The rules of after-work drinks, and of pub-talk generally, are deeply ingrained in the English psyche. If you ever find that a business discussion or interview you are conducting with an English person is somewhat stilted, over-formal or heavy going, ask the person to 'just talk as though we were in the pub,' or 'tell me about it as you would if we were in the pub.' Everyone will know exactly what you mean: pub-talk is relaxed, informal, friendly talk, not trying to impress, not taking things too seriously. Of course, if you can actually take the person to the nearest pub, so much the better, but I have found that even just 'invoking' the social micro-climate of the pub in this way can reduce tensions and inhibitions.
OFFICE-PARTY RULES
The same principles apply, in intensified form, to office parties (I'm using this, as most people do, as a generic term, covering all parties given by a firm or company for its employees, whether white- or blue-collar) - particularly the annual Christmas party, an established ritual, now invariably associated with 'drunken debauchery' and various other forms of misbehaviour. I have done a couple of studies on this, as part of SIRC's wider research on social and cultural aspects of drinking, and I always know when the run-up to Christmas has officially started, as this is when I start getting phone calls from journalists asking 'Why do people always misbehave at the office Christmas party?' The answer is that we misbehave because misbehaviour is what office Christmas parties are all about: misbehaviour is written in to the unwritten rules governing these events; misbehaviour is expected, it is customary.
By 'misbehaviour', however, I do not mean anything particularly depraved or wicked - just a higher degree of disinhibition than is normally permitted among the English. In my SIRC surveys, 90 per cent of respondents admitted to some form of 'misbehaviour' at office Christmas parties, but simple over-indulgence was the most common 'sin', with nearly 70 per cent confessing to eating and drinking too much. We also found that flirting, 'snogging', telling rude jokes and 'making a fool of yourself' are standard features of the office Christmas party.
Among the under-thirties, 50 per cent see the office Christmas party as a prime flirting and 'snogging' opportunity, and nearly 60 per cent confessed to making fools of themselves. Thirty- and forty-somethings were only slightly more restrained, with 40 per cent making fools of themselves at Christmas parties, often by 'saying things they would never normally say'. Although this festive 'blabbing' can sometimes cause embarrassment, it can also have positive effects: 37 per cent had made friends with a former enemy or rival, or 'made up' after a quarrel, at a Christmas party, and 13 per cent had plucked up the courage to tell someone they fancied them.
But even the most outlandish office-party misbehaviours tend to be more silly than sinful. In my more casual interviews with English workers, when I asked general questions about 'what people get up to at the office Christmas party', my informants often mentioned the custom of photocopying one's bottom (or sometimes breasts) on the office photocopier. I'm not sure how often this actually occurs, but the fact that it has become one of the national standing jokes about office parties gives you an idea of how these events are regarded, the expectations and unwritten rules involved - and how the English behave under conditions of 'cultural remission'.
I will have much more to say about different kinds of 'cultural remission', 'legitimized deviance' and 'time-out behaviour' in later chapters, but we should remind ourselves here that these are not just fancy academic ways of saying 'letting your hair down'. They do not mean letting rip and doing exactly as you please, but refer quite specifically to temporary, conventionalized deviations from convention, in which only certain rules may be broken, and then only in certain, rule-governed ways.
English workers like to talk about their annual office parties as though they were wild Roman orgies, but this is largely titillation or wishful thinking. The reality, for most of us, is that our debauchery consists mainly of eating and drinking rather too much; singing and dancing in a more flamboyant manner than we are accustomed to; wearing skirts cut a bit too high and tops cut a bit too low; indulging in a little flirtation and maybe an illicit kiss or fumble; speaking to our colleagues with rather less restraint than usual, and to our bosses with rather less deference - and perhaps, if we are feeling really wanton and dissolute, photocopying our bottoms.
There are exceptions and minor variations, but these are the permitted limits in most English companies. Some young English workers learn these rules 'the hard way', by overstepping the invisible boundaries, going that little bit too far, and finding that their antics are frowned upon and their careers suffer as a result. But most of us instinctively obey the rules, including the one that allows a significant degree of exaggeration in our accounts of what happened at the office Christmas party.
WORK RULES AND ENGLISHNESS
Looking at the guiding principles identified at the beginning of this chapter, and trying to figure out what they tell us about Englishness, I am immediately struck by all the ambivalence and contradictions in English attitudes to work. The 'muddle rules' seem to be full of 'buts'. We are serious but not serious, dutiful but grudging, moaning but stoical, inventive but also stuffily set in our ways. I would not go so far as to say that we have a 'love/hate' relationship with work. That would be too passionate and extreme and un-English. It is more a sort of 'quite like/rather dislike' relationship - a somewhat uneasy compromise, rather than an angst-ridden conflict.
There is something quintessentially English, it seems to me, about all this middling, muddling and fence-sitting. English work-culture is a mess of contradictions, but our contradictions lack the sense of dramatic tension and struggle that the word normally implies: they are generally half-resolved, by means of a peculiarly English sort of grumpy, vague, unsatisfactory compromise. We can neither embrace work with wholehearted Protestant zeal, nor treat it with Latin-Mediterranean insouciant fatalism. So we sit awkwardly on the fence, somewhere in the middle ground, and grumble about it all - quietly.
The concept of compromise seems to be deeply embedded in the English psyche. Even on the rare occasions when we are roused to passionate dispute, we usually end up with a compromise. The English Civil War was fought between supporters of the monarchy and supporters of Parliament - and what did we end up with? Well, er, both. A compromise. We are not keen on dramatic change, revolutions, sudden uprisings and upheavals. A truly English protest march would see us all chanting: 'What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!'
When in doubt, which would seem to be much of the time, we turn to our favourite, all-purpose coping mechanism: humour. I think that the workplace humour rules have added a new dimension to our understanding of English humour and its role in our cultural codes. We already knew that the English put a high value on humour, but we had only seen this 'in operation' in purely social contexts, where there is perhaps less need for clarity, certainty and efficiency than in the workplace. We can only calculate the value of humour now that we have seen what the English are prepared to sacrifice in its honour - things like clarity, certainty and efficiency.
The workplace humour and modesty rules have also helped us to get 'inside' another stereotype, that of English anti-intellectualism, which we stuck under our microscope and broke down into its component parts - namely prohibitions on earnestness and boastfulness. Having got anti-intellectualism in my Petri dish, I've now poked away at it a bit more and tweezered out another component, which looks awfully like 'empiricism', particularly the anti-theory, anti-dogma, anti-abstraction elements of the English empiricist tradition, our stolid preference for the factual, concrete and common-sense, and deep mistrust of obscurantist, 'Continental' theorising and rhetoric. There is something fundamentally empiricist about the English 'Oh, come off it!' response. In fact, there is something essentially empiricist about most aspects of the English sense of humour. I've got a feeling we'll be coming back to this.