Hutton, the toff?

CMJ’s son Robin retired from first class cricket a couple of weeks ago. I looked looked him up on Cricinfo, and came across a delicious little nugget: Robin Martin Jenkins played in the same Radley College XI as Andrew Strauss and Ben Hutton.

The reigning England captain, a county all rounder who was once considered England material, and the captain of the county that calls Lord’s home – these guys all played together in a school team. Wow! What sort of school boasts such a fine cricketing tradition?



A very posh school, it turns out. Radley College is one of three remaining all-boys all-boarding public schools in England, along with Eton and Harrow. Its campus is five miles south of Oxford, sprawls across eight hundred acres, includes a cricket pavilion, a golf course and, since 2008, a real tennis court. It is only about 150 years old - Eton and Harrow are both more than 400 years old - but, regardless, an interactive web-tour of the Radley College campus confirms that it is as comfortably upper class as PG Wodehouse’s Wrykyn ever was.

Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the sonorous voice of the MCC establishment, sent his son to Radley College. That fits. Andrew Strauss’ nickname in the England dressing room is Lord Brock, after an old Etonian TV presenter famous for living the high life. That fits. But Ben Hutton? Does he fit?

The name Hutton is sacred in cricketing lore because of Ben’s grandfather Len Hutton, who, as recently as 1951, became the first professional to captain England. He was the son of a builder from a Yorkshire village called Pudsey. He went to a local council school, trained as a carpenter (perhaps, coincidentally, like Jesus Christ), set the world record for the highest test match score with 364 against Australia, and he captained England to successive Ashes victories.

Len Hutton was more than just a great player. Like Frank Worrell, the West Indies’ first black captain, Hutton’s achievements are drenched in special meaning because of who he is. Yet, this working class hero’s grandson went to one of England’s most exclusive public schools. Interesting.

Arnold Toynbee has a theory on why this is not just OK, but is profoundly good. Toynbee takes it as a given that every civilization is shaped by a ruling elite. This has been empirically true through history, including in supposedly communist or socialist societies. The vast majority in every civilization, the “internal proletariat” in Toynbee-speak, are outside the ruling elite. Toynbee believes that the relationship between this ruling elite and the internal proletariat is the most critical difference between a vital civilization and one that is breaking down.

In a vital civilization, the ruling elite have a natural legitimacy. The elite have a hold on the imagination and aspirations of the internal proletariat, who voluntarily seek to become more like the the ruling elite, a process Toynbee calls mimesis. Conversely, in a civilization which is breaking down “the internal proletariat, that majority in society which had formerly given its voluntary allegiance to a creative leadership, but which is now increasingly alienated from its own society by the coercive despotism of its corrupted masters... registers its secession from society by adopting a spiritual ethos which is alien in inspiration”. In this calculus, the Huttons are a part of a healthy civilization, one in which the best of the working class seek to become like the ruling elite.

Ben Hutton is not the first public-school-man in his family. His father Richard attended Repton, a school as exclusive as Radley College. Richard Hutton would have been eligible to enroll at Repton in 1955, when Len was the reigning England captain. It seems like Len, at the pinnacle of his career, respected the prevailing power structure even though he was not born into it, and chose to give his son a more privileged upbringing than he himself enjoyed.

England’s cricket captain sent his son to the best school that he possibly could. That fits well enough, regardless of whether the captain was a gentleman or a professional.

Re-thinking Clement Attlee

Was Clement Attlee a great Prime Minister? Or was he a bungling idiot?

This feels like an interesting question right now, because the two issues that define Attlee’s legacy are very similar to the issues that President Obama is grappling with – withdrawing from occupied countries and providing health care to the less fortunate.

As an Indian, my first instinct is that Clement Attlee was a bungling idiot. He was responsible for the British withdrawal from India in 1947. However one looks at it, the way the British withdrawal from India was managed, and the consequent partition of India, was an unmitigated disaster (as was Attlee's withdrawal from the British mandate of Palestine). What kind of a fool would chose to dismantle an edifice that had been built up over more than three hundred years - Emperor Jehangir's firman to allow the East India Company to set up a factory in Surat was issued in 1615 - in nine months? The kind of fool who had never before held any substantial responsibility. His Labour party had never been in government before. His sheer ignorance would have given him courage.

However, that is not how the British see Attlee. Surveys generally show that Atlee is one of the best loved British Prime Ministers of the twentieth century. This BBC survey shows Attlee, Churchill’s “modest man with much to be modest about”, at #3 out of 19 behind Churchill and Lloyd George. A more recent Newsnight poll in 2008 ranked Attlee at #2 behind Churchill among 12 post war PMs. His most beloved achievement? The NHS.

When I first read about this, I thought there was a pattern here. The NHS, a comprehensive medical system which is totally free at the point of use, entirely funded and managed by the state, is an astonishing enterprise. It is staggeringly vast and impossibly complex. By rights, it should collapse under its own weight. But, miraculously, it works. Okay, not perfectly, but certainly adequately. Maybe it took a beginner’s mind to even imagine that something as ambitious as the NHS could be created. Lack of experience fooled Attlee and his government of beginners into thinking he could just walk away from India without all hell breaking loose. The same lack of experience told him that it was possible to create something as ambitious as the NHS. The beginner’s mind comes with both risks and possibilities.

It turns out I was being too kind to Attlee. Neither he, nor his health minister Aneurin Bevan, dreamt up the NHS with the innocence of a beginner’s mind, and then willed it into existence. Nobody did. The NHS just happened.

This outstanding article by Atul Gawande talks about how. The entire health infrastructure that existed in Britain had been bombed down to rubble through WWII. Yet millions of injured servicemen, and displaced urbanites, evacuated by the government into the countryside, needed to be looked after. There was nobody to do the looking after except the government. By the time the war ended, the only health services that existed in Britain were delivered through this vast nationalized system that nobody would have dreamt possible, or maybe even wanted, if it didn’t already exist. Attlee and Bevan “creating the NHS” was nothing more than legislating to keep the status quo.

What Attlee’s legacy in India and Palestine demonstrate is that the consequences of incompetence are as grave as the consequences of evil. Attlee meant well, and had long supported the Indian freedom struggle. He did not intend to leave millions dead in the wake of British withdrawal and partition. Nor did he want the hurried British withdrawal from Palestine to destabilize the Middle East for generations. Yet, intended or not, the consequences of his actions were as horrible as those of other politicians with more explicitly evil intent.

The verdict of history? The British public has successfully forgotten about Empire, but lives with the NHS every day. Attlee’s spot in the great Prime Ministers rankings looks secure. The take away for President Obama? America will remember his health care reforms much more vividly than any events that unfold in Iraq or Afghanistan.
____________________________________
Fact check: Clement Attlee did serve as Deputy Prime Minister as a part of a coalition governing arrangement between Labour, the Liberals and the Conservatives during the war. Churchill served as PM, and chaired the War cabinet. Previously, Attlee was a Major in the British Army during WWI, and gave up a legal career to become a social worker in London before being elected to Parliment.

David Cameron goes Dutch?

Gezellig - space and people coming together in harmony, that special spirit of cosy fellowship that animates Dutch life - would be an excellent addition to the English language and to English speaking cultures. Maybe, but maybe not in the way I initially thought. When I first wrote about Gezellig, I assumed that the word that best describes Amsterdam would naturally be liberal (as opposed to Liberal). Having thought about it longer, I’m realizing that gezellig is in fact deeply conservative.

Gezellig cosiness implies a comfort with the status quo, the fellowship a comfort with people like us. A gezellig culture could easily be the culture of a smug, closed-minded, back-slapping clique. The liberal experience is necessarily edgy. It means making peace with the creative destruction wrought by liberal economic ideas, and connecting with the strange people and their unfamiliar customs that liberal social ideas inevitably bring into the mainstream.

About a year ago, until the world was hit by a recession, David Cameron’s Tories were making a strong and very articulate pitch for gezellig in British life. David Brooks, once protégé of William Buckley, wrote about this pitch in his New York Times column:

The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary for political leaders to talk about “the whole way we live our lives.”

The David Brooks column pointed me to this paper called On Fraternity, by Danny Kruger, a special advisor to David Cameron.

The title is well chosen. Take the French Revolution’s trinity of liberty, equality and fraternity. Liberty belongs to the right, equality to the left. This paper is a call to make fraternity Tory territory. And Kruger’s diagnosis of what ails Britain?

...Britain is suffering ‘social desertification’... a process that began in the 1980s as hundreds of local institutions... were swept away... small high-street grocers and bakers disappeared. Family-run pubs were subsumed into giant chains... this trend is apparent in the rates of family breakdown and the prevalence of drug addiction and violent, alcohol-fuelled crime; in the neglect of the old and the precocious sexuality of children; in the cult of vicarious narcissism which is ‘reality TV’; in the popular addiction to shopping as a means of self-definition, and in the astronomical scale of private debt which is necessary to maintain the shopping habit...

Everything Kruger doesn’t like is ongezellig, the opposite of gezellig. It’s all so unlike the halcyon past. Terrible isn’t it, old chap?

This blog isn’t about ask if the Thatcher-Blair decades saw the re-birth of British vitality, or guess the correct level of social cohesion needed for liberal institutions to take root. But hopefully, the conservative possibilities of gezellig are apparent.

By the way, lamenting the absence of gezellig is not the same thing as experiencing gezellig. Is it ongezellig to moan about the absence of gezellig?

Boo Ponting - Part 2

I was at Trent Bridge earlier this week for the fifth ODI. I was observing the crowd intently when Ricky Ponting came out to bat. He was booed, loud and clear. But the more decent elements in the crowd were embarrassed enough to try and drown out the booing with cheering.

When Ponting finally walked off the pitch after a masterly match-winning century, the entire house rose to give him a standing ovation. Good show, Trent Bridge.

I believe the Trent Bridge crowd booed England yesterday, in the sixth ODI, for putting up such a limp performance. Interestinger and interestinger...

Raptor Rapture

England’s ancient cathedral spires are finding an exciting new twenty-first century purpose. They are excellent nesting sites for peregrine falcon. Handsome young falcon families are bringing glitz and glamour to cathedrals at Chichester, Derby, Lincoln and Worcester, having taken up residence in the spires.

This great story didn’t just happen. The first falcon couple to take up residence in Chichester cathedral did so in 2001, in a nesting box helpfully provided by the Sussex Ornithological Society. Since then 26 chicks have hatched in Chichester. The Derby falcons seem to be well marketed, getting the community involved in conservation, as evidenced by this video made by local six year olds.

Is there scope for some cross cultural conservation learning here? There are a number of temple gopurams in South India which might serve as a nice home for falcons, or other revered raptors.

Echoes of गरुडा (garuda) and जटायू (jatayu)?

Boo Ponting and Boo Hoo Colly

When Australia won the fourth test in two and a half days, Ricky Ponting went up to the podium to receive the winning captain's magnum of champagne, and he was roundly booed by the Headingley crowd.

The was not the first time Ponting was booed this Ashes series. It started back in Cardiff. It has continued through to Headingley, despite the ECB president Giles Clarke's calls to cease and desist. The Australian captain has ignored the booing.

Nor is this the first time booing has been in the news this summer. Paul Collingwood, the then reigning England captain, spoke in a hurt, injured tone about being booed by a predominantly Indian Lord's crowd during the Twenty20 World Cup. At the subsequent India v. South Africa game at Trent Bridge, there was much sanctimonious commentary (by Jeremy Coney, I think) about how it is nicer to cheer your own team than to boo the other team. Many of my Indian friends and family cringed. Are we really the cricket world's most boorish nation?

Well, the Ashes experience suggests that English fans aren't all that different from the Indian fans. English fans will boo Australia even when England are not playing, as I discovered at the Australia v. Sri Lanka T20 game at Trent Bridge.

Expanding the frame a bit, yes it is undeniably nicer to cheer your own team than to boo the other team. But it is easy to over-steer.

Ultimately, cricket is fun because it is theatre. Banter is a part of the theatre. Like booing a villain at the pantomime is a part of the fun. There is a very fine line between banter and sledging, defined mostly by the spirit in which the words are spoken and received.

Sure, maybe the booing at Headingley and Lord's was not in the right spirit. But the English ODI captain can surely learn a thing or two about stiff upper lips from his Australian counterpart.

Play up! play up! and play the game!

There is a breathless hush at the close tonight -
Ten to make and a match to win -
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.

And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote
Play up! play up! and play the game!

My family's primary religion is cricket. I grew up with these words echoing inside my head, reminding me that cricket is our spiritual calling.

When I recited this poem at my grandparent's dinner parties, or at junior school elocution competitions in Madras, I was vaguely aware that there was more to the poem. But I stopped the recitation at this point. That was probably a good thing. In the Victorian original the next stanzas go:

The sand of the desert is sodden red -
Red with the wreck of a square that broke
The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks -
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

Jeremy Paxman quotes this poem, Vitai Lampada, in The English. Paxman's take on the poem:

It is hard not to be carried along in its rhythm, even if there is something so breathtakingly stupid about the poem that it is hard to imagine how on earth it could ever have been taken seriously. Yet, in the balmy days before August 1914, the idea that life was essentially a version of the Game seemed almost plausible.

"The sand of the desert is sodden red, red with the wreck of a square that broke", is a reference to the seige of Khartoum, a colonial misadventure which ended with the entire garrison at Khartoum slaughtered and General Gordon, the British officer in charge of the garrison, beheaded by the Mahdi army.

And that is somehow like a game of cricket? Paxman is spot on: breathtakingly stupid.



Reminds me of Lance Klusener. He was asked how he stayed so calm after South Africa crashed out of the 1999 World Cup semi-finals in one of the greatest games ever. Klusener said "nobody died".

Good perspective. Must remember next time India are playing.

A first class map

Here's a cricketing puzzle that's got me stumped.

England has about 39 counties or shires, or maybe that should be 42, or maybe even 46, an interestingly vague number unlike the unimaginative precision of the 50 American states...but the English taste for vagueness is not what this post is about. However one chooses to count, 18 adds up to less then half the English counties. Yet, only 18 counties (the darker coloured counties on the map above) play first class cricket. How did this come to pass?

For instance, Shropshire, that fabled land where the Empress of Blandings covered herself with such glory, would surely have a deep rooted cricketing culture? Or consider Lincolnshire, a well-populated county wedged in between the cricketing powerhouses of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Surely Lincolnshire would be able to muster a decent county team? Club cricket is played in both Shropshire and Lincolnshire. But both seem content to remain Minor Counties, without objecting to the condescension loaded into that term.

Even more mysterious, Durham, the current champions, are the only Minor County to have been promoted to the first class level in 80+ years. This was a one time "historic" event. There is no mechanism by which the top Minor Counties get promoted to the first class level, and the weakest first class counties get relegated to the minors.

This instinctively feels odd to me, as an Indian cricket fan, because the growth of cricket outside India's traditional metropolitan centers is one of the most fascinating changes in Indian cricket over the last 25 years.

Pigs Gone Wild

An American friend I was dining with last week was talking about her life in Mechanicsville, VA. Her neighbour is a wild hog hunter. Maybe he has a boring day job, like being a mechanic or something. But hunting wild hogs is what he really does.

That brought back to life this marvellous story. Wild hogs, feral swine, the offspring of escaped farm pigs which copulated with wild boar imported from Europe as game, are thriving across the vast American wilderness. And with them is thriving a culture of guys who hunt wild hogs, accompanied by packs of dogs, armed with knives, shotguns or even bows and arrows, with the Confederate flag emblazoned on everything they wear.

In America, people hunt hogs. In Britain, hogs hunt people.

Ms. Carla Edmonds, a landowner in Gloucestershire, first encountered wild boar when she and her two dogs were riding along a path in the Forest of Dean, about 100 yards or so from the main road. “I saw a group of 20 or more. I couldn’t make out quite what they were, but then I could see they looked like pigs.” Ms. Edmonds’ dogs started barking and her horse became agitated. The herd of boar gave chase. “I could see them charging at huge pace” she said. Her horse was seriously agitated by the experience, and took a long while to calm down, and a less experienced rider might even have been thrown off her horse.

Subsequently, the wild boar dug up about 100 square feet of the Edmonds’ grounds. But despite these intrusions, Ms. Edmonds and her partner think the boar are “brilliant” and that “it was amazing...would love to see them again”. She may well have an opportunity to do so. After having been hunted to extinction 300 years ago, wild boar have reintroduced themselves to Britain spontaneously and now also live in Sussex, Kent, Hampshire and Devon.

What makes wild boar, Sus Scrofa, so successful? The same factor that makes Homo Sapiens so successful?

The thought was triggered by a book I read back in the 80s, Omnivore by Lyall Watson, a zoologist who observed that our evolutionary resilience owes a lot to our omnivorous diet. Boars (and bears) are omnivorous higher mammals, like us.

"So, what do you do?"

In New Zealand, when this question is asked, it means "do you sail or do you hike?". Not "are you a lawyer or a banker?". Some good Kiwi perspective for these troubled times.

Is this true? Heard it from a colleague of mine, a big outdoors enthusiast, who spent a year in Kiwi-land on a working holiday. Context matters; a management consultant who flies in from Hong Kong would have probably met more people who describe themselves as Business Systems Analysts rather than as (amateur) Yngling Class yatchsmen. But the question is still meaningful: when asked in a neutral context, which identity do people assume? I suspect, and hope, that the story I heard is still true when "So, what do you do?" is asked in a neutral context. Kiwi readers...any comments?

My own culture, the culture of urban middle-class India, mostly devout Hindus and a smattering of Sunnis and Catholics, who live by an impeccably Protestant work ethic, is very different. Back home, you are who you are at work. This is great when one is gunning for 10% GDP growth, but might make India's collective psyche a little less resilient to the business cycle.

This assumption is expressed in sometimes quaint ways: in a typical South Indian wedding invitation, the bridegroom's name is suffixed by his educational qualifications, the name of his employer and his rank/ designation. Or think back to Sen-saab, IAS, from English August; his identity cannot be decoupled from the fact that he is an Indian Administrative Service officer.

This assumption about the source of identity defines an interesting cultural axis.

My Chinese friends tell me that China is pretty close to my slice of India. My reading of Memoirs of a Geisha suggests that Japan, if anything, is further out on the same axis. The USA is, in my personal experience, only a little bit more laid back than India.

England, surprisingly, is a lot closer to New Zealand than the USA. A typical conversation after a game of squash might go:

Prithvi: "So, where do you work?"

English squash player: "About eight miles off the M1".

The same conversation in sub-text should read:

Prithvi: "How do you make a living?". Since I am well brought up and cosmopolitan I don't follow that question up with "So, what is your salary?", which would be quite acceptable at home

English squash player: "How I make a living is strictly my business, but I'm too polite to tell you to butt out, so I'll say something neutral"

I guess England is in Europe after all.

Fubsies skirring into the caliginosity

Harper Collins is running a campaign to save rarely used words from oblivion. Heard about it on on Radio 4. They asking influential cultural figures - humorists, poets, bloggers :) - to use these rare words so Harper Collings have a basis for including them in the next edition of the dictionary. Some of the endangered words, and their definitions on the Merriam Webster (since Harper Collins don't have a free online edition): - skirr: to leave hastily. Webster thinks the etymology may be an alteration of scour. The Radio 4 show suggested onomatopoeia, the sound a bird makes when beating its wings in flight, which sounds more plausible - fubsy: chubby and somewhat squat. I can't believe this beauty actually fell out of usage - Caliginosity: dimness or darkness. Has already vanished from the Webster's, so the link is to the free Wikipedia style dictionary. Radio 4 thinks caliginosity deserves to die. But to me, it evokes a sense of the eerie, an image of a hooded candle flickering in the nave of an enormous cathedral casting shadows into the vast stillness, that mere darkness does not convey. Gloaming feels closer to the mark Harper Collins claim that this exercise is needed because they need to drop words from the dictionary. They need to make room for terms like equity injection and credit crunch by dropping fubsy and skirr. I smell bullshit. Surely, in today's world, the real authoritative version of any dictionary is the soft copy, which is not constrained by size. A physical print edition can be cut to any arbitrary number of words. This seems to be an effort to raise the public profile of rare words. A worthy and noble effort in any circumstances. Lets just drop the bs.

Cultural Learnings of Eng-a-land for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Hindustan

A summit has been summoned in Kirkcaldy. The problem: asbo seagulls.

Test cricket. Live at the ground

Five thoughts after a day watching test cricket at Trent Bridge:

1. The thonchk sound of bat hitting ball. That sound just doesn't come through on TV

2. The new TV screen at Trent Bridge is fantastic. Watching from a stand 150 meters from the screen, the picture quality is as good as on TV at home. They do show the key moments on screen. Makes the classic (expensive) seats over the top of the bowler's arm less relevant, really

3. They market special radios on the ground that pick up Sky Sports' TV commentary. They ought to also market special internet devices that pick up The Guardian's OBO coverage

4. The English start drinking at 11:00 am and drink continuously till stumps at 6:30. Men and women, white haired gentlemen in blazers and yobs in tattoos...they all sustain this rate of consumption. It is an amazing physical achievement. Even more amazing, Britain is ranked only 15th in European league tables for alcohol consumption per capita

5. Monty Panesar does a cool wave to the crowd. His back is towards the crowd, but he acknowledges the "Monty, give us a wave" calls by transferring his weight on to one leg, pivoting his hands at about waist height, shrugging a shoulder and just glancing back for a split second

Do better driving tests save lives?

Earlier this morning, I was talking a friend through the painful process of getting a UK driving license. My friend is a Chartered Accountant and a banker. He is bringing up a family. He has been driving for about 20 years in India, the USA and various holiday destinations. It's hard to find a lower risk-profile than him. But getting a UK license remains a painful process, low-risk-profile or otherwise.

Part of the pain is, of course, the sheer bureaucracy. But a part of the pain is that there is a real risk of cautious and experienced drivers failing the test. The UK test is a heck of a lot more rigorous than equivalents in either India or, slightly more surprisingly, the USA.

Does the UK get anything valuable out of these rigourous tests (apart from the perverse pleasure oily government employees get from randomly saying no)?

A quick Google search seems to show that the testing works. The per capita death rate through road accidents in the UK is about half US levels. That is massive, a lot more than I was expecting.

An interesting twist in the data is that almost 65% of the difference in death rates seems to be explained the fact that the US has more cars per capita. A first glance the more money -> more cars -> more road deaths pattern seemed natural. But no. One might have expected a society that is more dependent on cars to invest more in road safety. And at some human level, the risk of death per individual just feels like a much more important metric than the risk of death per vehicle.

Another interesting slant in the data is the ratio of injuries to deaths. The UK and the US are around the same level here, suggesting that there are no material differences in the quality of medical care delivered to accident victims. If anything the much-reviled NHS seems to be delivering a slightly better ratio than the USA.

There is a specter haunting Europe (2)

Britain is one of the world's more over-priced property markets. Prices can go into free-fall.

So what should be done about that? Cut interest rates to prop up prices? Or use the inevitable carnage as an opportunity to massively expand housing supply...to deliver a step-change improvement in the real lives of real people?

My (contrarian) vote is for the supply side expansion.

The elephant in the very-tiny-room during any conversation about housing in Britain is that the quality of housing really sucks. A country as rich as Britain need not live in homes that are so small that a standard "bedroom" is about the size of an American walk-in closet. Where double bedrooms don't fit double beds. Or where faucets that mix hot and cold water are an exotic luxury.

The simple and obvious solution is to develop large tracts of high quality housing, either on greenfield sites or by bulldozing some of the existing housing stock. But this simply has not happened. Is there a subtle but powerful political pressure from property owners defending high prices?

A counter-argument that is sometimes reflexively trotted out is: Britain is a small island and land is scarce. This is pure hokum. Britain can easily import tomatoes or milk. Britain can't import land. A very similar argument was used in the 80s to justify Japan's over-priced "rabbit hutches" and its heavily subsidized rice farms.

More realistically, a supply side expansion that might happen during this downturn is that sellers might be forced to spend more on the house to sell it at the same price. This will not get picked up as deflation in the published house price indices. But that investment will be a welcome improvement in the real lives in real people.

Cultural learnings of Eng-a-land for make benefit glorious nation of Hindustan

Kevin, our electrician/ plumber/ handyman came in over the weekend to help assemble the kid's bunk bed. He's a genial, happy and very helpful guy we've worked with a lot. We offered him tea or coffee. He turned us down...because he drinks only freshly ground coffee. How posh is that!

Tony Blair once famously claimed that "we're all middle class now." Is he right?

The Guardian survey below shows that the children of the old upper classes (think Bertie Wooster and colonial colonels) now describe themselves as middle class. Truck drivers and electricians want the best schools for their children and drink tall skinny lattes while referring to themselves as working class.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2195560,00.html

My take is that there is a real convergence of identities and values happening. Slowly. It's being driven by the emergent service economy. The fascinating twist is that the old notions of class are still self-defining, even while this convergence is happening.

My clearest window into English culture is Watching the English, by Kate Fox. The author is an English anthropologist, who has an insider's right to make un-PC anthropological observations that can never really be made about Amazonian tribes.

One of her central theses is that every English person comes with a built in radar that automatically switches on during social interactions to plot the other person onto a fine, richly layered social hierarchy. The English are uncomfortable with foreigners because this radar no longer works.

Will that class-radar get slowly ground to dust by the service economy? Hard to say. My money is on the service economy winning.

Cultural learnings of Eng-a-land for make benefit glorious nation of Hindustan

The city magistrates of Nottingham has just banned five notorious, aggressive beggars from begging in the city center, sitting within ten meters of a cash point, or selling the Big Issue without authorization.

In case you're wondering, the UK's per capital GDP at ppp is around $35000.

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=133965&command=displayContent&sourceNode=133948&contentPK=18991107&moduleName=InternalSearch&formname=sidebarsearch

Reminds me of a conversation I had with my driver back in Bombay in the late 90s.

My driver then was Anil Thakker, a hard working Gujarati who was carefully saving up money to pay a broker for a job in the Gulf. We were on Marine Drive. A few beggers were hovering around the car. Anil asked me if there were beggers outside India. I told him there were, many. He flatly refused to believe me.

Cultural learnings of Eng-a-land for make benefit glorious nation of Hindustan

How did England's cricket captain Paul Collingwood meet his wife?

Here's how he describes the moment in his own words:

"I was at the bar getting the beers in and she was standing about ten yeards away with her friends. I shouted over 'Oi', which wasn't a very good pick up line. She looked around and I thought 'She's lovely'. So I said 'Come here, like' and she started walking over. She said 'Yes?' and I panicked because I didn't expect her to come over. I said 'I don't know what to say.' And that was that. I guess that is one way of breaking the ice."