English pet-owners are highly unlikely to admit that their pet is a status signal, or that their choice of pet is in any way class-related. They will insist that they like Labradors (or springer spaniels, or whatever) because of the breed's kind temperament. If you want to get them to reveal their hidden class anxieties, or if you just like causing trouble, you can try the canine equivalent of the Mondeo and Mercedes tests: put on your most innocent face, and tell a Labrador-owner 'Oh, I'd have seen you more as an alsatian [or poodle, or chihuahua] sort of person.'
If you are of a more kind and affable disposition, note that the quickest way to an English person's heart, no matter what their class, is through their pet. Always praise people's pets, and when you speak to our animals directly (which you should do as much as possible) remember that you are addressing our inner child. If you are a visitor eager to make friends with the natives, try to acquire or borrow a dog to act as a passport to conversation and as a chaperone.
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.