32. This is not as improbable as it might sound: cows on the line are quite a frequent problem in this country, and most regular rail passengers will have heard a similar announcement at least once.
33. If you are female, lone males may instead assume that you are chatting them up. They are therefore more than willing to break the denial rule and talk to you, but it can then be difficult to extricate yourself from the conversation. Even the 'formal interview' approach can be misinterpreted, so I tended to avoid speaking to unaccompanied males unless I was a) surrounded by other passengers and b) getting out at the next stop.
34. If you would like to try this yourself, I found that the best method was to pretend to be searching for something in my shoulder-bag: with my head down and hair over my eyes, I could actually still see my 'target' and calculate my trajectory to achieve a relatively gentle bump, while giving the impression that I was genuinely distracted by my bag-fumblings.
35. I have since been told about a cross-cultural study of pedestrians which showed that the Japanese are indeed much more skilled than other nations at avoiding bumping into each other in crowded public places - so this was not just my imagination.
36. The Mondeo example may be out of date by the time you read this, but there will be an equivalent suburban, lower-white-collar car, probably a Ford or Vauxhall, so just substitute the new name.
37. Or even, among the very class-secure, approvaclass="underline" I know one unquestionably upper-middle woman who actually drives a Mondeo. She says that she bought it precisely because of its Mondeo-Man associations with salesmen: 'If the big companies buy it for their travelling salesmen, it must be a reliable car that can take a lot of abuse,' she argues. Such confidence and admirable disdain for the opinion of others is, however, quite rare.
38. Cars purchased in large quantities ('fleets') by companies, generally for the use of travelling sales staff, area managers and other relatively low-grade employees.
39. The exception being very wealthy members of the upper class whose servants are responsible for their car care, and whose cars are therefore cleaned to impeccable upper-working-class standards.
40. I have noticed that those on the political left tend to believe that we have always been awful and unpleasant (citing colonialism, Victorian hypocrisy, etc., etc.), while those on the right favour the 'going to rack and ruin' line, harking back to an earlier age (usually the 1930s, 40s or 50s), when we still had manners, respect, dignity, hard-backed blue passports and so on.
WORK TO RULE
To identify and analyse the behaviour codes of the English at work is a huge, complex and difficult task - so daunting that most other recent books on the English either simply ignore the subject of work altogether, or gloss over it with a few brief mentions. At least, I'm assuming that this aspect of English life and culture is neglected because it is too difficult, as it seems to me that it cannot be regarded as either irrelevant or uninteresting. Perhaps I am being supremely arrogant in even attempting to tackle this subject. My direct personal experience of the English world of work and business is somewhat unorthodox, as almost all of my own working life has been spent in a tiny, struggling, independent research organisation, the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC), run by two very un-businesslike social scientists (myself and my Co-Director Dr Peter Marsh, a social psychologist). But while SIRC itself may not be a typical workplace, the work we do has taken us into a varied and reasonably representative sample of working environments across the country (and in other countries as well, providing at least some basis for cross-cultural comparison).
During the research for this book, almost all of the foreigners I spoke to were somewhat perplexed and confused by English attitudes to work and behaviour at work; they all seemed to feel that there was a 'problem', but they found it hard to pin down or express exactly what the problem was. To some extent, the differing opinions I encountered reflected my informants' own cultural backgrounds - those from Mediterranean, Latin American, Caribbean and some African cultures tended to see the English as rather rigid adherents of the Protestant work ethic, while many Indians, Pakistanis, Japanese and northern Europeans saw us as lazy, feckless and irresponsible (the Asians and Japanese usually tried to put this politely, although their meaning was clear enough; the Germans, Swedes and Swiss were more blunt).
But some of the contradictions seemed inherently English: the same people often expressed admiration for our inventiveness and innovation while deploring our stuffy, pig-headed traditionalism. Americans, supposedly our closest cultural relations, seemed if anything to be the most mystified and disoriented (not to mention irritated) by the anomalies and oddities of English work-culture. This may be partly because they have higher expectations of compatibility and mutual understanding, and are therefore more surprised and unsettled when they find themselves dealing with an 'alien' culture, but even English observers find English attitudes to work confusing. In a textbook entitled British Cultural Identities, the authors claim on one page that 'the dominant British view is that work is a treadmill from which people dream of escaping' and on the next that 'The work ethic is very strong in the UK'. Quite apart from their apparent uncertainty as to which country or countries they are talking about, this contradiction indicates that there are a number of elusive and entangled inconsistencies in English work-culture, which are 'indigenous' and quite independent of the cultural perspective from which they are viewed. I will now try to identify and untangle them.
THE MUDDLE RULES
The French writer Philippe Daudy remarked that 'Continentals are always disconcerted by the English attitude to work. They appear neither to view it as a heavy burden imposed by fate, nor to embrace it as a sacred obligation.' In other words, our attitude to work does not conform to either the Catholic-fatalist or the Protestant-work-ethic model, one or the other of which characterizes the work-cultures of most other European countries. Our position is sort of somewhere in between these two extremes - a typically English exercise in compromise and moderation. Or a typically English muddle, depending on your point of view. But it is not an incomprehensible muddle; it is a rule-governed muddle, the guiding principles of which are as follows:
* We are serious about work, but not too serious.
* We believe that work is a duty, but we wouldn't go so far as to call it a 'sacred' duty, and we also believe it is a bit of a fag and a nuisance, imposed by practical necessity, though, rather than by some mystical 'fate'.
* We constantly moan and complain about work, but we also take a kind of stoical pride in 'getting on with it' and 'doing our best'.
* We indignantly disapprove of those who avoid work - from the minor royals at the top of the social scale to the alleged 'dole-scroungers' at the bottom - but this reflects our strict, almost religious belief in 'fairness', rather than a belief in the sanctity of work itself (such people are seen as 'getting away with' idleness, while the rest of us, who would equally like to be idle, have to work, which is just not fair).