Chronic Britishness

I'm a Brit. This is hopefully not too much of a surprise to anyone reading this blog as I often complain about politeness, the weather and the pronunciation of the word "scone" - an age old battle which splits public opinion right down the middle and is indeed a more contentious issue than the current election. I wouldn't say I'm necessarily a proud Brit but I do enjoy being in Britain with our extensive tea drinking, quirky accents and long history. Though in saying this, a lot of our history does include a lot of atrocities, suffering and poverty. But hey, at least we brought tea to the world. Oh wait, that was China. Also apparently we drink tea really weirdly compared to the rest of the world, in most places milk and sugar in tea is an abomination. Nice going Blighty.

But one thing we can definitely identify as British through and through is apologising and being awkward about things that weren't your fault. You have no idea how much of an issue this is. Let me give some examples. Take a queue. Queueing is so quintessentially British. (What I would first like to point out, however, is HOW WEIRD IS THE WORD 'QUEUE'?! If you think about it, there are four silent letters, and it pronounced in the same way at the word 'cue' where all three letters are necessary. Strange.) When we queue, we do so with a set of guidelines which are unspoken but broken on pain of death. Rule one, a queue is established when the first person arrives and places themselves within one metre of the aim of the queue. Rule two, letting somebody into the established queue is only permitted when that person is a blood relative, someone in current sexual relations with the queue or a certified best mate. Rule three, only one person is allowed to be let into the queue. Rule 4, queue-jumping is punishable by death. Rule 5, in the event that any of these rules be broken, the only acceptable response is to 'tut' audibly, before resuming the queueing procedure. The problem lies within rule 5. You see, British people are moronic (we did vote to leave the EU after all) and cannot stand up for ourselves. We have these ideas in our heads and yet when someone goes against these rules (usually a continental European because they are a robust bunch) we cannot respond due to our ingrained politeness and stiff upper lip allows us only to respond with a 'tut' which is perhaps the most British sound in the world, and is what defines our moronicness. This moronic politeness can be seen extremely clearly in an interview I watched today. To get you up to speed, essentially there has been a computer cock-up, so now flights are delayed and people are stuck in airports. This has been all over the news, with heartbreaking images of people sat uncomfortable in chairs or having to entertain small children with hand luggage and a bottle of water likely being susceptible to Legionaires Disease due to prolonged exposure to an oddly hot British Friday. Back to the point, on the news two people were reported, the first was an American who was practically losing his marbles over having to wait five hours for a delayed flight and was red in the face and had to be told to stop shouting lest he transform into a raging Hulk-like-monster and kick over a nearby bin. The second interviewee was a Brit, who had been waiting TWENTY SIX hours and was politely saying how other people likely had it worse than her and she had let a young lad take her seat because he was complaining about his feet. Clearly this young British boy has not yet developed the 'tut', as any respectable British citizen would do when the situation of sore feet arose.

Chronic Britishness is the issue that we have of not being able to be assertive or to stand up for ourselves. Instead, through an odd process of evolution, we have developed a tutting process in which we show our mild disgust as a queue jumper or wrongly made cup of tea, but never express our true rage at the horror of having a cup of tea that has milk in it when I specially asked for no milk, how could you do this to me, you monster.

In other words: *tut*