Watching the English

CALENDRICAL RITES AND OTHER TRANSITIONS

Calendrical rites include big celebrations such as Christmas and New Year's Eve, and others that occur at the same time every year, such as Easter, May Day, Harvest Festivals, Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes' Night, as well as Mothers' Day, Valentine's Day and Bank Holidays. I'm including our annual summer holidays in this category, as they are seasonal and therefore essentially calendrical, even though they do not occur on fixed dates. (Some nit-pickers might argue that the summer holiday is not, strictly speaking, a 'rite', or at least not in the same sense as Christmas or Harvest Festivals, but I think it qualifies, and will explain why later.) Also in this category would be the daily/weekly work-to-play transitional ritual of after-work drinks in the pub, but I've already covered this one in detail in the chapter on work.

Under 'other transitions' I'm including life-cycle rites of passage other than the major ones covered above - such as retirement celebrations, 'significant' birthdays (decade marks) and wedding anniversaries (silver, golden) - and rituals marking other social/place/status/lifestyle transitions, such as housewarmings and 'leaving dos'.

This all adds up to an awful lot of rites, many of which, like the major life-cycle transitions, are in most respects largely similar to their equivalents in other modern Western industrialized cultures. Gifts, parties, special meals, songs and decorations at Christmas; chocolate eggs at Easter; cards and flowers on Valentine's Day; alcohol at almost all festive occasions; food at most; etc. Rather than attempt to describe each rite in exhaustive detail, I will focus mainly on the broader unwritten social rules governing peculiarly English patterns of behaviour associated with these rites.

All human cultures have seasonal and transitional celebratory rites of some sort. Other animals just automatically register things such as the passing of the seasons, and adjust their behaviour accordingly: humans have to make a huge song-and-dance about every little calendrical punctuation mark. Fortunately for anthropologists, humans are also quite predictable, and tend to make pretty much the same kind of song-and-dance about such things - or at least the festivities of different cultures tend to have a lot of features in common. Singing and dancing, for example. Most also involve eating, and virtually all involve alcohol.

The Role of Alcohol

The role of alcohol in celebration is particularly important in understanding the English, and requires a little bit of explanation. In all cultures where alcohol is used at all, it is a central element of celebration. There are two main reasons for this. First, carnivals and festivals are more than just a bit of fun: in most cultures, these events involve a degree of 'cultural remission' - a conventionalised relaxation of social controls over behaviour. Behaviour which would normally be frowned upon or even explicitly forbidden (e.g. promiscuous flirting, raucous singing, cross-dressing, jumping in fountains, talking to strangers, etc.) may, for the duration of the festivities, be actively encouraged. These are liminal periods - marginal, borderline intervals, segregated from everyday existence, allowing us, briefly, to explore alternative ways of being. There is a natural affinity between alcohol and liminality, whereby the experience of intoxication mirrors the experience of ritually induced liminality. The chemical effects of alcohol echo the cultural chemistry of the festival.

But although humans seem to have a deep-seated need for these altered states of consciousness, for an escape from the restrictions of mundane existence, liminality is also rather scary. The fact that we restrict our collective pursuit of altered states and alternative realities to specific, limited contexts suggests that our desire for this liberation is by no means unequivocal - that it is balanced by an equally powerful need for the stability and security of mundane existence. We may be enthralled by the liminal experience of the carnival, but we are also afraid of it; we like to visit alternative worlds, but we wouldn't want to live there. Alcohol plays a double or 'balancing' role in the context of festive rituals: the altered states of consciousness induced by alcohol allow us to explore desired but potentially dangerous alternative realities, while the social meanings of drinking - the rules of convivial sociability invariably associated with the consumption of alcohol - provide a reassuring counterbalance. By drinking, we enable and enhance the experience of liminality that is central to festive rites, but the familiar, everyday, comforting, sociable rituals of sharing and pouring and round-buying, the social bonding that is synonymous with drinking, help us somehow to tame or even 'domesticate' the disturbing aspects of this liminal world.

So, there are the universals. But there are also some cross-cultural variations. Although alcohol and celebration are inextricably bound together in all societies where alcohol is used, the connection appears to be stronger in 'ambivalent' drinking cultures - those with a morally charged relationship with alcohol, where one needs a reason for drinking, such as England - than in 'integrated' drinking cultures, where drinking is a morally neutral element of normal life and requires no justification. The English (along with the US, Australia, most of Scandinavia, Iceland, etc.) feel that they have to have an excuse for drinking - and the most common and popular excuse is celebration. In 'integrated' drinking cultures (such as France, Spain and Italy) there is little or no disapprobation of drinking, and therefore no need to find excuses for drinking. Festivity is strongly associated with alcohol in these integrated cultures, but is not invoked as a justification for every drinking occasion: a celebration most certainly requires alcohol, but every drink does not require a celebration.

The Celebration Excuse - and Magical Beliefs

As well as cross-cultural research with my SIRC colleagues on festive drinking, I did a study a few years ago specifically on English celebrations and attitudes to celebrating. This study involved the usual combination of observation-fieldwork, informal interviews and a national survey.

The main finding was that the English appear to be a nation of dedicated 'party animals', who will seize upon almost any excuse for celebratory drinking. As well as the established calendrical festivals, a staggering 87 per cent of survey respondents mentioned bizarre or trivial events that had provided an excuse for a party, including: 'my teddy-bear's birthday', 'my mate swallowing his tooth', 'when my neighbour's snake laid eggs after we'd thought it was a male', 'the first Friday of the week' and 'the fourteenth anniversary of the death of my pet hamster'.

In addition to the more outlandish excuses, over 60 per cent admitted that something as mundane and insignificant as 'a friend dropping in' had provided a good enough excuse for a bout of celebratory drinking. More than half the population celebrate 'Saturday night', just under half have celebratory drinks merely because 'It's Friday' and nearly 40 per cent of younger respondents felt that 'the end of the working day' was a valid excuse for drunken revelry.

Calling a drinking session a 'celebration' not only gets round our moral ambivalence about alcohol, providing a legitimate excuse for drinking, but also in itself gives us a sort of official licence to shed a few inhibitions. Celebrations are by definition 'liminal' episodes, in which certain normal social restraints can be temporarily suspended. A drink that has been labelled 'celebratory' therefore has even greater magical disinhibiting powers than a drink that is just a drink. 'Celebration' is a magic word: merely invoking the concept of celebration transforms an ordinary round of drinks into a 'party', with all the relaxation of social controls that this implies. Abracadabra! Instant liminality!

This kind of magic works in other cultures as well - and drinks themselves can be used to define and 'dictate' the nature of an occasion, without the need for words, magic or otherwise. Certain types of drink, for example, may be so strongly associated with particular forms of social interaction that serving them in itself acts as an effective indicator of expectations, or even as an instruction to behave in a specified way. In most Western cultures, for instance, champagne is synonymous with celebration, such that if it is ordered or served at an otherwise 'ordinary' occasion, someone will invariably ask 'What are we celebrating?' Champagne prompts festive, cheerful light-heartedness, which is why it would be inappropriate to serve it at funerals. In Austria, sekt is drunk on formal occasions, while schnapps is reserved for more intimate, convivial gatherings - the type of drink served defining both the nature of the event and the social relationship between the drinkers. The choice of drink dictates behaviour to the extent that the mere appearance of a bottle of schnapps can sometimes prompt a switch from the 'polite' form of address, sie, to the intimate du. In England, although we do not have the same clear linguistic distinctions, beer is regarded as a more informal, casual drink than wine, and serving beer with a meal indicates expectations of informal, relaxed behaviour - even guests' body language will be more casual: slumping a bit rather than sitting up straight, adopting more open postures and using more expansive gestures.

In this respect, then, the English are not very different from other humans, but our belief in, and need for, the disinhibiting powers of both drinks and magic words is perhaps stronger than most other cultures', as our social inhibitions are more formidable. Our ambivalence and magical beliefs about alcohol are defining features of all English rites of passage, from the most important life-cycle transitions to the most trivial, trumped-up, teddy-bear's-birthday rituals.

Christmas and New Year's Eve Rules

The English year is punctuated by national calendrical holidays: some are mere commas, others are more important semi-colons; the Christmas holiday and New Year's Eve are the final full stop. Most calendrical rites were originally religious events, often ancient pagan festivals appropriated by Christianity, but the Christian significance of many of these rites is largely ignored. Ironically, they might be said to have reverted to something more like their original pagan roots, which serves the Christians right for hi-jacking them in the first place, I suppose.

Christmas and New Year's Eve are by far the most important. Christmas Day (25th of December) is firmly established as a 'family' ritual, while New Year's Eve is a much more raucous celebration with friends. But when English people talk about 'Christmas' (as in 'What are you doing for Christmas?' or 'I hate Christmas!'), they often mean the entire holiday period, from the 23rd/24th of December right through to New Year's Day, including, typically and traditionally, at least some of the following:

* Christmas Eve (family; last minute shopping; panics and squabbles; tree lights; drinking; too many nuts and chocolates; possibly church - early evening carols or midnight service);

* Christmas Day (family; tree; present-giving rituals; marathon cooking and eating of huge Christmas lunch; the Queen's broadcast on television/radio - or pointedly not watching/listening to the Queen; fall asleep - perhaps while watching The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz or similar; more food and drink; uncomfortable night);

* Boxing Day (hangover; family 'outing' of some sort, if only to local park; long country walk; visiting the other set of relatives; escape from family to pub);

* 27th-30th December (slightly strange 'limbo' period; some back at work, but often achieving very little; others shopping, going for walks, trying to keep children amused; more overeating and drinking; visiting friends/relatives; television; videos; pub);

* New Year's Eve (friends; big boozy parties or pub-crawls; dressing up/fancy-dress; loud music; dancing; champagne, banging pans etc. at midnight; fireworks; 'Auld Lang Syne'; New Year's resolutions; taxi-hunt/long cold walk home)

* New Year's Day (sleep late; hangover)

Many people's Christmases may not follow this pattern, but most will include a few of these ritual elements, and most English people will at least recognise this rough outline of an average, bog-standard Christmas.

Often, the term 'Christmas' comprises much more than this. When people say 'I hate Christmas' or moan about how 'Christmas' is becoming more and more of a nightmare or an ordeal, they are generally including all the 'preparations' for and 'run-up' to Christmas, which may start at least a month ahead, and which involve office/workplace Christmas parties, 'Christmas shopping', a 'Christmas Panto' and quite possibly, for those with school-age children, a school 'Nativity Play' or Christmas concert - not to mention the annual ritual of writing and dispatching large quantities of Christmas cards. English people understand 'Christmas' to include any or all of these customs and activities, as well as the Christmas-week celebrations.

The school Nativity Play is, for many, the only event of any religious content that they will encounter during the Christmas period, although its religious significance tends to get lost in the social drama and ritual of the occasion - particularly the issue of whose children have been fortunate enough to secure the leading roles (Mary, Joseph) and the principal supporting ones (Three Kings, Innkeeper, Head Shepherd, Angel-of-the-Lord), and whose must suffer the indignity of playing mere background shepherds, angels, sheep, cows, donkeys and so on. Or the school may have been gripped by a sudden fit of political correctness and attempted to replace the traditional Nativity with something more 'multicultural' ('we're all very multiculti round here' an Asian youth-worker from Yorkshire told me). This being England, the squabbles and skirmishes over casting and other issues are rarely conducted openly but are more a matter of indirect scheming, Machiavellian manipulation and indignant muttering. On the night, Fathers tend to show up late and record the second half of the Nativity on shaky, cinema-verite video, unfortunately focusing throughout on the wrong sheep.

The Christmas Panto is a bizarre, quintessentially English custom. Almost every local theatre in the country puts on a pantomime at Christmas, in which a children's fairy-tale or folk tale - such as Aladdin, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, Dick Whittington, Mother Goose, etc. - is performed, always with men in drag (known as Pantomime Dames) playing the main female parts and a woman in men's clothes as Principal Boy. Tradition requires much noisy audience-participation for the children, with cries of 'HE'S BEHIND YOU!' 'OH NO HE ISN'T!' 'OH YES HE IS!' (a ritual into which adult members of the audience often throw themselves with considerable gusto), and a script full of salacious double-entendres for the grown-ups (at which the children laugh heartily, before patiently explaining them to their parents).

The Christmas Moan-fest and the Bah-humbug Rule

'Christmas shopping' is the bit many English people are thinking of when they say that they hate Christmas, and usually means shopping for Christmas presents, food, cards, decorations and other trappings. As it is considered manly to profess to detest any sort of shopping, men are particularly inclined to moan about how much they dislike Christmas. But the Christmas-moan is now something of a national custom, and both sexes generally start moaning about Christmas in early November.

There is effectively an unwritten rule prescribing 'bah-humbug', anti-Christmas moaning rituals at this time of year, and it is unusual to encounter anyone over the age of eighteen who will admit to unequivocal enjoyment of Christmas. This does not stop those who dislike Christmas taking a certain pride in their distaste, as though they were the first people ever to notice 'how commercial the whole thing has become' or how 'it starts earlier every year - soon there'll be bloody Christmas decorations in August' or how it seems to get more and more expensive, or how impossibly crowded the streets and shops are.

Christmas-moaners recite the same platitudes every year, fondly imagining that these are original thoughts, and that they are a beleaguered, discerning minority, while the eccentric souls who actually like Christmas shopping and all the other rituals tend to keep quiet about their unorthodox tastes. They may even join in the annual moan-fest, just to be polite and sociable - much as people who enjoy rain will often courteously agree that the weather is beastly. The cynical 'bah, humbug!' position is the norm (particularly among men, many of whom find something almost suspiciously effeminate about an adult male who admits to liking Christmas) and everyone loves a good Christmas moan, so why spoil their fun? Those of us who actively enjoy Christmas tend to be almost apologetic about our perversity: 'Well, yes, but, um, to be honest, I actually like all the naff decorations and finding presents for people... I know it's deeply uncool...'

Not all Christmas-moaners are mindless, sheep-like followers of the 'bah-humbug' rule. Two groups of Christmas-haters who have good reason to complain, and for whom I do have sympathy, are parents struggling on low incomes, for whom the expense of buying presents that will please their children is a real problem, and working mothers for whom, even if they are not poor, the whole business can truly be more of a strain than a pleasure.

Christmas-present Rules

A gift, as any first-year anthropology student can tell you, is never free. In all cultures, gifts tend to come with some expectation of a return - this is not a bad thing: reciprocal exchanges of gifts are an important form of social bonding. Even gifts to small children, who cannot be expected to reciprocate in kind, are no exception to this universal rule: children receiving Christmas presents are supposed to reciprocate with gratitude and good behaviour. The fact that they often do no such thing is beside the point - a rule is not invalidated just because people break it. It is interesting to note that in the case of very young children, who cannot be expected to understand this rule, we do not give Christmas presents 'directly', but invent a magical being, Father Christmas, from whom the gifts are said to come. The traumatic discovery that Father Christmas does not exist is really the discovery of the laws of reciprocity, the fact that Christmas presents come with strings attached.

English squeamishness about money can be a problem in this context, particularly for the upper-middle and upper classes, who are especially sensitive about it. Talking about how much a Christmas present cost is regarded as terribly vulgar; actually telling someone the price of their present, or even that it was 'expensive', would be crass beyond belief. Although general, non-specific complaints about the cost of Christmas presents are allowed, harping on and on about the financial aspects of gift-exchange is uncouth and inconsiderate, as it makes recipients of gifts feel awkward.

Actual expenditure on Christmas presents seems to be inversely related to income, with poor, working-class families tending to give more lavish gifts, especially to children, often going heavily into debt in the process. The middle classes (particularly the 'interfering classes') tut-tut sanctimoniously over this, and congratulate themselves on their superior prudence, while tucking in to their overpriced organic vegetables and admiring the tasteful Victorian ornaments on their tree.

New Year's Eve and the Orderly-disorder Rule

New Year's Eve, which more of us will admit to enjoying (although some of the bah-humbug brigade make the same complaints every year about the boring sameness of it all) is a more straightforward carnival - with all the usual, standard liminal stuff: cultural remission, legitimized deviance, festive inversions, altered states of consciousness, communitas and so on - and it is more obviously a direct descendant of pagan mid-winter festivals, uncluttered by Christian meddling with the imagery or sanitization of the rituals.

As with Freshers' Week, office Christmas parties and most other English carnival rites, the extent of actual debauchery and anarchy tends to be greatly overestimated, both by the puritanical killjoys who disapprove of such festivities and by those participants who like to see themselves as wild, fun-loving rebels. In reality, our New-Year's-Eve drunken debauchery is a fairly orderly sort of disorder, in which only certain specified taboos may be broken, only the usual designated inhibitions may be shed, and the standard rules of English drunken etiquette apply: mooning but not flashing; fighting but not queue-jumping; bawdy jokes but not racist ones; 'illicit' flirting and, in some circles, snogging, but not adulterous sex; promiscuity but not, if you are straight, homosexuality, nor heterosexual lapses if you are gay; vomiting and (if male) urinating in the street, but never defecating; and so on.

Minor Calendricals - Commas and Semi-colons

And as New Year's Eve is understood to be the most debauched and disinhibited of our calendrical rites, the rest (Hallowe'en, Guy Fawkes' Night, Easter, May Day, Valentine's, etc.) tend to be pretty tame - although they all have their origins in much more boisterous pagan festivals.

Our May Day, with staid, respectable, usually middle-aged Morris Dancers and the occasional innocent children's maypole, is a revival of the ancient pagan rites of Beltane. In some parts of the country, counter-culture/New Age revellers with dreadlocks, beads and multiple body-piercings celebrate May Day alongside the Morris Dancers and the Neighbourhood-Watch/Parish-Council types - an odd-looking juxtaposition, but generally amicable. Hallowe'en - fancy-dress and sweets - is a descendant of All Souls' Eve, a festival of communion with the dead, also of pagan origin and celebrated in various forms in many cultures around the world.

The practice of lighting bonfires and burning effigies in early November is another pagan one - common at 'fire festivals' welcoming the winter (the effigies represented the old year) - adapted in the seventeenth century to commemorate the defeat of Guy Fawkes's plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. It is still also known as Bonfire Night and Fireworks Night66, and is now celebrated with firework-parties over a period of at least a fortnight, rather than just on the night of the 5th of November. Valentine's Day - cards, flowers, chocolate - is a sanitized Christian version of the Ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, originally held on the 15th February, which was a much more raunchy celebration of the 'coming of spring' (in other words, the start of the mating season) designed to ensure the fertility of fields, flocks and people.

Many people think of Easter as one of the few genuinely Christian calendricals, but even its name is not Christian, being a variant of Eostre, the Saxon goddess of spring, and many of our Easter customs - eggs and so on - are based on pagan fertility rites. Some otherwise non-practising Christians may go to a church service on Easter Sunday, and even some totally non-religious people 'give something up' for the traditional fasting period of Lent (it's a popular time to restart one's New-Year's-Resolution diet, which somehow lost its momentum by the third week in January).

As calendrical punctuation marks go, these are mostly just commas. Easter qualifies as a semi-colon, as it involves a day's holiday from work, and is used as a reference point - people talk about doing things 'by Easter' or 'after Easter', or something happening 'around Easter'. Valentine's Day also just about counts as a semi-colon, although we don't get a day off work, as it plays a significant part in our courtship and mating practices (significant enough to cause a big peak in the suicide rates, anyway).

In addition to these 'mainstream' national calendricals, every English ethnic and religious minority has its own annual punctuation marks: the Hindu Divali and Janamashtami; the Sikh Divali and Vaisakhi; Muslim Ramadan, Eid-Ul-Fitr and Al-Hijra; Jewish Chanukkah, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana, to name just the first few that immediately spring to mind. And every English sub-culture has its own calendricals - its own annual tribal gatherings and festivals. These include the upper-class 'Season', of which the Royal Ascot race-meeting, the Henley Regatta and Wimbledon tennis championships (always abbreviated to just 'Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon') are the principal events. The racing fraternity have the Grand National, the Cheltenham Festival and the Derby in addition to Ascot; Goths have their annual Convention at Whitby in Yorkshire; New Agers, other counter-culture groups and young music-lovers have their Festival at Glastonbury; Modern Druids have the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge; the literati have Hay-on-Wye; opera-lovers have Glyndebourne and Garsington; dog-lovers have Crufts; bikers have the BMF Show at Peterborough; horsey folk have Badminton, Hickstead and the Horse of the Year Show; and so on. There are thousands of these sub-cultural calendricals, far too many to list, but each one, to its adherents, may be much more important than Christmas. And I have only mentioned the 'Christmases' - every sub-culture has its own minor calendricals as well, its own semi-colons and commas.

But even the minor punctuation marks are necessary: we need these special days, these little mini-festivals, to provide breaks from our routine and give structure to our year - just as regular mealtimes structure our days. That's 'we humans', of course, not just 'we English', but we English do seem to have a particular need for regular 'time out' from our rigid social controls.

Holidays...

Which brings me rather neatly to the concept of holidays, and especially the summer holiday. I am including this under 'calendrical rites' (although nit-pickers might argue that technically it is neither) as it is an annually recurring event of possibly even greater cultural significance than Christmas, which in my book makes it calendrical, and a 'liminal' ritual conforming in important respects to the pattern identified by van Gennep as characteristic of rites of passage, which in my book makes it a 'rite'. (And this is my book, so I can call things calendrical rites if I choose.)

In terms of punctuation marks (I can labour metaphors too, if I wish), the summer holiday is an ellipsis (...), the three dots indicating passage of time, or something unspoken, or a significant pause or break in the narrative flow, often with a suggestion of mystery attached. I've always felt there was something decidedly liminal about those three dots. There is certainly something very liminal about the summer holiday: this two- or three-week break is a time outside regular, mundane existence, a special time when the normal controls, routines and restraints are suspended, and we feel a sense of liberation from the workaday world. We are free from the exigencies of work, school or housekeeping routines - this is playtime, 'free' time, time that is 'ours'. On holiday, we say, 'your time is your own'.

Summer holidays are an alternative reality: if we can, we go to another country; we dress differently; we eat different, special, more indulgent food ('Go on, have another ice-cream, you're on holiday!') - and we behave differently. The English on their summer holiday are more relaxed, more sociable, more spontaneous, less hidebound and uptight. (In a national study conducted by my SIRC colleagues, 'being more sociable' was one of the three most common responses when people were asked what they most associated with summer, the other two being 'pub gardens' and 'barbecues', which are both essentially also about sociability.) We speak of holidays as a time to 'let our hair down', 'have fun', 'let off steam', 'unwind', 'go a bit mad'. We may even talk to strangers. The English don't get much more liminal than that.

English holidays - summer holidays in particular - are governed by the same laws of cultural remission as carnivals and festivals. Like 'celebration', 'holiday' is a magic word. As with festivals, however, cultural remission does not mean an unbridled, anarchic free-for-all, but rather a regulated sort of rowdiness, a selective spontaneity, in which specified inhibitions are shed in a prescribed, conventional manner.

The English on holiday do not suddenly or entirely stop being English. Our defining qualities do not disappear: our behaviour is still dictated by the ingrained rules of humour, hypocrisy, modesty, class-consciousness, fair play, social dis-ease and so on. But we do let our guard down a bit. The cultural remission of holiday law does not cure us of our social dis-ease, but the symptoms are to some extent 'in remission'.

We do not miraculously become any more socially skilled, of course, but we do become more socially inclined - more open, less buttoned-up. This is not always a good thing, or even a pleasant sight, as the native inhabitants of some of our favoured foreign holiday resorts will testify. Some of us are quite frankly nicer when we are not shedding our inhibitions all over the place, along with our trousers, our bras, the contents of our stomachs and our dignity. As I keep pointing out, our famous polite reserve and our almost equally renowned loutish obnoxiousness are two sides of the same coin: for some of us, the magic word 'holiday' has an unfortunate tendency to flip that coin.

For good or ill, the liminal laws of carnival/holiday time apply to minor calendricals such as Bank Holidays as well - and even to ordinary weekends. (Some members of non-mainstream sub-culture tribes, for instance, may only be able to adopt their 'alternative' dress, lifestyle and persona during this liminal time-out. The more dedicated, or simply more fortunate, full-time members of these tribes refer to the part-timers rather dismissively as, for example, 'weekend Goths' or 'weekend bikers'.) Evenings and lunch-hours are also mini-remissions, and even coffee- and tea-breaks can be - what's even smaller? - nano-remissions, perhaps. Little oases of time-out; tiny, almost homeopathic doses of therapeutic liminality.

We talk about 'getting back to reality' or 'back to the real world' after a holiday, and part of the meaning and function of holidays is to define that 'real world' more sharply. Holidays and mini-remissions do not challenge or subvert the norms and laws that are sometimes suspended for their duration; quite the opposite: holidays highlight and reinforce these rules. By labelling holidays as 'different', 'special' and 'unreal', we remind ourselves of what is 'normal' and 'real'. By breaking the rules in a conscious, structured manner, we throw these important norms into sharp relief, and ensure our own obedience to them back in 'real' time. Every year, English holidaymakers, sighing at the prospect of 'getting back to reality', comfort each other with the wise words: 'But of course if it were like this all the time, we wouldn't appreciate it'. Quite true. But the reverse is also true: holidays help us to appreciate the structure and certainties - and even the restraints - of our 'normal' life and routines. The English can only take so much liminality. By the end of the summer holidays, we have had enough of indulgence and excess, and yearn for a bit of moderation.

Other Transitions - Intimate Rites and Irregular Verbs

Decade-marking birthdays and wedding anniversaries, house-warmings, workplace 'leaving dos' and retirement celebrations are usually smaller and more informal affairs than the big life-cycle transitions described earlier, although some may be no less important to the individuals concerned.

As these transitions tend to be celebrated privately, among immediate family and close friends, they are generally less socially challenging, and thus less awkward and stilted, than big life-cycle rites such as weddings and funerals. In private, among people we know very well, the English are quite capable of warmth, openness, intimacy and the full gamut of human emotions associated with friendship and family ties. Some of us are more warm and open than others, but that is a matter of individual differences in personality, and has little or nothing to do with national character.

Retirement celebrations and 'leaving dos' that take place at work are an exception, as those involved may often not all be close friends of the person whose departure is being ritually marked. These events are therefore more likely to be characterized by the usual Englishnesses: social dis-ease symptoms, medicated with incessant humour and alcohol; polite egalitarianism masking class obsessions; modest, self-deprecating speeches full of indirect boasts; moaning rituals; jokey presentation of gifts; drunken 'disinhibition'; awkward handshakes, clumsy back-pats and uneasy embraces.

Truly private rites of passage - birthdays, anniversaries, housewarmings and retirements celebrated just with chosen close friends and family - are much less predictable. There may be a few generic customs and conventions (cake, balloons, singing, special food, drink, toasts) but the interpretation of these, and the behaviour of the participants, will vary considerably, not just according to their age and class, as might be expected, but also their individual dispositions, personal quirks and histories, unique moods and motivations - the sort of stuff that is really the province of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, rather than us social scientists.

This is all true to some extent of the more formal, less private rites of passage as well - we are individuals on these occasions too, not mere automata acting entirely in accordance with the dictates of national character. But without wishing to deny each of us our individuality, I would maintain that our behaviour at these larger, less intimate gatherings is broadly predictable, and conforms more consistently to the principal 'grammatical' rules of our culture.

Not that our less predictable behaviour at intimate celebrations is in any way 'ungrammatical'. Such events are a bit like irregular verbs: they have their own rules, which allow a much greater degree of warmth, spontaneity and openness than we usually permit ourselves. We are not 'breaking the rules' at these intimate rites. In private, among people we know and trust, the rules of Englishness specifically allow us to behave much more like normal human beings.