterized by typically English reserve, inhibition, squeamishness and awkwardness. They only break the rules when they are very drunk - or rather, they get drunk to legitimize their deviance from the rules50 - and even then there are boundaries which are never crossed.

I see Big Brother as a useful experiment, testing the strength of the 'rules of Englishness'. If even the flagrant exhibitionists on Big Brother conform to these rules, they must be very deeply ingrained in the English psyche.

Reading Rules

The English love of words features, in some form, on a large proportion of the lists of our 'national characteristics' that I came across during the research for this book. And the fact that there are so many of these lists only reinforces the point: our response to insecurities about our national identity is to make lists about it - to throw words at the problem. Orwell may have started the list-making trend, but now everyone seems to be at it.

Jeremy Paxman, whose own Orwellian list of quintessential Englishnesses includes 'quizzes and crosswords', calls the English 'a people obsessed by words', and cites the phenomenal output of our publishing industry (100,000 new books a year), more newspapers per head than almost any other country, our 'unstoppable flow of Letters to the Editor', our 'insatiable appetite' for all forms of verbal games and puzzles, our thriving theatres and bookshops.

I would add that reading books ranks as even more popular than DIY and gardening in national surveys of leisure activity, and over 80 per cent of us regularly read a daily newspaper. Our passion for word games and verbal puzzles is well known, but it is also worth nothing that every one of the non-verbal hobbies and pastimes that occupy our leisure time - such as fishing, stamp-collecting, train-spotting, bird-watching, walking, sports, pets, flower-arranging, knitting and pigeon-fancying - has at least one, if not many more specialist magazines devoted to it. The more popular hobbies each have at least half a dozen dedicated weekly or monthly publications, as well as umpteen Internet sites, and we often spend much more time reading about our favourite pastime than we do practising it.

The Rules of Bogside Reading

We read compulsively, anytime, anywhere. In many English homes, you will find what I call 'bogside reading': piles of books and magazines placed next to the loo, or even neatly arranged in a special rack or bookcase for reading while sitting on the loo. I have occasionally come across the odd book or magazine in loos in other countries, but bogside reading does not seem to be a firmly established custom or tradition elsewhere in the way that it is in England. There are many English people - particularly males - who find it very hard to defecate at all unless they have something to read. If there is no proper bogside reading, they will read the instructions on the soap-dispenser or the list of ingredients on the spray-can of air-freshener.

A cynical friend pointed out that this might have more to do with the English propensity to constipation than our love of words, but I am not convinced. It is often said that the English are obsessed with their bowels, and judging by the contents of people's bathroom cabinets (yes, I always snoop - don't you?) and of chemists' shelves, we do indeed seem to use more than our fair share of constipation and diarrhoea remedies, suggesting a constant struggle to maintain some elusive ideal state of regularity and solidity. But are we more obsessed than the Germans? We do not, as they do, construct our lavatory-bowls with a little shelf for the anxious inspection or smug contemplation of our faeces (at least I assume that's what those shelves are for: they seem to have no other discernible purpose). In fact, our bogside-reading customs indicate a degree of embarrassment about the whole process: we would rather distract ourselves with words than focus too intently (Germanically? anally?) on the products of our bowels. But maybe this is just more English hypocrisy.

The unwritten rules of bogside reading state that the books and magazines in question should be of a relatively unserious nature - humour, books of quotations, collections of letters or diaries, odd or obscure reference books, old magazines; anything that can be dipped into casually, rather than heavy tomes requiring sustained concentration.

Bogside reading, like pretty much everything else in an English home, is a useful class-indicator:

* Working-class bogside reading tends to be mostly humorous, light entertainment or sports-related - books of jokes, cartoons, maybe the occasional puzzle-book or quiz-book, and perhaps a few glossy-gossip or sports magazines. You will also sometimes find magazines about hobbies and interests, such as motorcycles, music or skateboarding.

* Lower-middles and middle-middles are not so keen on bogside reading: they may well take a book or newspaper into the loo with them, but do not like to advertise this habit by having a permanent bogside collection, which they think might look vulgar. Females of these classes may be reluctant to admit to reading on the loo at all.

* Upper-middles are generally much less prudish about such things, and often have mini-libraries in their loos. Some upper-middle bogside collections are a bit pretentious, with books and magazines that appear to have been selected to impress, rather than to entertain,51 but many are genuinely eclectic, and so amusing that guests often get engrossed in them and have to be shouted at to come to the dinner table.

* Upper-class bogside reading is usually closer to working-class tastes, consisting mainly of sport and humour, although the sporting magazines are more likely to be of the hunting/shooting/ fishing sort than, say, football. Some upper-class bogside libraries include fascinating old children's books, and ancient, crumbling copies of Horse and Hound or Country Life, in which you might come across the 1950s engagement-portrait of the lady of the house.

Newspaper Rules

When I say, in support of my claims about the English love of words, that over 80 per cent of us read a national daily newspaper52, some of those unfamiliar with English culture may mistakenly imagine a nation of super-literate highbrows, engrossed in the solemn analyses of politics and current affairs in the pages of The Times, the Guardian or another big, serious-looking paper. In fact, although we have four of them to choose from, only about 16 per cent of us read the so-called 'quality' national daily papers.

These are also known as 'broadsheets', because of their large format. I could never understand why these papers were such an awkward, unwieldy size, until I started watching English commuters reading them on trains, and realized that readability and manoeuvrability were not the point: the point is clearly to have a newspaper large enough to hide behind. The English broadsheet is a formidable example of what psychologists call a 'barrier signal' - in this case more like a 'fortress signal'. Not only can one conceal oneself completely behind its outsize, outstretched pages - effectively prohibiting any form of interaction with other humans, and successfully maintaining the comforting illusion that they do not exist - but one is enclosed, cocooned, in a solid wall of words. How very English.

Broadsheets also serve, to some extent, as signals of political affiliation. Both The Times and the Daily Telegraph are somewhat to the right of centre - although the Telegraph, also known as the Torygraph, is regarded as more right-wing than The Times. The Independent and the Guardian balance things out neatly by being somewhat to the left of centre - again with one, the Guardian, being seen as slightly more left-wing than the other. The term 'Guardian-reader' is often used as shorthand for a woolly, lefty, politically correct, knit-your-own-tofu sort of person. This is England, though, so none of these political positions is in any way extreme; indeed, the differences may be hard to discern unless you are English and familiar with all the subtle nuances. The English do not like extremism, in politics or any other sphere: apart from anything else, political extremists and fanatics, whether on the right or the left, invariably break the all-important English humour rules, particularly the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. Among their many other sins, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Franco were not noted for their use of the understatement. No such totalitarian leaders would ever stand a chance in England - even leaving aside their ethical shortcomings, they would be rejected immediately for taking themselves too seriously. George Orwell, for once, was wrong: 1984 would be unlikely to happen in England; our response to Big Brother (the original, not the television programme) would be 'Oh, come off it!'

Tabloids, otherwise known as the 'popular' press, are smaller (although still large enough to conceal one's head and shoulders) and somewhat less challenging, both intellectually and physically. The people who read the broadsheets occasionally lower their printed barrier-signals to look down their noses at those who read the tabloids. When broadsheet readers complain about the awfulness of 'the press', which they do constantly, they usually mean the tabloids.

A MORI survey found that more people are 'dissatisfied' than 'satisfied' with our national press, but the margin was quite small, and, as the researchers pointed out, 'filled with an irony'. The balance against the press was tipped by broadsheet readers (the minority), who are much more likely to say they are 'dissatisfied' with our national press than tabloid readers (the majority). Broadsheet readers are unlikely to be dissatisfied with the papers they actually buy themselves, say the MORI researchers, so they are presumably expressing dissatisfaction with newspapers they do not read. The press as a whole is condemned by 'people who don't actually read what they take exception to!' Fair point. The English love to complain, and the English educated classes do have a tendency to complain noisily about matters of which they have little or no knowledge. But I would hazard a guess that the broadsheet readers are in fact quite likely to be expressing dissatisfaction with the papers they do read, as well as the ones they don't. Just because the English buy something, it doesn't follow that we actually like it, or are even 'satisfied' with it, and it certainly doesn't mean we won't moan and complain about it. Given an opportunity for a pointless whinge - such as a clipboard-toting MORI researcher showing interest in our opinions - we will complain about pretty much anything.

As a paid-up member of the broadsheet-reading classes, I will probably be regarded as a traitor for saying anything nice about the tabloids, but I think that in some respects they are unfairly maligned. Yes, I get fed up with their sensationalism and scare-mongering, but the so-called 'quality' Press is often just as guilty of these sins. We have no less than eight main national daily papers - four tabloids, four broadsheets - in cut-throat competition for a relatively small market, and all of them sometimes feel obliged to mislead or exaggerate in their efforts to attract our attention. But leaving the moral issues to one side, the quality of the writing on both broadsheets and tabloids is generally excellent. There is a difference in style between the 'popular' and the 'quality' press, but the skill of the writers is equally outstanding. This is not surprising, as they are often the same writers: journalists move back and forth between tabloids and broadsheets, or even write regularly for both.

It seems to me that the English love of words - and particularly the universal nature of this passion, which transcends all class barriers - is most perfectly demonstrated not by the erudite wit of the broadsheet columnists, brilliant though they are, but by the journalists and subeditors who write the headlines in the tabloids. Take a random selection of English tabloids and flip through them: you will soon notice that almost every other headline involves some kind of play on words - a pun, a double meaning, a deliberate jokey misspelling, a literary or historical reference, a clever neologism, an ironic put-down, a cunning rhyme or amusing alliteration, and so on.

Yes, many of the puns are dreadful; much of the humour is laboured, vulgar or childish; the sexual innuendo is overdone; and the relentlessness of the wordplay can become wearing after a while. You may find yourself longing for a headline that simply gives you the gist of the story, without trying to be funny or clever. But the sheer ingenuity and linguistic playfulness must be admired, and all this compulsive punning, rhyming and joking is uniquely and gloriously English. Other countries may have 'quality' newspapers at least as learned and well written as ours, but no other national press can rival the manic wordplay of English tabloid headlines. So there we are: something to be proud of.

Cyberspace Rules

In recent times, the English have found a new and perfect excuse to stay at home, pull up the imaginary drawbridge and avoid the traumas of face-to-face social interaction: the Internet. Email, chatrooms, surfing, messaging - the whole thing could have been invented for the insular, socially handicapped, word-loving English.

In cyberspace, we are in our element: a world of disembodied words. 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. Nothing physical, no actual corporeal human beings to deal with at all. Just written words. Our favourite thing.

And, best of all, cyberspace is a disinhibitor. The disinhibiting effect of cyberspace is a universal phenomenon, not peculiar to the English. People from many cultures find that online they are more open, more chatty, less reticent than they are face-to-face or even on the telephone. But this disinhibiting effect is particularly important to the English, who have a greater need for such social facilitators than other cultures.

In my focus groups and interviews with English Internet users, the disinhibiting effect of online communication is a constantly recurring theme. Without exception, participants say that they express themselves more freely, with less reserve, in cyberspace than in what they invariably call 'real life' encounters: 'I say things in emails that I would never dare to say in real life.' 'That's right, you lose your inhibitions when you're online - it's almost like being a bit drunk.'

It seems particularly significant to me that so many of my interviewees and focus group participants contrast their online communication style with what they would (or would not) say in 'real life'. This curious slip provides a clue to the nature of the disinhibiting effects of online communication. It seems that William Gibson, who coined the term 'cyberspace', was right when he said that 'It's not really a place, it's not really space'. We regard cyberspace as somehow separate from the real world: our behaviour there is different from our conduct in 'real life'.

In this sense, cyberspace can be seen as what anthropologists would call a 'liminal zone' - a marginal, borderline state, segregated from everyday existence, in which normal rules and social constructions are suspended, allowing brief exploration of alternative ways of being. Just as we abandon the conventional rules of spelling and grammar in our emails and other cyber-talk, so we ignore the social inhibitions and restrictions that normally govern our behaviour. The English behave in remarkably un-English ways. In cyberspace chatrooms, for example, unlike most 'realspace' public environments in England, striking up conversations with complete strangers is normal behaviour, indeed actively encouraged. We then go on, in instant messages and emails, to reveal personal details that we would never disclose in 'real life'. This may explain why a recent study found that cyberspace friendships form more easily and develop more rapidly than traditional 'realspace' relationships.

Much of this sociable disinhibition is based on an illusion. Because of the 'liminality effect', email feels more ephemeral and less binding than 'putting something in writing' on paper, but it is in fact if anything more permanent and considerably less discreet. So although many English people find the alternative reality of online communication a liberating experience, it can have adverse consequences. Just as we may sometimes regret things we have said or done while under the influence of alcohol, we may also sometimes regret our unrestrained behaviour in cyberspace. The problem is that cyberspace is not separate from the 'real' world, any more than the office Christmas party takes place in a parallel universe. Excessively uninhibited emails, like office-party misdemeanours, may come back to haunt us. But I would still argue that the benefits of the cyberspace 'liminality effect' in overcoming English social dis-ease far outweigh these disadvantages.

The Rules of Shopping

It may seem strange to include shopping in this section on 'private and domestic' pursuits, as shopping clearly does not take place in the home, but in shops, which are public places. We are talking about the English, however, which means that 'public' activities can be just as 'private' as domestic ones. Shopping is not, for most people, a social pastime. Indeed, for most people, most of the time, it is not a 'pastime' at all, but a domestic chore - and should really have been covered in the chapter on work, not here.

But you would probably have found it odd to see a section on shopping under the heading of 'work'. Shopping is not generally regarded as 'work'. There is a curious mismatch between shopping as a concept, and shopping as a real-life activity - between the way we talk in the abstract about shopping, and the realities of our actual experience of it.53 Discussions about 'shopping' - in the media, among researchers and social commentators, and often in ordinary conversation - tend to focus on the hedonistic, materialistic, individualistic view of shopping: we talk about shopaholics, about 'retail therapy', about the power of advertising, about people spending lots of money they don't have on lots of things they don't need, about the 'sex and shopping' novel, about shopping as self-indulgence, shopping as pleasure, shopping as leisure.

Shopping may indeed sometimes be all of these things. But apart from the very rich and the very young, most people's day-to-day experience of shopping bears little resemblance to this image of mindless hedonism. Most of the shopping we do is 'provisioning' - buying the mundane necessities of life such as food, drink, washing powder, loo paper, light bulbs, toothpaste and so on. This is no more an act of materialistic self-indulgence than the gathering and foraging of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Shopping is not work in the sense of 'production' - it is a form of 'consumption', and the people who do it are 'consumers' - but for many shoppers it is work in the sense of 'providing a service', albeit an unpaid service.

On the other hand, shopping can be a pleasurable leisure activity, even for those who mainly experience it as a tedious chore. (In one recent survey, 72 percent of us said we had 'been shopping for pleasure' in the past month.) In my informal fieldwork interviews with shoppers, most of the people I spoke to made a distinction between 'routine' shopping and 'fun' shopping, provisioning and pleasure, work and play. In fact, if I introduced the topic without qualification, I would often be asked to specify which type of shopping I meant (one woman asked 'Do you mean the baked-beans-and-nappies sort of shopping or the girly-day-out sort?'). On other occasions, it would be clear from people's answers that they assumed I was talking specifically about either one type or the other. This often depended on the location in which the interview took place: people in supermarkets were more likely to assume that I was talking about 'routine' shopping, while the same sort of people interviewed in clothes shops, antiques shops and garden centres tended to think I meant 'fun' shopping. Age was also a factor: teenagers, students and some twenty-somethings mainly tended to assume that 'shopping' referred to the play/leisure/fun variety, while older people were much more likely to focus on the chore/provisioning/routine aspects.

Sex and Shopping Rules

There were also significant sex differences: men were less likely than women to distinguish between different types of shopping, and much less inclined to admit to enjoying any sort of shopping, even the 'fun' type. Among older English males, in particular, there seems to be an unwritten rule prohibiting any enjoyment of shopping, or at least prohibiting the disclosure or acknowledgement of such enjoyment. Taking pleasure in shopping is regarded as effeminate. The correct masculine line is to define any shopping one does, including the purchase of luxuries and inessentials, as something that has to be done, a means to an end, never a pleasure in itself. The majority of women, by contrast, will readily admit to enjoying 'fun' shopping, and some even say that they quite like the 'provisioning' sort of shopping, or at least take some pride and pleasure in doing it well. There are males and females who do not conform to these rules, but they are seen as deviating from the norm, and they recognize that they are unusual.

The rules regarding attitudes towards shopping are also reflected in the manner in which males and females are expected to shop. I call them the 'hunter/gatherer rules': men, if they can be persuaded to shop at all, are supposed to shop like hunters; women are supposed to shop like gatherers. Male shopping (or more accurately, masculine shopping) is teleological: you select your prey, and then single-mindedly and purposefully hunt it down. Female (feminine) shopping is more flexible, more opportunistic: you browse, you see what's available; you know roughly what you're looking for, but you might spot something better, or a bargain, and change your mind.

A significant number of English males, however, choose to prove their masculinity by emphasizing how hopelessly bad they are at shopping. Shopping is seen as a female skill; being too good at it, even in the approved hunter-like manner, might cast doubt upon your macho credentials, or even raise questions about your sexual orientation. 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. The done thing for 'real men' is to avoid shopping, to profess to hate shopping, and to be completely useless at it.

This can be partly just a matter of laziness, the employment of a practice the Americans call 'klutzing out' - deliberately making such a poor job of a domestic chore that one is unlikely to be asked to do it again. But among English men, uselessness at shopping is also a significant source of pride. Their female partners often play along with this, helping them to display their manliness by performing elaborate pantomimes of mock-exasperation at their inability to find their way around the supermarket, teasing them constantly and telling stories about their latest doofus mistakes. 'Oh he's hopeless, hasn't got a clue, have you, love?' said a woman I interviewed in a supermarket coffee shop, smiling fondly at her husband, who pulled a mock-sheepish face. 'I sent him out to get tomatoes and he comes back with a bottle of ketchup and he says "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.

The 'Shopping as Saving' Rule

For many English females, who still do most of the 'routine', 'provisioning' type of shopping, shopping is a skill, and it is customary, even among the relatively well-off, to take some pride in doing it well, which is understood to mean with a concern for thrift. Not necessarily getting everything as cheaply as possible, but getting value for money, not being extravagant or wasteful. There is a tacit understanding among English shoppers to the effect that shopping is not an act of spending, but an act of saving54. You do not speak of having 'spent' x amount on an item of food or clothing, but of having 'saved' x amount on the item. You would certainly never boast about having spent an excessive sum of money on something, but you are allowed to take pride in finding a bargain.

This rule applies across all social classes: the upper echelons would regard boasting about extravagant expenditure as vulgar, while the lower classes would regard it as 'stuck up'. Only brash, crass Americans display their wealth by boasting about how much something cost them. Congratulating yourself on a bargain or saving, however - boasting about how little something cost you - is universally acceptable among English shoppers of all classes. It is one of the very few exceptions to the money-talk taboo. What constitutes a bargain, what counts as cheap or good value, may well differ according to class and income level, but the principle is the same: whatever price you paid, you should if possible claim that it somehow constituted a saving.

The Apology and Moan Options

When it is not possible to make saving claims - when you have indisputably paid full price for something undeniably expensive - you should ideally just keep quiet about it. Failing that, you have two options, both very English: either apologize or moan. You can apologize for your embarrassing extravagance ('Oh dear, I know I shouldn't have, it was terribly expensive, just couldn't resist it, very naughty of me...') or you can moan and grumble about the extortionate cost of things ('Ridiculously expensive, don't know how they get away with charging that much, stupid prices, rip-off...')

Both of these options are sometimes used as indirect boasts, ways of subtly indicating one's spending power without indulging in anything so vulgar as an overt display of wealth. And both can also be a form of 'polite egalitarianism': even very rich people will often pretend to be either apologetically embarrassed or grumpy and indignant about the cost of expensive things they have bought, when in fact they can easily afford them, in order to avoid drawing attention to any disparity in income. Shopping, like every other aspect of English life, is full of courteous little hypocrisies.

The 'Bling-bling' Exception

There is one significant exception to the 'shopping as saving' principle, and its associated apologizing and moaning. Young people influenced by the black American hip-hop/'gangsta'/rap culture - currently a significant youth sub-culture in this country - have adopted a style that requires deliberate ostentatious displays of wealth. This involves wearing expensive designer clothes and flashy gold jewellery (a look known as 'bling-bling'), drinking expensive champagne (Cristal) and cognac, driving expensive cars - and certainly not being the slightest bit embarrassed about all this extravagance; in fact taking great pride in it.

Even those who cannot afford the champagne and cars (the majority: this style is particularly popular among low-income teenagers) will do their best to acquire at least a few items of the correct designer clothing, and will boast to anyone who will listen about how much they cost. The 'bling-bling' culture is not so much an exception as a deliberate challenge to mainstream rules of Englishness; it is sticking up two heavily be-ringed fingers at all our unwritten codes of modesty, restraint, diffidence, polite egalitarianism and general hypocrisy. In its own way, it provides confirmation of the enduring importance of these codes - assertion by negation, if you like.

Youth sub-cultures come and go, and this particular example may well already be passe by the time you read this. The next one may pick on some other aspect of mainstream Englishness to rebel against.

Class and Shopping Rules

The shopping-as-saving rule applies across class barriers, and even the bling-bling exception is not class-bound: this style appeals to young people from all social backgrounds, including some upper-class public schoolboys, who seem quite unaware of how silly they look, trying to dress like pimps and walk and talk like tough black 'gangstas' from American inner-city ghettos.

Most other aspects of shopping, however, are deeply entangled in the complexities of the English class system. As might be expected, where you shop is a key class indicator. But it is not a simple matter of the higher social ranks shopping in the more expensive shops, while the lower echelons use the cheaper ones. The upper-middle classes, for example, will hunt for bargains in second-hand and charity shops, which the lower-middle and working classes 'would not be seen dead in'. Yet the upper-middles and middle-middles would be reluctant to buy their groceries in the cheap supermarkets, with names that emphasize their price-consciousness such as Kwiksave and Poundstretcher, favoured by the working classes. Instead, they shop in middle-class supermarkets such as Sainsbury's and Tesco, or the slightly more upper-middle Waitrose.

Not that anyone will admit to choosing a supermarket for its class status, of course. No, we shop in middle-class supermarkets because of the superior quality of the food and the wider range of organic and exotic vegetables, even when we are just buying exactly the same ubiquitous brand-name basics as the working-class shoppers in Kwiksave. We may have no idea what to do with pak choi or how to eat organic celeriac, but we like to know they are there, as we walk past with our Kellogg's corn flakes and Andrex loo paper.

The M amp;S Test

If you want to get an idea of the convoluted intricacy of shopping class-indicators, spend some time observing and interviewing the shoppers in Marks amp; Spencer. In this very English high-street chain, you trip over invisible class barriers in every aisle. M amp;S is a sort of department-store, selling clothes, shoes, furniture, linen, soap, make-up, etc. - as well as food and drink - all under its own brand name.

* The upper-middle classes buy food in the very expensive but high-quality M amp;S food halls, and will also happily buy M amp;S underwear and perhaps the occasional plain, basic item such as a t-shirt, but will not often buy any other clothes there, except perhaps for children - and certainly not anything with a pattern, as this would identify it as being from M amp;S. They would never buy a party dress from M amp;S, and are squeamish about wearing M amp;S shoes, however comfortable or well made they may be. They will buy M amp;S towels and bed-linen, but not M amp;S sofas, curtains or cushions.

* The middle-middles also buy M amp;S food, although those on a lower budget would not do their entire weekly shop here. They complain a bit (to each other, not to M amp;S) about the high prices of M amp;S food, but tell themselves it is worth it for the quality, and buy their cornflakes and loo paper at Sainsbury's. They will buy a much wider range of clothes from M amp;S than the upper-middles, including things with prints and patterns, and they are happy to buy M amp;S sofas, cushions and curtains. Their teenage children, however, may turn up their noses at M amp;S clothes, not for class reasons but because they prefer the more youthful, fashionable high-street chains.

* Lower-middles and some upwardly mobile upper-workings buy M amp;S food, but usually only as a special treat - for some, particularly those with young children, an M amp;S 'ready-meal' is an alternative to eating out at a restaurant, something they might have as an indulgence, maybe once a week. They cannot afford to food-shop here regularly, and regard anyone who does as extravagant and quite possibly 'stuck-up'. 'My sister-in-law buys all her veg and washing-up liquid and everything from Marks, stupid cow,' a middle-aged woman told me, with a disdainful, disapproving sniff. 'It's just showing off - thinks she's better than us.' M amp;S clothes, on the other hand, are generally regarded as 'good value' by the thrifty, respectable, genteel sort of lower-middles: 'Not cheap, mind you, but good quality'. Some lower-middles feel the same about the cushions and duvets and towels, while others regard them as 'very nice, but a bit too pricey'.

If you need to make a quick assessment of an English shopper's social class, don't ask about her family background, income, occupation or the value of her house (all of which would in any case be rude): ask her what she does and does not buy at Marks amp; Spencer. I say 'she' because this test only works reliably on women: men are often blissfully unaware of the yawning social gulf between M amp;S knickers and an M amp;S patterned dress.

Pet Rules and 'Petiquette'

Keeping pets, for the English, is not so much a leisure activity as an entire way of life. In fact, 'keeping pets' is an inaccurate and inadequate expression - it does not begin to convey the exalted status of our animals. An Englishman's home may be his castle, but his dog is the real king. People in other countries may buy luxurious five-star kennels and silk-lined baskets for their pets, but the English let them take over the whole house. The unwritten rules allow our dogs and cats to sprawl all over our sofas and chairs, always hogging the best places in front of the fire or television. They get far more attention, affection, appreciation, encouragement and 'quality time' than our children, and often better food. Imagine the most over-indulged, feted, adored bambino in Italy, and you will get a rough idea of the status of the average English pet. We had the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals long before the establishment of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which appears to have been founded as a somewhat derivative afterthought.

Why is this? What is it about the English and animals? Yes, many other cultures have pets, and some, particularly our colonial descendants, are in their own ways as soppy about them as we are, but the English inordinate love of animals is still one of the characteristics for which we are renowned, and which many foreigners find baffling. The Americans may outdo us in gushy sentimentality and extravagant expenditure on pets - all those cheesy, tear-jerker films, elaborate pet cemeteries, luxury toys and dogs got up in ludicrous designer costumes. But then they always outdo us in gushiness and conspicuous consumption.

The English relationship with animals is different: our pets are more than status indicators (although they do serve this purpose) and our affinity with them goes well beyond sentimentality. It is often said that we treat them like people, but this is not true. Have you seen how we treat people? It would be unthinkable to be so cold and unfriendly to an animal. OK, I'm exaggerating - a bit. But the fact is that we tend to be far more open, easy, communicative and demonstrative in our relationships with our animals than with each other.

The average Englishman will assiduously avoid social interaction with his fellow humans, and will generally become either awkward or aggressive when obliged to communicate with them, unless certain props and facilitators are available to help the process along. He will have no difficulty at all, however, in engaging in lively, amicable conversation with a dog. Even a strange dog, to whom he has not been introduced. Bypassing all the usual stilted embarrassments, his greeting will be effusive: 'Hello there!' he will exclaim, 'What's your name? And where have you come from, then? D'you want some of my sandwich, mate? Mmm, yes, it's not bad, is it? Here, come up and share my seat! Plenty of room!'

You see, the English really are quite capable of Latin-Mediterranean warmth, enthusiasm and hospitality; we can be just as direct and approachable and emotive and tactile as any of the so-called 'contact cultures'. It is just that these qualities are only consistently expressed in our interactions with animals. And unlike our fellow Englishmen, animals are not embarrassed or put off by our un-English displays of emotion. 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.

An American visitor I met had suffered for a week as a guest in a fairly typical English household ruled by two large, boisterous and chronically disobedient dogs, whose ineffectual owners engaged them in non-stop, stream-of-consciousness chatter, indulged their every whim and laughed affectionately at their misdemeanours. She complained to me that the owners' relationship with these pets was 'abnormal' and 'unhealthy' and 'dysfunctional'. 'No, you don't understand,' I explained. 'This is probably the only normal, healthy, functional relationship these people have.' She was, however, sensitive enough to have picked up on an important rule of English 'petiquette' - the one that absolutely forbids criticism of a person's pets. However badly your hosts' ghastly, leg-humping, shoe-eating dog behaves, you must not speak ill of the beast. This would be a worse social solecism than criticizing their children.

We are allowed to criticize our own pets, but this must be done in affectionate, indulgent tones: 'He's so naughty - that's the third pair of shoes he's wrecked this month, ah, bless!' There is almost a hint of pride in these 'isn't he awful?' complaints, as though we are secretly, perversely, rather charmed by our pets' flaws and failings. In fact, we often engage in one-upmanship over our pets' misdemeanours. Just the other night, at a dinner party, I listened to two Labrador-owners capping each other's stories of the items their dogs had eaten or destroyed: 'It wasn't just shoes and ordinary things, mine used to eat mobile phones.' 'Well, mine chewed a whole HiFi system to bits!' 'Mine ate a Volvo!' (How do you top that, I wondered: Mine ate a helicopter? Mine ate the QE2?)

I am convinced that the English get great vicarious pleasure from our pets' uninhibited behaviour. We grant them all the freedoms that we deny ourselves: the most repressed and inhibited people on Earth have the most blatantly unreserved, spontaneous and badly behaved pets. Our pets are our alter egos, or perhaps even the symbolic embodiment of what a psychotherapist would call our 'inner child' (but not the sort of inner child they mean, the one with big soulful eyes who needs a hug - I mean the snub-nosed, mucky, obnoxious inner brat who needs a good slap). 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.

The unspoken law states that our animal alter egos/inner brats can do no wrong. If an English person's dog bites you, you must have provoked it; and even if the attack was clearly unprovoked - if the animal just took a sudden irrational dislike to you - the owners will assume that there must be something suspect about you. The English firmly believe that our dogs (and cats, guinea pigs, ponies, parrots, etc.) are shrewd judges of character. 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. People who object to being jumped on, climbed over, kicked, scratched and generally mauled by English animals who are 'just being friendly' also clearly have something wrong with them.

Although our pets usually provide a vital therapeutic substitute for emotional relationships with human beings, the superior quality of our communication and bonding with animals can sometimes also have beneficial side effects on our relations with other humans. We can even manage to strike up a conversation with a stranger if one of us is accompanied by a dog, although it must be said that both parties are sometimes inclined to talk to the canine chaperone rather than address each other directly. Non-verbal as well as verbal signals are exchanged through the blissfully oblivious dog, who happily absorbs all the eye contact and friendly touching that would be regarded as excessively forward and pushy between newly acquainted humans. And pets can act as mediators or facilitators even in more established relationships: English couples who have trouble expressing their feelings to each other often tend to communicate through their pets. 'Mummy's looking really pissed off, isn't she, Patch? Yes she is. Yes she is. Do you think she's annoyed with us?' 'Well, Patchy-poo, Mummy's vewy, vewy tired and she would appreciate it if your lazy old Daddy gave her a bit of help round here instead of sitting on his arse reading the paper all day.'

Most of the above rules apply across class barriers, but there are a few variations. The middle-middles and lower-middles, although just as dotty about their pets as the other classes, tend to be somewhat less tolerant of mess, and rather more squeamish about the 'ruder' kinds of misbehaviour than those at the top and bottom of the social scale. Middle-middle and lower-middle pets are not necessarily any better behaved, but their owners are more zealous about cleaning up after them, and more embarrassed when they sniff people's crotches or try to have sex with their legs.

The type and breed of pet you keep, however, is a more reliable class indicator than your attitude towards animals. Dogs, for example, are universally popular, but the upper echelons prefer Labradors, golden retrievers, King Charles spaniels and springer spaniels, while the lower classes are more likely to have rottweilers, alsatians, poodles, afghans, chihuahuas and cocker spaniels.

Cats are less popular than dogs with the upper class, although those who live in grand country houses find them useful for keeping mice and rats at bay. The lower social ranks, by contrast, may keep mice and rats as pets - as well as guinea pigs, hamsters and goldfish. Some middle-middles, and lower-middles with aspirations, take great pride in keeping expensive exotic fish such as Koi carp in their garden pond. The upper-middles and upper classes think this is 'naff'. Horses are widely regarded as 'posh' animals, and social climbers often take up riding or buy ponies for their children in order to ingratiate themselves with the 'horsey' set to which they aspire. Unless they also manage to perfect the appropriate accent, arcane vocabulary, mannerisms and dress, they don't fool anybody.

What you do with your pet can also be a class indicator. Generally, only the middle-middles and below go in for dog shows, cat shows and obedience tests, and only these classes would put a sticker in the back window of their car proclaiming their passion for a particular breed of dog or warning other motorists that their vehicle may contain 'Show Cats in Transit'. The upper classes regard showing dogs and cats as rather vulgar, but showing horses and ponies is fine. There is no logic to any of this.

Middle-middles and below are also more likely to dress up their dogs and cats in coloured collars, bows and other tweenesses - and if you see a dog with its name in inverted commas on its collar, the animal's owners are almost certainly no higher than middle-middle. Upper-middle and upper-class dogs usually just wear plain brown leather collars. Only a certain type of rather insecure working-class male goes in for big, scary, aggressive-looking guard dogs with big, scary, studded, black collars.

English pet-owners are highly unlikely to admit that their pet is a status signal, or that their choice of pet is in any way class-related. They will insist that they like Labradors (or springer spaniels, or whatever) because of the breed's kind temperament. If you want to get them to reveal their hidden class anxieties, or if you just like causing trouble, you can try the canine equivalent of the Mondeo and Mercedes tests: put on your most innocent face, and tell a Labrador-owner 'Oh, I'd have seen you more as an alsatian [or poodle, or chihuahua] sort of person.'

If you are of a more kind and affable disposition, note that the quickest way to an English person's heart, no matter what their class, is through their pet. Always praise people's pets, and when you speak to our animals directly (which you should do as much as possible) remember that you are addressing our inner child. If you are a visitor eager to make friends with the natives, try to acquire or borrow a dog to act as a passport to conversation and as a chaperone.

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