Being British

If there’s one thing I’ve been pretty certain about all my life, it’s that I’m British. I’ve really been rather proud about the whole thing, actually. I blame the passport a little, for the pompous writing it’s got in the front demanding that foreigners care for me because I am British and great.

Since I’ve left the country, though, I have been moving further away from my ethnic identity day by day. Sometimes for expediency, sometimes for embarrassment and sometimes for humour.

It all started out of the lying-about-our-names phase. You know, there are some people on the street who you simply do not want to know your name, so you make one up. Then you feel much less uncomfortable when they tell you how nice a name it is and shout it after you down the street as you walk away. I’ve always liked ‘Sophie’ and ‘Susan’, so use those quite a lot. It also avoids everyone I meet telling me I’m named after the wife of Abraham.

But those are quite boring names, really. Would that I were able to keep a straight face more I would love to have the guts to introduce myself as ‘Flangewad’ to people, to then be told that it is a beautiful name. As it is, I still have to cough every time that particular party member brings it up.

Why stop at a name, though? If I don’t want these people to know just my first name, I certainly do not want them to know where I come from. It started innocently enough with accent-identification-failures (”Ahh, you’re American!”) but it soon became apparent that few people can place the range of British accents that exist. I now frequently find myself traveling with Anna the Australian, who has a fantastically crap accent she wheels out randomly.

So where have I gone for? I’m sure any of you who remember Sooty’s Big Day Out (or whatever it was called) cannot but forget my stirling example of a Scottish accent. Sophie the Edinburgher is able to be as rude to annoying people as she likes, because she has the right accent. Well, not the ‘right’ accent, maybe. An accent. Or a few accents which kind of merge together. Sophie does sometimes come out as Irish.

When we were up Mount Kenya, though, we shied our Englishness even more, and this time not to protect our personalities from unwanted attention or to amuse our companions (and sometimes other people riding the bus, who notice that in the same journey we purport to be from numerous countries). This time, it was all the fault of some fellow Brits. We happened upon a group of tweenagers.

At first we were rather excited by the prospect of meeting them. Whilst we stumbled about near the campsite halfway up the mountain (in the heather and the thistles and all manner of other growths which would have been so at home in England) we saw the exuberant little buggers arrive and spend a long time trying to take a photograph of them all jumping at the same time. We contrived not to feel old in their presence. We could be gap year students after all, right? There’d be no problem with us making some new friends and chatting to them.

It turns out there was a problem. It was them. And arguably our age, but mostly them.

The hut we were staying in had thin walls. Very thin walls, in fact. In many places you could just see into the next room. There was no sound absorption whatsoever, as well the tweenagers next door realised when they heard me singing the Wonderstuff’s ‘The Size of a Cow’ repeatedly. Everyone in the corridor could hear everyone else.

So what the hell possessed them to play Never Have I Ever in the middle of the night? There wasn’t even any alcohol! Over the next two hours we became well acquainted with them and in the end I felt sorry for Floppy Hand Job’s lack of sexual gratification at the limp wrists of his girlfriend. I was still unsure how Man Who Lost His Virginity to Woman With a Hairy Minge had managed to repulse the girl so that she wouldn’t speak to him again, but it sounded as though he and Girl Who Wouldn’t Swallow were getting on rather well. They shared a bed in the end.

We informed them again that we could hear everything, and they then talked about that fact for a while. It was very hard at breakfast the next morning not to ask them all the follow-up questions. The girl who pulled 20 men in 2h30 in Cambridge whilst dressed as a Barbie; what night club was that? Men Who Was Twenty Three, when are you going to tell all these people that you’re gay? Man Who Ejaculated on a School Keyboard, how much did it cost you to replace it?

Of course, everyone else in the hut thing had heard too. And worst still, someone asked us to keep it down in the future. So we fled as fast as we could from our British identities, shunned the tweenagers and moved as quickly as we could from their age range. Instead of befriending them, we found some nice American men who did aid work in Sudan. We could get away from our association with those horrible, noisy Brits then.

So we’re not tweenagers any more, and glad of it. We’re barely even British. Sophie loves her home in Scotland, with her husband and exceptionally ugly five-year-old daughter Alice. Her husband wants to put Alice up for adoption, but Sophie is worrying about how to afford plastic surgery for her. The story takes a long time, and by that point Annoying Bus Man has decided he doesn’t want to sell Sophie a fish anyway. He really just wants to get away from her. It’s rather nice to turn the tables every now and then.