There was this guy. A.A.Gill - I like his name. It doubles as a support group for alcoholics - he was a restaurant critic but he also found time to observe the British. He once wrote that contrary to popular opinion, the default setting for English people is anger.
There's a misconseption out there that Brits are congenial, polite. A little stuffy even. There is an imagined undercurrent of self loathing and self deprecation that makes us think them funny at their own expense. But the truth is, it's false advertising.
England is a nation of Post Menstrual Tension. A nameless, faceless, directionless pissed offness, perpetual and uneneding in all directions simultaneously.
They're just bubbling away all the time. I stood on the tube this morning and the man next to me opened his paper right onto me. He wasn't being rude, he was angry at something and I just happened to be there, standing too close for his "rules of standing near people". As I'm writing this now, the lady next to me is sighing up a monsoon of huffing, presumably because I'm typing too loudly.
This is a nation of horn honkers and fist shakers. Of no-merging lanes. A nation of obscene finger gestures and muttered asides. Of eye rolling and tsk-tsking. This is a country of cranky shopkeepers and on-the-edge bus drivers. Of hostile doctors and furious pedestrians. An asylum for the criminally peeved. A nation of baby pram rammers and supermarket trolley colliders. Of pusher-pasters and "do you mind-ers". Of raised voices and wide eyes. Of snarls and snides and gripes and grumbles. Of newspapers angrily folded. A middleaged nation of old farts. A place built on a vesuvius of uncontrollable rage boiling under the surface, ready to splat like overboiled milk onto the face of anyone, anywhere, anytime.
To control this, English people use the word "sorry" alot. It makes it worse. It removes the backbone. It says a lot about a country when the most commonly used word is an apology. It should greet visitors at Heathrow.
Welcome to London. Sorry.
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