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.

The Underdog Rule

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. The English tendency to support the underdog is one of national stereotypes. To understand the underdog rule, I’d like to tell you an example.

The men’s final at Wimbledon in 2002.

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.

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.

‘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 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.

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.

Football fans are the most patriotic sports spectators. 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 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. 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 young males 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 become legendary, actually apologise when they bump into people and politely open doors for women.

Club Rules

TheEnglish 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’.

The English are not keen on random, spontaneous, street-corner sociability, and it makes them uneasy. They prefer to socialize in an organised, ordered manner, at specific times and places of our choosing, with rules that they can argue about, an agenda, minutes and a monthly newsletter.

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.

Meetings of regional or local branches 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.

Pub Rules

Pubs are quite an important part of English culture. 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.

There is a 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 café-bars and wine bars. The English pub, as an institution, as a micro-society, is still governed by a stable set of unspoken rules. The much more important unwritten codes are the rools of social drinking.

Drinking Rules

You can learn a lot about a culture by studying its drinking rules. In every culture where alcohol is used, drinking is a rule-governed activity, with prescriptions and norms concerning who may drink how much of what, when, where, with whom, in what manner and with what effects. So, if we want to understand Englishness, we need to look more closely at the Englishness of English drinking.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 865