Watching the English

PROPS AND FACILITATORS - PUBLIC, SOCIAL ACTIVITIES

If you do not have a dog, you will need to find another kind of passport to social contact. Which brings me neatly to the second type of English approach to leisure mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: the public/social pursuits and pastimes - sports, games, pubs, clubs and so on. All of these relate directly to our second main method of dealing with our social dis-ease: the 'ingenious use of props and facilitators' method.

Rules of the Game

It is no accident that almost all of the most popular sports and games played around the world today originated in England. Football, baseball, rugby and tennis were all invented here, and even when we did not actually invent a sport or game, the English were usually the first to lay down a proper, official set of rules for it (hockey, horseracing, polo, swimming, rowing, boxing - and even skiing, for heaven's sake). And that's not counting all the rather less athletic games and pastimes such as darts, pool, billiards, cards, cribbage and skittles. And let's not forget hunting, shooting and fishing. We didn't create or codify all of these, of course, but sports and games are widely recognized as an essential part of our culture, our heritage and our legacy - one cannot talk about Englishness without talking about sports and games.

Testosterone Rules

A number of students of Englishness have tried to explain the English obsession with games. Most of these commentators attempt to find historical explanations. Jeremy Paxman wonders whether the development of this obsession might have had something to do with 'safety and prosperity and the availability of leisure time' or perhaps 'the fact that duelling was frowned upon earlier than in the rest of Europe meant there was a need to find alternative challenges'. Hmm, well, maybe. He comes closer with the observation that our great boys' boarding schools had to 'find ways of exercising the hormonally challenged'. But this is what I would call a 'cross-cultural universal', a valid reason for any human society to develop sports and games, and indeed one of the reasons every human society has them. 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.

The universal testosterone problem cannot in itself explain why the English in particular should have developed so many of these pastimes, although I would argue that the young English male, being socially uneasy as well as hormonally challenged, has perhaps a more pressing need for such channelling. And the rest of us also need some means of overcoming our social inhibitions and dis-ease. The real reasons for the English love of games are perhaps best explained through an example from my research.

The 'Props and Facilitators' Method

It was during my study on pub etiquette that I began to understand the importance of games. In conversations with tourists, I found that to foreign visitors, many English pubs seem more like children's playgrounds than adult drinking-places. One American tourist I interviewed expressed his bewilderment at the number and variety of games in a local pub: 'Look at this place! You've got a dart board, a bar-billiards table, four different board games, and card games and dominoes and some weird thing with a box and a bunch of little sticks - and then you tell me this pub has a football team and a cricket team and quiz nights... You call this a bar? At home we'd call it a kindergarten!' Fortunately for me, this scornful tourist had only noticed about a dozen or so typical pub games, and had not heard of all the more obscure regional eccentricities such as Aunt Sally, wellie-throwing, shove ha'penny, marrow-dangling, conger-cuddling and Wetton Toe Wrestling. Another equally puzzled but marginally more polite visitor asked: 'What is it with you English? Why do you have to play all these silly games? Why can't you just go to a bar and drink and talk like the rest of the world?'

Somewhat defensively, I explained in the pub-etiquette book that the rest of the world is not as socially inhibited and inept as the English. We do not find it easy to initiate friendly conversation with strangers, or to develop closer relationships with fellow pubgoers. We need help. We need props. We need excuses to make contact. We need toys and sports and games that get us involved with each other.

What works in the microcosm of the pub also works in English society as a whole. More so, in fact. If we need games and sports even in the special social micro-climate of the pub, where the usual restraints are relaxed somewhat, and it is acceptable to strike up a conversation with a stranger, we clearly have an even greater need for such props and facilitators outside this sociable environment.

The Self-delusion Rule

But sports and games do not only provide the props we need to initiate and sustain social contact, they also prescribe the nature of that contact. This is not 'random' sociability, but sociability hedged about with a lot of rules and regulations, ritual and etiquette, both official and unofficial. The English are capable of engaging socially with each other, but we need clear and precise guidelines on what to do, what to say, and exactly when and how to do and say it. Games ritualize our social interactions, giving them a reassuring structure and sense of order. By focusing on the detail of the game's rules and rituals, we can pretend that the game itself is really the point, and the social contact a mere incidental side-effect.

In fact, it is the other way round: games are a means to an end, the end being the kind of sociable interaction and social bonding that other cultures seem to achieve without all this fuss, subterfuge and self-delusion. The English are human; we are social animals just like all other humans, but we have to trick ourselves into social interaction and bonding by disguising it as something else, such as a game of football, cricket, tennis, rugby, darts, pool, dominoes, cards, scrabble, charades, wellie-throwing or toe-wrestling.

Games Etiquette

Every one of these games has its rules - not just the official rules of the game itself, which the English like to be as complex as possible, but an equally complex set of unofficial, unwritten rules governing the comportment and social interactions of the players and spectators. Again, pub games are a good example. Even in this sociable microclimate, our natural diffidence and reluctance to intrude on other people means that we are more comfortable when there are established 'rules of introduction' to follow. Knowing the etiquette, the correct form of address, gives us the courage to take the initiative. Even if we are feeling in need of company, we are unlikely to approach a stranger who is sitting at a table with his pint, or with his mates, but if they are playing pool or darts or bar-billiards, there is not only a valid excuse to make an approach, but also a set formula to follow, which makes the whole process much less daunting.

For pool and bar-billiards players, the formula is straightforward. You simply approach a player and ask, 'Is it winner stays on?' This traditional opening is both an enquiry about the local rules on turn-taking, which may vary from region to region and even from pub to pub, and an invitation to play the winner of the current game. The reply may be 'Yeah, coins down,' or 'That's right - name on the board.' This is both an acceptance of your invitation, and an instruction on the pub's system for securing the table, which may be by placing your coins on the corner of the table, or writing your name on a nearby chalkboard. Either way, it is understood that you will pay for the game, so there is no need for any embarrassing breach of the money-talk taboo. If the reply to your original question is simply 'Yes,' you may ask 'Is it coins down?' or 'Is it names on the board?'

Having completed the correct introductions, you may now stand around and watch the current game, gradually joining in the banter as you wait your turn. Further enquiries about local rules are the most acceptable way of initiating conversation. These usually begin with the same somewhat impersonal 'Is it...' as in 'Is it two shots on the black?' or 'Is it stick pocket or any pocket?' - rather than using anything so intimate as a personal pronoun. Once you are accepted as a player, the unwritten etiquette also allows you to make appropriate comments on the game. Well, actually there is only one entirely safe and appropriate comment you can make, particularly among male players, and this is to say 'Shot' when a player makes a particularly good shot. Perhaps to compensate, this one word is pronounced in a drawn-out fashion, as though it had at least two syllables: 'Sho-ot'. Other players may also tease and taunt each other over bad shots, but newcomers wisely tend to avoid making any derogatory remarks until they are better acquainted.

Sex Differences and the 'Three-emotions Rule'

There are some sex differences in the codes of conduct governing pub games, and indeed many sports and games played in other contexts. As a rule of thumb, males are supposed to adopt a strong, stiff-upper-lipped, manly approach to the game, both as players and as spectators. It is not done to jump about and exclaim over one's own or another player's luck or skill. In darts, for example, swearing at one's mistakes, and making sarcastic comments on those of one's opponents is allowed, but clapping one's hands in glee upon scoring a double-twenty, and excessive laughter on failing to hit the board at all, are regarded as 'girly' and inappropriate.

The usual 'three-emotions rule' applies. English males are allowed to express three emotions: surprise, providing it is conveyed by shouting or swearing; anger, also communicated in expletives; and elation/triumph, displayed in the same manner. For the untrained eye and ear, it can be difficult to distinguish between the three permitted emotions, but English males have no trouble grasping the nuances. Female players and spectators are allowed a much wider range of acceptable emotions, and a much more extensive vocabulary with which to express them. This often seems to happen - that one sex is required to be 'more English' than the other, in a certain context. Here, males are subject to more restrictions than females, but in other contexts - such as, say, the giving and receiving of compliments - the unwritten rules place more complex constraints on female behaviour. It may all balance out, but my suspicion is that, overall, the rules of Englishness are probably a bit harder on males than on females.

The Fair-play Rule

The English concern with fair play is, as we have seen, an underlying theme in almost all aspects of our life and culture, and in the context of sports and games, fair play is still - despite the rantings of the doom-mongers - an ideal to which we cling, even if we do not always manage to live up to it.

At the top national and international level, sport has become, for the English as for all other nations, a rather more cut-throat business, and there seems to be more focus on winning and on the exploits of individual superstar 'personalities' (a misnomer if ever there was one), than on high-minded notions of team spirit and sportsmanship. Until, that is, there is some accusation of cheating, unfairness, loutishness or unsporting behaviour, whereupon we all seethe with righteous indignation - or cringe with shame and embarrassment, and tell each other that the country is going to the dogs. Both reactions suggest that the sporting ethic, which the English are often credited with inventing, is still very important to us.

In Anyone for England, one of the many recent premature obituaries for English national identity, Clive Aslet bemoans the loss of all these gentlemanly ideals, claiming that even cricket, 'the game synonymous with the sporting ideal, has changed beyond recognition in terms of the spirit in which it is played.' But apart from the rather unseemly row between Ian Botham and Imran Khan in 1996, the worst sin of which he accuses the England team is that the players 'make little effort to cultivate an image of gentlemanliness through their dress.' He objects to the baseball caps, stubble, T-shirts and shorts worn by off-duty cricketers. He refers to the 'ungentlemanly tactics' of national players, without giving any examples, and then is 'shocked to learn from cricketing friends' that these are even being adopted at village-cricket level. Intimidating 'war-paint' and helmets, as seen in televised international matches, are sometimes worn; opposing batsmen, it seems, are no longer always clapped to the crease; and in 1996, the Woodmancote team, from Hampshire, was expelled from the National Village Cricket Knockout Tournament for being 'too professional'. The first two of these examples do not strike me as particularly shocking, and the third seems to indicate that, if anything, the old values of amateurism and fair play are very much alive and well in village cricket.

Even Aslet admits that people have been mourning the demise of this sporting ethic for at least a century - indeed, the obituaries started almost as soon as the Victorians invented the gentlemanly 'sporting ideal' in the first place. The English have a habit of inventing 'traditions' out of thin air, to suit the spirit of the times, and then almost immediately waxing mournfully nostalgic about them, as though they were a vital and now tragically dying part of our cultural heritage.

Which brings me to football. And the modern evil of football hooliganism, of course. Football violence is always wheeled out as Exhibit A by those who complain that the country is going to the dogs, that we have become a nation of louts, that sport isn't what it used to be, and so on. These complainers admittedly constitute quite a large proportion of the population, but that is an indication of our Eeyorish love of moaning and national self-flagellation, rather than evidence for the truth of our moans.

What all the mourners and moaners fail to understand is that football violence is nothing new. You know the well-worn joke about 'I went to a fight and a football match broke out'? Well, that's pretty much how football started. The game of football has been associated with violence since its origins in thirteenth-century England. Medieval football matches were essentially pitched battles between the young men of rival villages and towns. They involved hundreds of 'players', and were often used as opportunities to settle old feuds, personal arguments and land disputes. Some forms of 'folk-football' existed in other countries (such as the German Knappen and the Florentine calcio in costume), but the roots of modern football are in these violent English rituals.

The much more restrained, disciplined form of the game with which we are now familiar was the reformed pastime of the Victorians, but the violent traditions and rivalries have persisted, mainly among spectators, on the terraces and in the towns. Only two quite brief periods in English history - the inter-war years and about a decade or so following the Second World War - have been relatively free of football-related violence. Historically, these periods are the exception rather than the rule. So I'm sorry, but I cannot accept modern football hooliganism as evidence of a recent decline in sporting manners or values.

In any case, the rule or ideal I am concerned with here is not the entire Victorian gentlemanly package, but just the basic notion of fair play, which is not necessarily incompatible with a desire to win, or with inelegant dress, or with financial gain and commercial sponsorship - or, for that matter, with violence. My colleague Peter Marsh (among others) has shown that human violence - including specifically English football-hooligan violence - is not a random free-for-all but a rule-governed affair, in which considerations of fairness may often play a part. Football violence is not as widespread, or indeed as violent, as it is cracked up to be. There is a lot of aggressive chanting and taunting, some intimidating displays and threats, and a few scuffles, but serious physical violence is actually relatively uncommon. The hooligans' aim is to scare rival fans into running away, and then jeer at their cowardice, not to beat them to a pulp. A typical football chant (this one sung to the tune of Seasons in the Sun) encapsulates the hooligans' mission:

We had joy, we had fun, we had Swindon on the run

But the joy didn't last, cos the bastards ran too fast!

I am not trying to whitewash or defend football hooligans here. They are loud, obnoxious, ill-mannered and often racist. All I am saying is that they do have their own codes of conduct, and that 'fair play' is very much part of the etiquette governing their aggressive and violent encounters.

The Underdog Rule

In 1990, the Tory MP Norman Tebbit caused much outrage and uproar when he complained that too many Asian immigrants in Britain failed what he called the 'cricket test' - by cheering for India or Pakistan when these countries played England at cricket, rather than cheering for England. His remarks were aimed primarily at second-generation Asian and Caribbean immigrants, whom he accused of having 'split loyalties', when they should be demonstrating their Britishness by supporting the England cricket team. 'When people come to a new country, they should be prepared to immerse themselves totally and utterly in that country,' he declared.

The racism, ignorance and arrogance of the 'Tebbit Test', as it came to be known, are quite breathtaking. Was Tebbit suggesting that Asian immigrants in Britain should follow the shining example we provided as uninvited residents in their countries? And for whom would he suggest that English settlers in Australia should cheer, when England plays Australia in their adopted home? And what about Scottish and Welsh people living in England - who should they support? Did he realize that the Scots always, on principle, cheer for whatever country is playing against England? As do many members of the cynical chattering-class English intelligentsia, among whom any display of patriotism, particularly over sport, is regarded as deeply unsophisticated. Not to mention all the other English people who just find patriotic fervour somewhat embarrassing, and would feel silly and self-conscious if obliged to cheer for England. Should we all be denied full citizenship?

But even leaving all this aside, the 'Tebbit Test' would still not work as a test of Englishness. Those who are truly, culturally 'English' - whatever their race or country of origin - can be distinguished by their automatic, instinctive inclination to cheer for the underdog. I am by no means the first to notice this trait: the English tendency to support the underdog is one of those national stereotypes that I was determined to 'get inside' during my field research. I saw plenty of examples, but the one that sticks in my mind, the one that really helped me to understand the depth and complexities of the underdog rule, was the men's final at Wimbledon in 2002.

Tennis buffs apparently found this match rather dull, for a Wimbledon final, but I was there to watch the spectators, not the players, and I found it fascinating. The match was between the world-famous, top-seed Australian player Lleyton Hewitt, and a virtually unknown Argentine called David Nalbandian, who had never even played at Wimbledon before. The result was a predictably easy victory for the Australian champion, who beat Nalbandian 6-1, 6-3, 6-2.

At the start of the match, all the English spectators were cheering for Nalbandian, clapping and whooping and shouting 'Come on, David!' every time he scored a point or even made a good shot (or whatever it's called in tennis), while Hewitt only got a few token, polite claps. When I asked the English spectators around me why they were supporting the Argentine - particularly given that there was no great love between England and Argentina; indeed, we were at war not so long ago - they explained that nationality was irrelevant, that Nalbandian was the underdog, highly unlikely to win, and therefore obviously deserved their support. They seemed surprised that I should have to ask such a question, and several people even spelt out the rule for me - 'You always support the underdog.'; 'You have to support the underdog.' Their tone suggested that I really should already know this, that it was a fundamental law of nature.

Fine, I thought, good, another 'rule of Englishness' in the bag. Feeling rather smug, I watched complacently for a bit, and was just beginning to get bored, and thinking about maybe sloping off in search of an ice-cream, when something strange happened. Hewitt did something particularly good (don't ask me what, I don't understand tennis) and the people around me started whooping and cheering and clapping him. 'Eh?' I said, 'Hang on. I thought you were supporting Nalbandian, the underdog? Why are you now cheering for Hewitt?' The explanations offered by the English spectators were a bit less clear-cut, but the gist was that Hewitt was, after all, playing exceptionally well, and that everyone had been cheering for Nalbandian, because he was the underdog, which meant that poor Hewitt, despite playing brilliantly, was getting little or no support and encouragement from the crowd, which seemed rather unfair, so they felt sorry for him, out there all alone with everyone cheering his opponent, so they were cheering for him to redress the balance a bit. In other words, Hewitt, the overdog (is that a word? never mind - you know what I mean), had somehow become the underdog, the one who deserved their support.

For a while, that is. I was now alert, shaken out of my complacency, and paying close attention to the behaviour of the spectators, so when the cheering for Hewitt dwindled, and the spectators began giving all their support to Nalbandian again, I was ready with my questions: 'Now what? Why aren't you cheering for Hewitt any more? Is he not playing so well?' No, apparently he was playing even better. And that was the point. Hewitt was now clearly heading for an easy win. Nalbandian was struggling, was going to be 'slaughtered', had absolutely no chance - so obviously it was only fair to give him all the noisy vocal encouragement and praise, and only clap politely for the all-conquering overdog Hewitt.

So, in the logic of English fair play, you must always support the underdog, but too much support for the underdog can be unfair on the overdog, who then becomes a sort of honorary underdog, whom you must support until balance is restored, or until the real underdog is clearly going to lose, at which point you must support the real underdog again. Simple, really. Once you know the rules. Or at least at Wimbledon it was relatively simple, as there could be no doubt as to who was the real underdog. When this is not immediately obvious, there can be difficulties, as the English dither over who is most deserving of their cheers; and further problems can arise when an English player (or team) happens to be the overdog, as fairness demands that we give at least some support to the underdog opposition.

Football fans, the most patriotic of sports spectators, do not suffer from these fair-play anxieties at the international level, or when the local team they support is playing, but even they may be inclined to cheer for the underdog when they have no prior loyalties to either team involved in a match, particularly if the overdog-team has been too boastful about its successes, or too insultingly confident about the result of the match. Many English football fans will also doggedly support a hopeless, talent-less, third-division team throughout their entire lives, never wavering in their loyalty, however badly their team performs. There is an unwritten rule that says you choose which football team to support at a very young age, and that's it, forever: you never switch your allegiance to another team. You can appreciate or even admire the skills and talent of, say, a top team such as Manchester United, but the team you support is still Swindon, or Stockport, or whoever - the team you have supported since you were a child. You are not obliged to support your local team: many young people from all parts of the country support Manchester United, or Chelsea, or Arsenal. The point is that once you have chosen, you stay loyal; you don't switch from Manchester United to Arsenal just because the latter happen to be playing better, or indeed for any other reason.

Horseracing - another fascinating English sub-culture, which I studied for three years and wrote a book about - actually has more right than football to be called our 'national sport', not in terms of numbers of spectators, but because it attracts a much more representative sample of the population. At the races, you will see even more extreme examples of English observance of the fair-play and underdog rules - and indeed of Englishness in general. At race-meetings, you see the English in the behavioural equivalent of full national costume. The unique 'social micro-climate' of the racecourse, characterized by a combination of (relatively) relaxed inhibitions and exceptionally good manners, also seems to bring out the best in us.

Race-meetings, I found, also provide proof that, contrary to popular belief, it is entirely possible for hordes of young males to congregate, drink large quantities of alcohol, and gamble, in an exciting sporting context, without getting into fights or indeed causing any trouble at all. At the races, the same young males whose violence, vandalism and general bad behaviour at football matches and in town centres on Saturday nights has become legendary, not only exhibit none of these obnoxious qualities, but actually apologise when they bump into people (and even, in true English fashion, when people bump into them), and politely open doors for women.

Club Rules

There is an apparent contradiction, which has puzzled a number of commentators, between the strong individualism of the English and our penchant for forming and joining clubs, between our obsession with privacy and our 'clubbability'. Jeremy Paxman notes that the supposedly insular, individualistic, privacy-fixated English have clubs for almost everything: 'There are clubs to go fishing, support football teams, play cards, arrange flowers, race pigeons, make jam, ride bicycles, watch birds, even for going on holiday'. I won't attempt a more comprehensive list - it would take up half the book: just as every conceivable English leisure pursuit has a magazine or six, each one also has clubs, if not a National Society, with a whole network of Regional Groups and subdivisions. Usually there are two rival National Societies, with marginally different views on the activity in question, who spend most of their time happily bickering and squabbling with each other.

Citing de Tocqueville, 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 emphasizes the fact 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 socialize 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, amateur dramatics, charity, breeding rabbits, whatever) is the real point of the gathering, and that social bonding is just a secondary side-effect.

It's that self-delusion thing again. The English constantly form clubs and societies for exactly the same reason that we have so many sports and games: 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 pragmatic de Tocqueville/Paxman explanation of English clubbiness is a very English one: it perfectly describes this illusion, but fails to recognize that it is an illusion - that 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.

If you are very English, you may well choose to reject my explanation. I don't like it much myself. I would much rather believe that I joined, say, the Arab Horse Society, and attended meetings of its Chiltern Regional Group, because I had an Arab stallion and was interested in breeding and riding Arab horses and participating in shows, events and discussions with other aficionados. I would like to think that at university I joined umpteen left-wing political groups, and went on countless demonstrations and marches and CND rallies, because of my firmly held convictions and principles55. And indeed, these were the conscious reasons. I am not saying that the English deliberately set out to trick themselves into sociability. But if I'm ruthlessly honest with myself, I have to admit that I also liked the sense of belonging, the ease of socializing 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, to be sociable, without any shared hobbies or horses or political hobby-horses to help things along.

If you are a member of an English club or society, you may also resent my lumping them all together like this, as though there were no significant difference between the Arab Horse Society and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, or between, say, a Women's Institute meeting and a meeting of a bikers' club. Well, sorry, but I have to report that there is indeed very little difference. I've been a member of many English clubs and societies, and gate-crashed a few others in the course of my research, and they are all much of a muchness. Meetings of regional or local branches of the AHS, CND, WI and MAG (Motorcycle Action Group) all follow more or less the same pattern. They start with the usual English awkward greetings and jokes and some preliminary weather-speak. There is tea, and sandwiches or biscuits (both if you're lucky), a lot of gossip, a lot of ritual moaning and a lot of in-jokes. These are followed by a bit of throat-clearing and attempts to get the meeting started without seeming pompous or officious. The unwritten rules prescribe slightly self-mocking tones when using official meeting-speak terms such as 'agenda', 'minutes' 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.

There is some discussion of important matters, punctuated by jokes, bitching about enemies (or rival clubs with the same interests - MAG members bitch about the British Motorcycle Federation, for example), and polite territorial squabbling among members over largely irrelevant details. Occasionally, a decision or resolution is reached, or at least a consensus of opinion, with the actual decision deferred till the next meeting. Then more tea, with more joking, gossiping and moaning - especially moaning (I defy you to find an English club or society whose members do not feel misunderstood or put-upon in some way), finishing up with the usual prolonged English goodbyes. Sometimes there is a guest speaker, who must be feted and fussed over and politely applauded, however dull and unenlightening their speech. But the basic pattern is always the same. If you've seen one meeting of an English club or society, you've seen them all. Even an Anarchist meeting I attended followed the same sequence, although it was much better organized than most, and at the demonstration the next day the members were all dressed in uniform black, carrying professional-looking banners, chanting in unison and marching in step.

Pub Rules

You've probably got the message by now that I think pubs are quite an important part of English culture. Of all the 'social facilitators' that help the inhibited English to engage and bond with each other, the pub is the most popular. There are around fifty-thousand or so pubs in England, frequented by three-quarters of the adult population, many of whom are 'regulars', treating their local pub almost as a second home. This national love-affair with the pub shows no sign of waning: overall, about a third of the adult population are 'regulars', visiting the pub at least once a week - but among the younger age-groups, this proportion rises to 64 per cent.

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, cyber-pubs, sports pubs - as well as a number of other kinds of drinking-places such as cafe-bars and wine bars. Much fuss has been made about these novelties, of course, much huffing and puffing, dire warnings and doom and gloom. 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 can't help wondering how the author now feels every time he passes a Rose amp; Crown or a Red Lion and sees people still happily drinking and playing darts). But a lot of this precipitate mourning is just typical English Eeyorishness, and the rest is the result of a syndrome similar to 'ethnographic dazzle': the doom-mongers are so dazzled by superficial differences between the new types of pub and the traditional sort that they cannot see the underlying, enduring similarities - the customs and codes of behaviour that make a pub a pub. Even if the Eeyores were right, the new pubs they object to are still only a small minority, concentrated largely in city centres, and there are still tens of thousands of more traditional 'local' pubs.

It is true that a number of village pubs are struggling, and some in very small villages have had to close, which is sad, as a village is not really a proper village without a pub. Whenever this happens, there are howls of protest in the local papers, and a morose group of villagers is photographed with a handmade 'Save Our Pub' placard. What would save their pub, of course, would be lots of them spending lots of money drinking and eating in it, but they never seem to make this connection. 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, enduring set of unspoken rules. I have already described most of these in the chapter on pub-talk - the pub is an institution devoted to sociability, which even among the English involves communication, so it is not surprising that most of its rules are concerned with language and body language. Some more pub rules were covered in the section on games, but that still leaves a few quite significant ones, such as the rules governing the consumption of alcohol. I don't mean the official licensing laws, but the much more important unwritten codes of social drinking.

Drinking Rules

You can learn a lot about a culture by studying its drinking rules. And every culture has rules about alcohol: there is no such thing as random drinking. In every culture where alcohol is used, drinking is a rule-governed activity, hedged about with prescriptions and norms concerning who may drink how much of what, when, where, with whom, in what manner and with what effects. This is only to be expected. I have already pointed out that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Homo sapiens is our passion for regulation - our tendency to surround even the most basic, essential activities such as eating and mating with a lot of elaborate rules and rituals. But even more than with sex and food, the specific unwritten rules and norms governing the use of alcohol in different cultures invariably reflect the characteristic values, beliefs and attitudes of those cultures. The anthropologist Dwight Heath put it more eloquently when he wrote that: 'just as drinking and its effects are imbedded in other aspects of culture, so are many other aspects of culture imbedded in the act of drinking'. So, if we want to understand Englishness, we need to look more closely at the Englishness of English drinking.

The Rules of Round-buying

Round-buying is the English form of a universal practice: the sharing or reciprocal exchange of drinks. The consumption of alcohol, in all cultures, is a quintessentially social activity, whose ritual practices and etiquettes are designed to promote friendly social interaction. There is certainly nothing uniquely English about reciprocal drink-giving. What is distinctively English, and often baffling or even frightening for foreigners, is the immense, almost religious significance attached to this practice among English pubgoers. Obeying the rules of round-buying is not just good manners, it is a sacred obligation. Failing to buy your round is not just a breach of drinking etiquette: it is heresy.

When I talked to foreign visitors about this, during the research for the pub etiquette book, they found it all a bit extreme. Why, they asked, is round-buying so desperately important to English pubgoers? In the book, I said that round-buying is important to us because it prevents bloodshed. Realizing that this might sound even more extreme, at least to non-anthropologists, I explained a bit further. Reciprocal gift-giving has always been the most effective means of preventing aggression between groups (families, clans, tribes, nations) and between individuals. Among English drinkers, more specifically English male drinkers, this peacekeeping system is essential. This is because the socially challenged English male has a tendency to become aggressive. Male pub-talk, as we have seen, is often highly argumentative, and there is a need for an antidote to these verbal fisticuffs, a means of ensuring that the argument is not taken seriously, and does not escalate into physical aggression. Buying your 'opponent' a drink is a kind of symbolic handshake: it proves that you are still mates. A particularly shrewd (female) publican told me 'If the men didn't buy each other drinks, they'd be at each other's throats. They can be shouting and swearing, but as long as they are still buying each other drinks, I know I won't have a fight on my hands'. I have personally witnessed many apparently heated slanging matches which were amicably concluded with the phrase 'and anyway, it's your round!' or 'and I suppose it's my bloody round again and all, right?' or 'Oh, put a sock in it and get the beers in, will you?'

As well as preventing carnage and mayhem, round-buying is also vitally important because it is an Englishman's substitute for the expression of emotion. The average English male is terrified of intimacy, but he is also human, and therefore has a need to bond with other humans, particularly with other males. This means finding some way of saying 'I like you' to other males, without, of course, actually having to utter anything quite so soppy. Fortunately, such positive feelings can be expressed, without any loss of masculine dignity, by the reciprocal buying of rounds of drinks.

The importance we attach to round-buying is also yet another indicator of our obsession with fair play - round-buying, like queuing, is all about taking turns. But, like every aspect of English etiquette, the unwritten rules of round-buying are complicated, with all the usual sub-clauses and exceptions, and 'fairness' is a somewhat slippery concept - it is not just a simple matter of ensuring roughly equal expenditure on drinks. The rules of round-buying are as follows:

* In any group of two or more people, one person must buy a 'round' of drinks for the whole group. This is not an altruistic gesture: the expectation is that the other member or members of the group will each, in turn, buy a round of drinks. When each person has bought a round, the process begins again with the first person.

* Unless the group is drinking at the bar counter, the person who buys the round must also act as waiter. 'Buying your round' means not only paying for the drinks, but going to the bar, ordering the drinks and carrying them all back to the table. If there are a lot of drinks, another member of the group will usually offer to help, but this is not compulsory, and the round-buyer may have to make two or three trips. The effort involved is as important as the expenditure: it is part of the 'gift'.

* 'Fairness' in round-buying is not a matter of strict justice. One person may well end up buying two rounds during a 'session', while the other members of the group have only bought one round each. Over several 'sessions', rough equality is usually achieved, but it is extremely bad manners to appear overly concerned about this.

* In fact, any sign of miserliness, calculation or reluctance to participate wholeheartedly in the ritual is severely frowned upon. For an English male, saying that someone 'doesn't buy his round' is a dire insult. It is thus important to try always to be among the earliest to say 'It's my round,' rather than waiting until the other members of the group have bought 'their' rounds and it is quite obviously your turn.

* Perhaps surprisingly, I found that on average 'initiating' round-buyers (those who regularly buy the first round) actually spend no more money in the long term than 'waiting' round-buyers (those who do not offer a round until later in the session). In fact, far from being out-of-pocket, 'initiators' often end up rather better off than those who wait, because their popularity and reputation for generosity means that others are inclined to be generous towards them.

* One should never wait until all one's companions' glasses are empty before offering to buy the next round. The correct time to say 'It's my round' is when the majority of the glasses are about three-quarters empty. This rule is not so much about proving one's generosity, more a matter of ensuring that the flow of alcohol is continuous - that no-one is ever left without a drink for even a few minutes.

* It is acceptable occasionally to refuse a drink during the round-buying process, as long as you do not attempt to make an issue or a moral virtue out of your moderate intake, but this does not exempt you from the round-buying obligation. Even if you are drinking less than the others, you should still 'buy your round'. It would be very rude, however, to refuse a drink that is offered as a 'peace-making' gesture, or that is clearly a significant, personal friendship-signal.

There is usually no excuse for failing to perform the sacred round-buying ritual, but there are a few exceptions to the round-buying rules, relating to the size of the drinking group and the demographics of its members.

THE NUMBERS EXCEPTION In a very large group, traditional round-buying can sometimes be prohibitively expensive. This is not, however, usually seen as a valid reason to abandon the ritual altogether. Instead, the large group divides into smaller sub-groups (nobody suggests or organizes this, it just happens), each of which follows the normal round-buying procedure. Alternatively, the principle of gift-giving is maintained by having a 'whip round' - collecting a relatively small sum of money from each person to put into a 'kitty', which is then used to buy rounds of drinks for the whole group. Only as a last resort, perhaps among students or others on very low incomes, will members of a large group agree to purchase drinks individually.

THE COUPLE EXCEPTION In some social groups, couples are treated as one person for the purposes of round-buying, in that only the male half of the couple is expected to 'buy his round'. This variation is rarely seen among younger people, unless they are deliberately adopting old-fashioned courtly manners for some special occasion. In normal circumstances, you will only see this practice when the males in the group are over forty. Some older English males cannot cope with the idea of women buying them drinks at all, and extend the couple exception to cover all females in a group, whether or not they are accompanied by an attached male. When out alone with a female, these older, old-fashioned males will also insist on buying all the drinks, whereas younger males will usually expect a female companion to take turns buying rounds in the usual manner.

THE FEMALE EXCEPTION Women generally have considerably less reverence for the round-buying rules than men. In mixed-sex groups, they play along, humouring their male companions by following the prescribed etiquette, but in all-female gatherings you see all sorts of odd variations and even outright flouting of the rules. They do buy each other drinks, but round-buying is just not such a big issue for them - they don't keep track of whose round it is, or have endless friendly disputes about who has or hasn't bought their round, and they tend to find the male obsession with round-buying somewhat tedious and irritating.

This is mainly because English females have much less need for the 'liquid handshake' of reciprocal drink-buying than English males: the argument is not their primary form of communication, so there is no need for peacekeeping gestures, and they are quite capable of conveying that they like each other and achieving intimacy by other means, such as compliments, gossip and reciprocal disclosure. English women may not be as free-and-easy with their disclosures as women from other, less inhibited cultures: they do not tend to tell you all about their divorce and their hysterectomy and what their therapist said within five minutes of meeting you. But once English females become friends, such discussions are commonplace, whereas most English males never get to this stage, even with their best and closest friends.

Even the word 'friend' is a bit difficult, a bit too touchy-feely, for some English males: they prefer to use the term 'mate'. You can be 'mates' with someone without necessarily knowing anything at all about his personal life, let alone his feelings, hopes or fears - except where these concern the performance of his football team or his car. The terms 'mate', 'good mate' and 'best mate' are ostensibly used to convey varying degrees of intimacy, but even your 'best mate' may know little or nothing about your marital problems - or only as much as can be conveyed in a jokey-blokey, mock-moaning manner, to which he can respond, 'Women! Huh! Typical!' You would, of course, risk your life for him, and he for you. Your 'best mate' may have a better idea of your golf handicap than the names of your children, but you actually care deeply about each other. Still, that goes without saying, right, so there's no need to cause unnecessary embarrassment by saying it. And anyway, it's your round, mate.

You Are What You Drink

Another 'human universal' is important here: in all cultures where more than one type of alcoholic drink is available, drinks are classified in terms of their social meaning, and these classifications help to define the social world. No alcoholic drink is ever 'socially neutral'. In England, as elsewhere, 'What's yours?' is a socially loaded question, and we judge and classify people on their answer. Choice of beverage is rarely just a matter of personal taste.

Among other symbolic functions, drinks can be used as indicators of social status, and as gender differentiators. These are the two most important symbolic functions of alcoholic beverages among the English: your choice of drink (in public at least) is determined mainly by your sex and social class, with some age-related variations. The rules are as follows:

* Working-class and lower-middle-class females have the widest choice of drinks. Almost anything is socially acceptable - cocktails, sweet or creamy liqueurs, all soft-drinks, beers and so-called 'designer' drinks (pre-mixed drinks in bottles). There is really only one restriction: the size of glass from which lower-class women may drink beer. Drinking 'pints', in many working-class and lower-middle circles, is regarded as unfeminine and unladylike, so most women in this social group drink 'halves' (half-pints) of beer. Drinking pint glasses of beer would classify you as a 'ladette' - a female 'lad', a woman who imitates the loutish, raucous behaviour of hard-drinking males. Some women are happy with this image, but they are still a minority.

* Next on the freedom-of-choice scale are middle-middle to upper-class females. Their choice is more restricted: the more sickly-sweet drinks, and cream-based liqueurs and cocktails, are regarded as a bit vulgar - ordering a Bailey's or a Babycham would certainly cause a few raised eyebrows and sideways looks - but they can drink more or less any wines, spirits, sherries, soft-drinks, ciders or beers. Female pint-drinking is also more acceptable in this social category, at least among the younger women, particularly students. Among upper-middle-class female students, I found that many felt that they had to give an explanation if they ordered a 'girly' half rather than a pint.

* The choices of middle- and upper-class males are far more restricted than those of their female counterparts. They may drink only beer, spirits (mixers are acceptable), wine (must be dry, not sweet) and soft-drinks. Anything sweet or creamy is regarded as suspiciously 'feminine', and cocktails are only acceptable at cocktail parties or in a cocktail bar - you would never order them in a pub or ordinary bar.

* Working-class males have virtually no choice at all. They can drink only beer or spirits - everything else is effeminate. Among older working-class males, even some mixers may be forbidden: gin-and-tonic may be just about acceptable in some circles, but more obscure combinations are frowned upon. Younger working-class males have a bit more freedom: vodka-and-coke is acceptable, for example, as are the latest novelties and 'designer' bottled drinks, providing they have a high enough alcohol content.

The Rules of Drunkenness - and the 'Become Loud and Aggressive and Obnoxious' Method

Another 'universal': the effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by social and cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol. There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. In some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia), drinking is associated with aggression, violence and anti-social behaviour, while in others (such as Latin/Mediterranean cultures) drinking behaviour is largely peaceful and harmonious. This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption or genetic differences, but is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations regarding the effects of alcohol and different social norms regarding drunken comportment.

This basic fact has been proved time and again, not just in qualitative cross-cultural research but in carefully controlled proper scientific experiments - double-blind, placebos and all. To put it simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol. The English believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when they are given what they think are alcoholic drinks - but are in fact non-alcoholic 'placebos' - they shed their inhibitions: they become more flirtatious, and males (young males in particular) often become aggressive.

Which brings me to the third method the English use to deal with their chronic, incurable social dis-ease: the 'become loud and aggressive and obnoxious' method. I am certainly not the first to have noticed this dark and unpleasant side to the English character. Visitors have been commenting on it for centuries, and our habit of national self-flagellation ensures that not a week goes by without some mention of it in our own newspapers. Football hooligans, road rage, lager louts, neighbours-from-hell, drunken brawling, delinquency, disorder and downright impudence. These infelicities are invariably attributed either to a vague, idiopathic 'decline in moral standards' or to the effects of alcohol, or both. Neither of these explanations will do. Even the most cursory scan of English social history confirms that our current bouts of obnoxious drunken disorder are nothing new and, even leaving aside the placebo experiments, it is clear that many other nations manage to consume much larger quantities of alcohol than us without becoming rude, violent and generally disgusting.

Our beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol are certainly at least partly to blame, as they act as self-fulfilling prophecies. If you firmly believe and expect that alcohol will make you aggressive, then it will do exactly that. But this still leaves the question of why we should hold such strange beliefs. The notion that alcohol is a dangerous disinhibitor is not peculiar to the English: it is shared by a number of other cultures, known to the anthropologists and other social scientists who take an interest in such matters as 'ambivalent', 'dry', 'Nordic' or 'temperance' cultures - cultures with an ambivalent, morally charged, love/hate, forbidden-fruit relationship with alcohol, usually the result of a history of temperance movements. These are contrasted with 'integrated', 'wet', 'Mediterranean' or 'non-temperance' cultures - those for whom alcohol is simply a normal, integral, taken-for-granted, morally neutral part of everyday life; generally cultures that have been fortunate enough to escape the attentions of temperance campaigners. 'Integrated' drinking-cultures, despite usually having much higher levels of per-capita alcohol consumption, experience few of the 'alcoholrelated' social and psychiatric problems that afflict 'ambivalent' cultures.

These basic facts are, among my fellow cross-cultural researchers and other dispassionate 'alcohologists', so obvious and commonplace as to be tedious. We are certainly all very weary of repeating them, endlessly, to English audiences who either cannot or will not accept their validity. Much of my professional life has been spent on alcohol-related research of one sort or another, and my colleagues and I have been trotting out the same irrefutable cross-cultural and experimental evidence for over a decade, every time our expertise is called upon by government departments, police conferences, worried brewers and other concerned agencies.

Everyone is always highly surprised - 'Really? You mean there are cultures where people don't believe that alcohol causes violence? How extraordinary!' - and politely determined to let nothing shake their faith in the evil powers of the demon drink. It's like trying to explain the causes of rain to some remote mud-hut tribe in thrall to the magic of witch-doctors and rain-makers. Yes, yes, they say, but of course the real reason it hasn't rained is because the ancestors are angry because the shaman did not perform the rain-dance or goat-sacrifice at the correct time and someone allowed uncircumcised boys or menstruating women to touch the sacred skulls. Everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows that drinking alcohol makes people lose their inhibitions and start bashing each other's heads in.

Or rather, according to the concerned believers at the conferences on 'Alcohol and Public Disorder', alcohol makes other people do this. They themselves are somehow immune: they can get quite squiffy at the office Christmas party, or over a few bottles of good Cabernet Sauvignon with their friends, or gin-and-tonics in the pub or whatever, without ever throwing a single punch, or even using bad language. Alcohol, it seems, has the specific power to make working-class people violent and abusive. Which if you think about it is truly miraculous - a much more impressive magical feat than rain-making. We hold these strange beliefs about the powers of alcohol because, like other irrational religious tenets, they help us to explain the inexplicable - and, in this case, to avoid the issue. By blaming the booze, we sidestep the uncomfortable question of why the English, so widely admired for their courtesy, reserve and restraint, should also be renowned for their oafishness, crudeness and violence.

My view is that our courteous reserve and our obnoxious aggression are two sides of the same coin. More precisely, they are both symptoms of the same social dis-ease. We suffer from a congenital sociability-disorder, a set of deeply ingrained inhibitions that make it difficult for us to express emotion and engage in the kind of casual, friendly social interaction that seems to come naturally to most other nations. How we have come to be like this, why we are afflicted with this dis-ease, is a bit of mystery, which I may or may not be able to solve by the end of this book, but it is possible to diagnose an illness or disorder without necessarily knowing its cause. With psychological disorders such as this one, whether at the individual or national level, the cause is often difficult or even impossible to determine, but that does not prevent us pronouncing the patient to be autistic, or agoraphobic, or whatever.

Those were supposed to be random examples, but now that I come to think of it, the English social dis-ease has some symptoms in common with both autism and agoraphobia. But let's be charitable and politically correct and just say that we are 'socially challenged'.

Whatever we choose to call it, the symptoms of the English social dis-ease involve opposite extremes: when we feel uncomfortable or embarrassed in social situations (that is, most of the time), we become either over-polite, courteous, buttoned-up and awkwardly restrained, or loud, loutish, aggressive, violent and generally insufferable. There seem to be no in-between states, and certainly no happy medium. Both extremes are regularly exhibited by English people of all social classes, with or without the assistance of the demon drink.

The worst of the 'loud and obnoxious' extreme tends, however, to be largely confined to specific, well-defined periods of 'cultural remission', such as town centres on Friday and Saturday nights, and holidays at home and abroad, when it is customary for hordes of young people to congregate in pubs, bars and night-clubs and get drunk. Getting drunk is not an accidental by-product of the evening's entertainment: it is the primary objective - young English revellers and holidaymakers (male and female) set out quite deliberately to achieve this goal, and they are almost invariably successful (we're English, remember, we can get roaring drunk on non-alcoholic placebos). To prove to their companions that they have attained the socially desirable degree of drunkenness, they generally feel obliged to do something 'mad' - to put on some sort of display of outrageously disinhibited behaviour. The repertoire of approved displays is actually quite limited, and not terribly outrageous, ranging from relatively tame shouting and swearing to rather more ambitiously offensive antics such as 'mooning' (pulling down one's trousers to show one's naked bottom - bottoms being regarded as intrinsically funny among young English males) and, more rarely, fighting.

For a very small minority, a Saturday night's revelry is just not complete without a bit of a punch-up. These are generally rule-governed, predictable, almost choreographed affairs, consisting mainly of a lot of macho posturing and bravado, occasionally escalating to a drunken, clumsy exchange of blows. Such incidents are often sparked off by nothing more than a fraction of a second too much eye contact. It is remarkably easy to start a fight with the average young, inebriated English male: all you have to do is make eye contact, hold it a little too long (anything over about a second will do - the English are not keen on eye contact), then say, 'What you lookin' at?' The response may well be a repetition of the question 'What you lookin' at?' - very like the traditional English 'How do you do?' exchange: our obnoxiousnesses are about as awkward, irrational and inelegant as our politenesses.

These problems are much less evident, it must be said, among those young people who use illegal 'recreational drugs', such as cannabis and ecstasy, as their social facilitators, rather than alcohol. We believe that cannabis makes you mellow and pleasantly relaxed ('chilled out', in current parlance) and that ecstasy makes you lively, euphoric, full of goodwill towards fellow revellers, and a brilliant dancer. Apart from the quality of the dancing, these beliefs are largely self-fulfilling prophecies, and a good time is had by all.