Watching the English

Has my life taken a melancholy turn? Admittedly, my recent blog updates may be interpreted as evidence in favour of this supposition. I am, however, feeling fine and dandy and put the perhaps slightly more melancholy tone of my recent updates down to the fact that it is the holidays. Although being on holiday usually has a positive, uplifting affect on people, I instead see it as a lot of time in which to do very little. As I spend most of my days drifting in and out of thought, even when I am engaged in some other activity, it comes as little surprise that for me having large amounts of time and very little to do means that I spend lots of time philosophising about life, the universe and everything. My melancholy tone should in fact be interpreted as a philosophical one. I remain as happy and upbeat as ever, I am definitely in a transitionary phase, but I am rather enjoying my current 'soul searching' and 'life redefining'. So, as the aussies say, no worries. There's no need for Prozac just yet.

Anyway, here's some book talk...

As a lone English person in a small German town (there is one other Brit in Fulda, but as she is a middle-aged wife and mother we don't cross each others paths much), studying intercultural communication with a group of 20-somethings from every corner of the globe, Kate Fox's book Watching the English couldn't be more perfect for me. It is essentially an attempted analysis of the hidden rules of English behaviour; a description of how the English act and a quest to formulate a set of rules defining the behaviour of the English. The book appealed to me for multiple reasons ranging from the fact that it felt good to read something that can be described as 'vaguely relating to my studies', to Fox's enjoyable writing style and sense of humour (both of which are not too dissimilar to my own) , to the fact that as the only English person in my current setup is me, it is rather fascinating to read how my fellow people act and to analyse whether I am the same, especially when alienated from my natural habitat and surrounded by people from different cultures. I can confirm that in fact, Fox's claims about English behaviour ring very true with my own experiences back in England and that I also sub-consciously follow a large number of these rules. Until reading this book I thought it was just me that finds that socialising with people I don't know very well can often be a trial, that introductions and goodbyes are often somewhat embarrassingly stilted (and the communication that goes on inbetween is often no different), and who frequently invokes 'weather chat' to open conversations, or to fill awkward silences. According to Fox these are all phenomenons that affect English people, all examples that demonstrate what she calls our 'social dis-ease'. She also talks about English humour, claiming that it underlies everything we do and say: we rarely make an utterance without using irony or sarcasm and very little that we say can be taken literally at face value. I know full well that most things I say are said with an undercurrent of humour. I've never really considered before how people from other cultures react to this, to my lack of telling things straight without using any form of understatement, irony, sarcasm etc. It is unlikely that I am going to start speaking in a non-English manner, and stop invoking subtle humour at every opportunity, but I will certainly now be more aware when I do and will assess my counterpart's reactions accordingly. There is only one place where I found Fox's writing a bit off the mark; where she talks about class. According to Fox, class permeates everything within English society. I do not wish to argue this point, what I have issue with is more the fact that she takes certain aspects of peoples' lives and uses them to put them under a class heading (either working class, lower-middle, middle-middle, upper-middle class, or upper class). For example, according to Fox you can tell what class a person comes from by whether or not their car is dirty or by the contents of their gardens (to name but two examples). For some reason this class-giving reminded me somewhat of a very much more negative version of the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which may be a good way of splitting people up into houses at Hogwarts, but which seems wholly unnecessary to do to the English population, especially in a book aiming to explain why the English behave in the manner they do. Apart from my slight quibble with the Fox's dealings with the class issue though, I found the book extremely enlightening, highly entertaining and, in a funny kind of way, inspiring (PhD in Anthropology here I come...)