Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Many of the British have an unerring conviction that the future will be different from the
present, namely, worse. There are always fresh catastrophes just round the corner. For some
Americans, there is also an unimaginable catastrophe just round the corner, but it is known
as the Apocalypse and will have a positive outcome, at least for those who believe in it.
Even the end of the world is not the end of the world. Some British attitudes to the future
could be described as apocalypticism without the religion. History has been in steep de-
cline ever since some indeterminate golden age. The nation's best days have always gone.
To adopt a phrase of Oscar Wilde's, the British have a great future behind them. Even the
golden age was not all it is cracked up to be. Even then, people glanced back nostalgically
to some previous paradise. And even in Eden there was a snake in the garden. In the States,
by contrast, one frequently hears that the nation's best days lie ahead of it. In fact, this has
probably been a constant refrain since the Pilgrim Fathers. It tacitly acknowledges that the
present is not exactly brilliant, but does so in a way that avoids dwelling too despondently
on the fact.
The attitude of the stereotypical British workman illustrates the nation's generic glum-
ness. Confronted with a blocked pipe or a broken radiator, he will stare at it in gloomy si-
lence for several minutes, hand on hips, shake his head slowly and finally come out with a
deep-throated “Nah.” There is, he will imply with funereal satisfaction, absolutely no way
in which this disaster can be repaired. After a lengthy period of anxious questioning, in
which one is obliged to participate as in some vital ritual at a voodoo ceremony, he will
grudgingly admit that there might just be a way of fixing the problem, though it will be
fiendishly complicated and insanely expensive. Ten minutes later, the repair will be com-
plete, a modest amount of money will have changed hands, and the workman will have
moved on to another bout of Nah-ing and head-shaking elsewhere.
Nothing could be further from everyday America. The United States is a land where for
the most part things work. It is streamlined, efficient, labour-saving and economical. Ser-
vice in bars and restaurants is prompt, cheerful and efficient. In Europe, by contrast, waiters
can go to extraordinarily ingenious lengths to avoid serving you. One suspects they engage
in competitions with each other over who can delay delivering food the longest. When they
finally appear with your meal, they sometimes look rather older than they did when you
ordered it. Efficient service is not a British priority. Indeed, in some pubs and cafés it is
regarded as a kind of moral defect. I once knew a Manchester bus driver who devoted his
life to seeing how many people he could leave behind at bus stops. He was inordinately
proud of this achievement. When I caught sight of him across a crowded pub, he would
gleefully hold up a number of fingers to indicate the latest toll of abandoned passengers.
British workers do not typically take pride in the outfits that employ them. Not many of
them would refer to their companies as “we,” as American workers tend to do. Attempts to
induce them to identify with the company as a whole might be greeted with ridicule. They
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