Nobody does irritability quite like the English
Asked to describe his worst character trait on the BBC’s Face to Face programme, Evelyn Waugh replied, quick as a flash, “irritability”, in his own uniquely irritable way. While Scots tend towards surliness, the Welsh fury and the Irish argumentativeness, the English excel at being mildly irritated by, well, pretty much everything. Because we struggle to express our emotions, they tend to emerge in all kinds of skewed ways. Catch an Englishman’s eye as he boards a busy train or waits in line at the bank and you can almost feel the self-righteous indignation bursting from his neck veins. For us English, it’s the little things that set us off.
I recently spent some time in California, where it took me several days to acclimatise myself to the complete absence of irritability. Why were complete strangers being so nice to me? An Englishman’s default setting is testy inarticulacy, so we tend to see an American’s easy charm as fake or insincere. Only the English could find friendliness irritating.
Despite what other countries might think, politeness does not come naturally to the English which is why we temper our temper with endless, unnecessary “pleases”, “thank yous” and “sorrys”. But these are mere sticking plasters, there to disguise our underlying fear that if we’re nice to people, they’ll take advantage of us. We must therefore remain on our guard, ready to strike with huffy indignation whenever offence is taken. This inability to just relax and be ourselves, safe in the knowledge that not everyone is trying to get one over on us, only adds to our seething irascibility.
Of course, some of us are more irritated by life’s injustices than others. Lurking beneath that thin veneer of impeccable decorum, the aristocracy appear to be in a perpetual state of crossness. Hardly surprising when you consider all those pettifogging rules of etiquette they have to adhere to in order to be accepted into “polite” society, which of course is anything but.
Tetchiness is a subtle but devastating weapon when used correctly and no one wields a passive aggressive putdown or soul-crushing tut more lethally than the overly entitled English. Maggie Smith’s character in Downton Abbey may have been ludicrously over the top, but her frosty condescension is typical of many a redoubtable dowager.
Of course, irritability can also be the source of great amusement. Basil Fawlty, Hyacinth Bucket and Victor Meldrew make us laugh so much because there’s nothing funnier than an uptight person trying not to be uptight and failing. Morecambe irritated Wise because of his childlike mischievousness; Albert Steptoe irritated his son because of his childlike vulnerability, while tightly wound Fawlty didn’t need an excuse to let rip. The rest of the world was simply beyond reproach. Without irritable characters, English comedy would lack its unique bite.
There’s tragedy here, too. As we age, we become less tolerant of life’s foibles and our irritability levels rise accordingly. The middle-aged are especially prone to inappropriate outbursts of peevishness, as I am discovering for myself. These days everything gets my goat, from the hideous annoyance of having to get out of bed in the morning to the repetitive tedium of getting back in at night.
You see, the older we get, the more we realise how hopeless it all is, how stupid we all are and how nothing is as it should be. And if that isn’t enough to raise your hackles, I don’t know what is.
How to explain the Theresa May vision of a Conservative future to the young? Or rather, how might we explain any conceivable resistance to it? After all, it sounds like heaven on earth. As she presented it in her pronouncements to party conference, it contains every good thing – a solution to all the apparent dilemmas of modern life – which any reasonable person could desire.
The May doctrine will support business that creates the wealth upon which the quality of our lives depend – but at the same time, it will hold business to account, making sure that it is serving the wider interest of society and not its own selfish ends. She and her ministers believe in government solutions as well, but only up to a point. “[We] believe in what government can do, but know its limits.”
It was all so very moderate and consensual, so – as she pointedly put it – non-ideological. Politics for sane grown-ups who were determined to avoid the dangers of purist dogma. This, surely, is the solution to all our disputes: free-market economics that