Not very English, after all
What’s summer in London about when temperature that hovers around 30 degrees for five days on a trot is declared a heat wave? It makes you wonder how the poor dears managed to survive India not just with its heat but also its dust and grimy collars. The dhobi and ayah may have compensated, but still… Fortunately for me, London’s Indian summer has been replaced by English weather so it’s sunny one moment, wet the next, and when you’re indoors, it hardly matters at all except that it’s still light till 9.30 at night, making it seem negligent to have a sundowner any earlier. In India, it would appear rude to be seen with a drink in one’s hand at least until the sun has dipped over the horizon. Unless it’s a gin-and tonic, of course!
Which probably explains why a G&T is currently everybody’s favourite in London. Almost no one drinks gin in India any more, once the preserve of the burra sahibs, its reputation as “Mother’s Sorrow” having been tarnished by prohibition in — surprisingly — Britain itself. Which is why, in our gymkhanas and other venerable clubs, it has been replaced by vodka. Possibly because it doesn’t have a taste, and mothers — sorrowful or otherwise — can’t smell it on your breath.
But right now, it’s more than just gin season in England with its pubs and bars spilling out on to roads as beer brims over hastily topped-up glasses while people gaze at football games on TV screens. It’s easy to tell the locals from the visitors. The commuters meeting up at a pub for a pint — beginning unusually early, since offices down shutters punctiliously at 5 pm — are the loudest and quite drunk by the time you show up for your reservation, Indian Standard Time, and stand by the side as they’re evicted to make way for you, their jolly “Oh darlings” giving way to racial slurs at this discourteous hoisting. The visitors, where it’s a little bit less crowded, are more likely to have their children along, mostly glued to their books or phones and unmindful of the crowds.
It’s also horse-racing season in the city, and though I missed it by a whisker, the effect of the Royal Ascot continues to linger with gentlemen in tailcoats and women in flamboyant hats showing up at Masterpiece, the preserve of the really rich with change to splurge on baubles that cost a million and a bob, or two. But Wimbledon is on, inviting you to spare a morning or afternoon at the grass courts at a friend’s box, complete with champagne and strawberries. The strawberries are available everywhere these days, in supermarkets and at cafeteria counters. They’re neatly packaged, but the charm of devouring strawberries — with or without cream — out of a plastic takeout box instead of in fine china isn’t, somehow, the same. A little like England itself these days.
For England may be clinging to its English ways but it’s rapidly running out of English people. Wherever you look — in restaurants and in shops, at taxi drivers or on the streets — the people are likely to be from places far removed from the island. English, as she is spoke, is changing too, and at my hotel the interns, everfriendly with road maps and directions, seem uncertain about how to pronounce the names of places in the neighbourhood. Exiting the European Union might be a political decision, but doesn’t No 10 realise the Europeans (and some others) are already here?