A little something about being English

(and why I gave up calling myself British)

I’m in the middle of a translating a huge cookery book, and some dish names, as always, are making me wonder why certain things sound awful in English when they sound fine in Portuguese, or vice versa, and why we think about food and names like we do, and it reminded me of a thing I wrote about being English. I found it this morning, and have just rewritten it, instead of translating the huge cookery book.

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Here in Portugal, I don’t say I’m British any more, I just say I’m English. It’s not a political point, it’s just easier, and quicker. We’ll get down to the fact that I’m English in the end. It just speeds the process up.

It also helps smooths the conversation. Whomever I’m talking to has a larger set of beliefs and stereotypes to refer to, to compare me to, if I’m English than if I’m British. It’s not that British doesn’t carry its own raft of stereotypes, but English carries a bigger and starker raft. If you’re flailing around trying to remember what stereotypes to attribute to someone, you’re not concentrating on the conversation.

from 2004, The British in Portugal, for, and not for, Euro 2004.

In Portugal, the word British doesn’t really enter into daily conversation, whereas English does. We have English Sauce (molho inglês, Worcestershire sauce), English Cake (bolo inglês, fruit cake), occasionally English Creme ( creme inglês, our kind of custard, which the Portuguese generally think is shit), but most of all, “para inglês ver”, “for English eyes”, an expression meaning something that, on the surface, looks good and will impress or comply with rules, but underneath and in practice is nothing of the sort.

We all, of course, resort to stereotypes about every nationality we have the merest idea about. The English, the French, the Americans, the Italians, the Germans, bring to mind a whole swathe of characteristics. I dare say that most people don’t have a set of adjectives prepared for the Portuguese, other than “lovely” but more on that another day.

Here, in Portugal, on hearing you speak English, without an American accent, most will go straight for "oh, you're English!" and if you can't counter with “god, no, I'm Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish/New Zealand/Australian, actually", you're immediately tarnished with all the famous traits of the English, good or bad, mostly bad, until you can prove otherwise. This can take a lifetime.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to say that you are Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish, your interlocutor is less sure of how awful you are, apart from the fact that you are one of the great oppressed (by the English, obvs). You are still British, so you are still a little bit oppressor. If you’re from NZ or Australia, you have your own soup of oppressor/oppressed to deal with.

So, the English. What do people think we are? What are the stereotypes? The following is a list of all the things I have personally been informed of, by the Portuguese, about what the English are:

We are formal, arrogant, cold, repressed, clever, polite, too polite, civilised to a fault, class-obsessed, have no interest in food, we can’t cook, we eat baked beans, we are always drunk, we’re boring, brilliant, colonialist, uncaring, ugly, unsexy, sickly, pasty, we are blond and blue eyed, we are very funny, we are horribly sarcastic.

All true. All false. However, we do have a trait common to all of us, one that I would like to instil into the catalogue of English national stereotypes. It’s the thing that makes us act like we do out in the world. It took me a few years of living away from Britain, navigating my way around Portuguese life, for me to realise what was going on, with me, and the rest of us. Not why everybody thinks we’re twats, which they do, but why we act like twats quite a lot of the time.

At home, it is less noticeable, because we are at home. When abroad, though, we are at our worst. We behave badly, don’t speak any other languages, we look down on or askance at anything that we don’t like, but mysteriously hold onto and obsess about the things we do like, approve of or think are “cool”.

This is because we English have a feeling. It’s not a thought, because as soon as you think about it, you realise it’s ridiculous, but a feeling. The feeling is that we are the default of everything.

The English are the Default Syndrome (TEDS) is not a superiority complex, since we English often feel embarrassed or inferior about ourselves too, mostly about our lack of exoticism or our not being French. This is why we hate the French. Yes, there are some fools who go round the world actively “thinking” that their Englishness actually makes them better than other people, but they are fools and we can dismiss them.

So, TEDS. What the hell am I talking about?

When I arrived in Portugal, I was being the full English. I looked at everything in direct comparison to the English/British version. Everything was either worse than, sillier than, better than our version, or just plain ridiculous and we English would never do such thing.

One day, I was watching the TV news, and something struck me. The news anchors were saying things like “The Portuguese government said today that…”, “Statistics say that 1 in 10 people in Portugal are…”, “Portugal will be seeing a heatwave this week…”. They didn’t do that on English TV. The country wouldn’t be mentioned half as much, as it was deemed unnecessary, because, of course, that’s who and what we’re talking about. It seems like nothing, but that kind of thing, that kind of attitude sticks.

I finally started to realise that deep down in my idiot brain, I felt (I didn’t think) that the Portuguese are the Portuguese version of us. The Americans are the American version of us (which to a teensy extent, is true, if you go back about 400 years). The French are the French kind, the Greeks are the Greek kind, etc., etc., etc. The Portuguese build houses like they do, because they are doing it like we do but for hot weather and wrong, the Americans invented junk food because they added a shit load of sugar and salt and mayonnaise to our bland food, the French do everything to prove that they are better than us, and that if the English didn't exist, the French wouldn't try so hard.

I know, it sounds idiotic, it makes no sense, to you, a thinking being.

But, when I was growing up, if one didn't pay too much attention, we English invented everything. It wasn’t just the TV news. We felt like we invented science (we didn't), we invented cars (we didn't), we invented flying (we didn’t), we invented telephones (we didn’t) we invented electric light (we didn't), we invented golf (we didn't), we invented trains (we did that one), and discovered pretty much everything else (we didn’t). We did do a lot, much of it was actually really good, but, we didn’t invent EVERYTHING.

History in school was almost all about us. We did (and won) the wars, we got conquered by an expat Viking living in Normandy and made it about us, we did the industrial revolution and if it weren't for us, the world would still be making stockings for the rich by candle light and living on turnips.

I haven’t lived in the UK for the last 25 years, but in the 30 years between my being born in England and my leaving it, everything pointed towards us being the default, or the origin, of everything human. I know that the education system has changed quite a lot, and it is taught that Britain is very much not the centre of the universe any more, but young English people still do seem to act like they have TEDS.

It might be because English language has taken over as the world's lingua franca, especially in the last half century. In Portugal, English didn’t used to be the second language taught in schools, it was French. Now, every Portuguese toddler has at least some English words in its vocabulary. This makes English important, and by (fallacious) extension, the English important, too.

When I explain this theory (for it is, OF COURSE, only an entirely unfalsifiable theory) to English people who have never lived abroad, they think I have lost my mind and have gone all forrin. When I explain this to English people who have lived abroad, they also think I have lost my mind, and some get rather antsy and offended. When I explain this theory to the Portuguese, they glaze over, because the English woman is Anglosplaining again.