Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
National Physique
An American student who once walked behind me on a college campus told me later that
he knew I was from Britain by the way I walked. Perhaps he found my walk ironic, under-
stated, reserved and self-effacing. I do not believe for a moment that this was a fantasy on
his part. There is an American male style of walking, just as there is an English male one.
A lot of young American men walk with a slightly hunched, ape-like, shambling gait, legs
splayed but one foot turned inwards, as though a horse has just escaped from between their
knees without their noticing. They walk as they talk: casual, loose and uncoordinated.
John Malkovich plays an eighteenth-century French nobleman in the movie
Les Liaisons
Dangereuses
, but moves like a twentieth-century American. American men are typically
bigger and rangier than their British counterparts. This means that at American baseball
games we have to be placed on the backs of burly, beer-swilling spectators so as to see what
is going on. On a U.S. campus I generally feel like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, expecting one
of the colossal youths around me to stoop down, scoop me up and perch me on his shoulder
like a parrot. Everything in the States is on a more epic scale than in Britain, including its
people.
Americans who come to live in Britain or Ireland sometimes undergo a gradual physical
change. When they arrive, not least if they come from one of the dodgier parts of some large
American city, they tend to leap several feet in the air if someone pads noiselessly up be-
hind them on the sidewalk. After a while, they begin to relax, unravel their physical reflexes,
reconstitute their nervous system, and take on a different kind of body. They cease to be hor-
rified by the sight of sugar bowls on café tables, where the sugar lies open to all kinds of
unspeakable infections. An adventurous few might even come to enjoy the delicacy known
as black pudding, especially if you do not tell them beforehand that it consists of congealed
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