Big England No.7: by Sam Butler

On his wise and witty blog The Adventures Of Queerpenguin, Sam Butler describes himself as a "20-something left-leaning homosexualist and pop culture nerd, living in the inner east Sydney pink ghetto," a sentence which may be unimprovable. I asked Sam, who also blogs here, to contribute to this series because I wanted a perspective from a non-Englander and non-Briton who would, nonetheless, have grown up in a culture possessing clear and strong ideas about who and what the English are. Here he describes a visit to England he made last summer.

I imagine “disoriented” is one word that could reasonably describe the British convicts, English ones included, when they first arrived at a penal island at the arse end of the earth nearly 200 years ago. So it was nice returning the favour for the Motherland last year and feeling disorientation myself when I first stepped foot on English soil.

Sure, seeing all the postcard icons was fairly straightforward. But much of the trip beyond this was not. In true Gothic style, the familiar suddenly felt strange while the strange was always somehow oddly familiar. Clubbing in Heaven on my first night in London – the city’s biggest and best for fags, I was told by English friends in Australia (which in turn was strongly rebutted by new temporary English friends in England) – was phenomenal, but frequently I had to remind myself that I wasn’t in Arq nightclub, Sydney. When you’re pounding away in a huge, dark enclosed space full of semi-naked Muscle Marys peaking to trance anthems and simulating their bed strategies on the dance floor, it’s all you can do to get clear in your head that, even though it feels like any other club night in your own home city, you are in fact 20,000kms away in another hemisphere.

Adding to the surrealism was the very nice-looking chap I spent most of my first night with offering me a complimentary pill. Such hospitality! I thought, until I was told that as pills “retail” in London for around two pounds and not the roughly equivalent nine they go for in Sydney, such an offer was not really so gregarious after all. Now, drugs in a nightclub is not news on its own I realise – but did I mention the chap in question was an ambitious constable with the local police force? Let me tell you, England isn’t sending her villains to Australia any more – she’s promoting them swiftly up the bobby chain.

This from my blogsite, written at 7:30am the next morning from a net café in Leicester Square:

“…I arrive to my home base at 4:30am, only to find I cannot work the locker combination to open the pub’s (I'm staying in residence above one) security grills….Not keen to awake my cousin and his lovely lady friend I contemplated other moves. It was already very bright and any body clock I may have had ran out of batteries days ago, so, after a failed attempt at sleeping in a nearby park (did I mention I'm a bit tired, having now not slept in over three nights)? I decided to walk. And walk. Get myself lost in London. It seemed like a romantic notion at the time, with cerebral nerve functions barely operational.

So I did manage to get myself lost in the stinky part of London - literally, the area where you have to step over garbage bags on the sidewalks. Suddenly I understood why people sometimes call London an ugly city. Of all the places in which to lose myself this was especially heinous. After nearly two hours of walking without a Tube station in sight I started to get a bit panicky…Then, one appears - and bloody hell, it's one down from Liverpool Street station where I began my journey!

…Feeling very strange, unsettled, and yet undeniably liberated. I have never enjoyed walking with no idea of where to turn so much. London cannot not impress, even its dark sides.”

Flash-forward to when the bombs dropped (yes, this was July 2005). I was in Paris by then – and my impulsive reaction upon first hearing the news was, “Shit! The Parisians REALLY wanted the Olympics, didn’t they?!” – but scheduled to make my way to Leeds in a couple of days. Managing to stay with friends who were living literally two streets away from the home of the bombers – on the same day on which their houses were raided – was an unlucky coincidence, but somehow oddly in sync with the tone of my UK experience thus far.

Needless to say, Leeds was a police state upon my arrival. I’d been warned about the nightly drunken fist fights breaking out in a city still shaking off its furious old industrial town foundations, but it was a brave man indeed who sought to get punchy while the streets were swarming with severely armed police people and battlefield choppers overhead. Nevertheless, in the three days I was in Leeds or Manchester, I still saw three “altercations”. Way to fly the Midlands flag, boys!

What can you do really, lost in a dream world where nothing is 100% “right”, other than adopt, adapt and improve? I guess that’s what the poor bastards did in Tasmania all those years ago. But the next time an English native chooses to make a disparaging comment about my convict ancestry, I can rest assured in the knowledge that we Aussies at least have evolved from our criminal stock.

Comments

[Katy]

Strong words, Sam! But your post is funny and also recognisable, and you had to structure it somehow. There is, of course, lots more than that to this place.

London is a multicultural Heaven, and not just a nightclub one. Hannah Pool in yesterday's Evening Standard, for example, wrote about her experience of Sydney as a largely monocultural city where any sighting of a black face is rare. Now, I can't say; I've never been to Sydney; but in the USA, where I came from all those aeons ago as a teenager, you still don't see anything like the number of mixed-race people you do here, or happily mixed couples where no one's having to fight for the right to go out together. People can just be friends, here. Or, if not friends, good neighbours. My neighbourhood is full of Turkish food, Indian food, I live in a block that's half Hassidic Jewish and till recently was commuting from there to a job where everyone was Bengali. My kids' friends are of every race and culture represented hereabouts; no one thinks anything of it.

London is a place where, by and large, people get along all together. That's what made the bombs so shocking. And I'm sure you can say the same for the rest of England, because (unlike the Americans, for example) the English really do seem to be distingished by an amazing capacity for tolerance.

This tolerance manifests itself as laissez-faire. It has made them the nation of shopkeepers they so proudly are. In other words, the English don't really CARE what you do as long as you don't get in anybody's way. It's the reason they have the 'tradition' of 'English eccentrics'. Because basically if you want to wear Argyll jumpers and spend your whole life repairing Grandfather clocks while reciting the Book of Revelations backwards, you can.

In America you'd have everyone you knew telling you what to wear, what to eat, what exercises to do, new research on which book of the Bible to recite, telling you you need anti-depressants, sending you magazine articles about some new dietary supplement for Argyll-wearing after 65.

And it's also the reason that copper's clubbing the way he is. And it's the reason shopkeepers are so surly - they just don't care... and the council never answers the phone... and the buses are so crap... and the Post Office loses half its letters... and the Home Office, don't get me started...

Well, you know what I mean! And there's more. I haven't even got onto the great - and endangered - English tradition of dissent - of which London is packed full of reminders. Plaques on walls everywhere for Shelley, Blake, Milton, the Pankhursts, Orwell. Wat Tyler was executed for his rebellion: did he think he'd be the subject of multiple street signs 700 years on?

I do love it here.

[Katy]

Sorry! Got into my argument there.

[littlebear]

Hi Katie,

Things have changed a whole lot in the US in the last thirty years. I bet England is great, but not because it's not the US. Youknow?

"People can just be friends, here. Or, if not friends, good neighbours. My neighbourhood is full of Turkish food, Indian food, I live in a block that's half Hassidic Jewish and till recently was commuting from there to a job where everyone was Bengali. My kids' friends are of every race and culture represented hereabouts; no one thinks anything of it".

Sounds like my neighborhood. We have over 27 languages spoken in the local Middle School, and EVERYBODY is mixed. Well, just about.

[molasses]

I usually live in London but have been posted out to Budapest with work for the last six months.

Its a great city and in many ways the lifestyle here is infinitely preferable to London.

However, I do miss the English and their 'whatever' attitude. I'd agree with Katy that it seems to add so much colour to English society. The result is a kind of anarchic chaos peculiar only to England.