There is some discussion of important matters, punctuated by jokes, bitching about enemies (or rival clubs with the same interests - MAG members bitch about the British Motorcycle Federation, for example), and polite territorial squabbling among members over largely irrelevant details. Occasionally, a decision or resolution is reached, or at least a consensus of opinion, with the actual decision deferred till the next meeting. Then more tea, with more joking, gossiping and moaning - especially moaning (I defy you to find an English club or society whose members do not feel misunderstood or put-upon in some way), finishing up with the usual prolonged English goodbyes. Sometimes there is a guest speaker, who must be feted and fussed over and politely applauded, however dull and unenlightening their speech. But the basic pattern is always the same. If you've seen one meeting of an English club or society, you've seen them all. Even an Anarchist meeting I attended followed the same sequence, although it was much better organized than most, and at the demonstration the next day the members were all dressed in uniform black, carrying professional-looking banners, chanting in unison and marching in step.
Pub Rules
You've probably got the message by now that I think pubs are quite an important part of English culture. Of all the 'social facilitators' that help the inhibited English to engage and bond with each other, the pub is the most popular. 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. This national love-affair with the pub shows no sign of waning: overall, about a third of the adult population are 'regulars', visiting the pub at least once a week - but among the younger age-groups, this proportion rises to 64 per cent.
I talk about 'the pub' as though they were all the same, but nowadays there is a bewildering 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 cafe-bars and wine bars. Much fuss has been made about these novelties, of course, much huffing and puffing, dire warnings and doom and gloom. Pubs aren't what they used to be. It's all trendy bars now, you can't find a proper traditional pub. The country's going to the dogs. The end of the world is nigh, or at least a lot nigher than it was.
The usual nostalgic moaning. The usual premature obituaries (I mean this quite literally: there was a book published about twenty years ago entitled The Death of the English Pub: I can't help wondering how the author now feels every time he passes a Rose amp; Crown or a Red Lion and sees people still happily drinking and playing darts). But a lot of this precipitate mourning is just typical English Eeyorishness, and the rest is the result of a syndrome similar to 'ethnographic dazzle': the doom-mongers are so dazzled by superficial differences between the new types of pub and the traditional sort that they cannot see the underlying, enduring similarities - the customs and codes of behaviour that make a pub a pub. Even if the Eeyores were right, the new pubs they object to are still only a small minority, concentrated largely in city centres, and there are still tens of thousands of more traditional 'local' pubs.
It is true that a number of village pubs are struggling, and some in very small villages have had to close, which is sad, as a village is not really a proper village without a pub. Whenever this happens, there are howls of protest in the local papers, and a morose group of villagers is photographed with a handmade 'Save Our Pub' placard. What would save their pub, of course, would be lots of them spending lots of money drinking and eating in it, but they never seem to make this connection. We have the same problem with the Death of the Village Shop: everyone wants to save their village shop; they just don't particularly want to shop there. The usual English hypocrisies.
But the English pub, as an institution, as a micro-society, is still alive and well. And still governed by a stable, enduring set of unspoken rules. I have already described most of these in the chapter on pub-talk - the pub is an institution devoted to sociability, which even among the English involves communication, so it is not surprising that most of its rules are concerned with language and body language. Some more pub rules were covered in the section on games, but that still leaves a few quite significant ones, such as the rules governing the consumption of alcohol. I don't mean the official licensing laws, but the much more important unwritten codes of social drinking.
Drinking Rules
You can learn a lot about a culture by studying its drinking rules. And every culture has rules about alcohoclass="underline" there is no such thing as random drinking. In every culture where alcohol is used, drinking is a rule-governed activity, hedged about with prescriptions and norms concerning who may drink how much of what, when, where, with whom, in what manner and with what effects. This is only to be expected. I have already pointed out that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Homo sapiens is our passion for regulation - our tendency to surround even the most basic, essential activities such as eating and mating with a lot of elaborate rules and rituals. But even more than with sex and food, the specific unwritten rules and norms governing the use of alcohol in different cultures invariably reflect the characteristic values, beliefs and attitudes of those cultures. The anthropologist Dwight Heath put it more eloquently when he wrote that: 'just as drinking and its effects are imbedded in other aspects of culture, so are many other aspects of culture imbedded in the act of drinking'. So, if we want to understand Englishness, we need to look more closely at the Englishness of English drinking.
The Rules of Round-buying
Round-buying is the English form of a universal practice: the sharing or reciprocal exchange of drinks. The consumption of alcohol, in all cultures, is a quintessentially social activity, whose ritual practices and etiquettes are designed to promote friendly social interaction. There is certainly nothing uniquely English about reciprocal drink-giving. What is distinctively English, and often baffling or even frightening for foreigners, is the immense, almost religious significance attached to this practice among English pubgoers. Obeying the rules of round-buying is not just good manners, it is a sacred obligation. Failing to buy your round is not just a breach of drinking etiquette: it is heresy.
When I talked to foreign visitors about this, during the research for the pub etiquette book, they found it all a bit extreme. Why, they asked, is round-buying so desperately important to English pubgoers? In the book, I said that round-buying is important to us because it prevents bloodshed. Realizing that this might sound even more extreme, at least to non-anthropologists, I explained a bit further. Reciprocal gift-giving has always been the most effective means of preventing aggression between groups (families, clans, tribes, nations) and between individuals. Among English drinkers, more specifically English male drinkers, this peacekeeping system is essential. This is because the socially challenged English male has a tendency to become aggressive. Male pub-talk, as we have seen, is often highly argumentative, and there is a need for an antidote to these verbal fisticuffs, a means of ensuring that the argument is not taken seriously, and does not escalate into physical aggression. Buying your 'opponent' a drink is a kind of symbolic handshake: it proves that you are still mates. A particularly shrewd (female) publican told me 'If the men didn't buy each other drinks, they'd be at each other's throats. They can be shouting and swearing, but as long as they are still buying each other drinks, I know I won't have a fight on my hands'. I have personally witnessed many apparently heated slanging matches which were amicably concluded with the phrase 'and anyway, it's your round!' or 'and I suppose it's my bloody round again and all, right?' or 'Oh, put a sock in it and get the beers in, will you?'