Is It Really Too Much to Ask? (40 page)

If I may be permitted to liken Britain to the human body, then Scotland is the brain, East Anglia is the stomach, North and East Yorkshire are the breasts and London is the heart that pumps vital nutrients and oxygen to the fingernails and the ears and Preston. Which leaves us with the garden shed we built years ago when we decided to take up metalworking: that's Birmingham.

In recent years it's been tidied up. Earnest locals have fitted funky new lighting and a bar. They've polished the lathe, too, and turned the vice into an amusing beer pump.

But still nobody's interested. We don't do metalwork any more. So, neat though it now may be, the shed remains rather unloved.

Early last week there were many big news stories to titillate the nation. A meteorite had crashed into Russia, a film had been made about Tom Cruise visiting a curry house last August in St Albans and people were very interested in the dramatic downfall of Oscar Pistorius. But even so, the eighth-most-read story on the BBC website was: ‘Why does everyone hate Birmingham?'

Twenty years ago it was very probably the worst place on earth. If you fancied eating something that wasn't a curry, you'd set off on a long and fruitless walk that would culminate in you being vomited on. And then stabbed, for daring to get in the way of someone's sick.

There was only one hotel where you had even half a chance of not catching lice and only one nightclub where you
wouldn't necessarily be glassed. Not that you could find either because a few years earlier someone had decided the city should have a series of underpasses. Unfortunately they'd got a bit carried away, so that visitors would turn off the M6, disappear immediately into a hole and not emerge until they were past Kidderminster. Birmingham, then, was difficult to find and horrible if, by some miracle, you succeeded.

The reasons for going? Well, Brummies were keen to point out that they had more canals than Venice. By which I think they meant more shopping trolleys in their canals than Venice. And, er, that's it. Birmingham was just an industrial city that had no industry any more.

Today, though, everything's changed. There are bars and nightclubs and Selfridges. And all the old industrial buildings have been turned into loft apartments for thrusting young executives. So why do we still have a problem with it? I realize, of course, that it takes a while for people to notice there's been a change. We still, for instance, think of Stella Artois as reassuringly expensive rather than a drink that causes you to beat up your wife.

But continuing to think of Birmingham as a wart is as daft as continuing to imagine that York is full of oxen. You simply can't not like the city any more. And it's hard to dislike the people either. Chiefly because they are usually more British than we'll ever be.

Show a Brummie a spectacular house and after he's arranged his face to register a complete and absolute lack of interest, he will say, ‘I wouldn't want to hoover a sitting room that big.' Show him an amazing garden and he will say, ‘I bet that takes a lot of digging.' Put his wife in a pretty frock and he will wonder what happens when she spills her balti on it. In short, a Birmingham person is born with an inability to say, ‘That is amazing.'

The British have a global reputation for keeping their emotions hidden. But Brummies have taken this to a level that would flabbergast even the Duke of Marlborough. Their emotions are not just hidden. They are locked in a safe and buried under twenty tons of concrete, in a well, at the bottom of the garden.

You know Michaela Strachan? The bubbly, enthusiastic former children's TV presenter? She's not from Birmingham. We know this because she released a video called
Wild About Baby Animals
. If she'd been a Brummie, it would have been called
Not Bothered Either Away About Baby Animals
.

Of course, this refusal to find anything wondrous can be rather irritating. Especially when you are with a Brummie at the Grand Canyon and he's facing the other way, checking his text messages. I'm not saying who that was. Only that his name begins with R and ends with ichard Hammond.

However, when you see a party of Americans whooping and high-fiving one another about something as trivial as a tropical sunset, you crave the company of a Brummie, who'll wilfully face east and tell you he'd rather be in Moseley.

I'd be happy in the trenches with a Brummie too. Because the upside of his downbeat nature is that he doesn't find things spectacularly bad either. You get the impression a Brummie would be capable of sitting there watching a rat eat his gangrenous foot without moaning anywhere near as much as, say, me.

So. We go back to the original question. Why, if the city's improved and the people are stoic, does the rest of the country have such a problem with the place? Well, there's no easy way of saying this. But, um, it's the accent.

In the complex world of advertising, a Yorkshire twang is perceived to be honest. Which is why Sean Bean is used to promote every single thing. It's the same story with the
Scotch.
Gavin & Stacey
has made the Welsh accent funny and likeable, and now that Cilla Black has taken her mocking tones into retirement, posh is okay as well.

A Birmingham accent, however, makes you sound thick. If Einstein had been from King's Heath, no one would have taken the theory of relativity seriously. If Churchill had been a Brummie, we'd have lost the war. And if you don't believe me, just get someone from Castle Bromwich to read out the ‘We shall fight on the beaches' speech.

That's why people hate Birmingham. It's because they think everyone who lives there is a bit daft. Happily, though, I have a solution. If the council really wants its city to thrive after the second phase of HS2 has turned it into an oxbow lake, it needs to stop giving the locals more bars. And send them for elocution lessons instead.

24 February 2013

Time. It's now so precious that we will happily spend an absolute fortune making all the things we do faster, simply so we have time to do more things.

A decade or more ago, if you were suddenly consumed with a need to watch some online footage of a cat falling over, it took about a minute for your internet to load the film. This was a minute none of us could spare. Then we got the idea of watching it on the go. Luckily a conglomerate of international mobile phone companies had paid the British government £22 billion for something called 3G. This meant people had to wait only five seconds to see a cat falling over, and for a while we were all very happy.

But then we realized that in the modern world five seconds is far too long. So now phone companies have paid a further £2.3 billion for 4G, a service that delivers hilarious animal-related accidents almost instantaneously.

We see the same thing going on in lifts. We need a button that closes the doors when we're ready to go because we simply cannot wait four seconds for them to close by themselves. Rightly so. Two lift journeys a day could waste eight seconds. Which in a working week is forty seconds. In a time frame that vast we could have watched six cats falling over. And an amusing helicopter crash.

It's the same at our favourite supermarket. If the queues are too long, we will go elsewhere. Even if we know the next shop fills its burgers with horses, toenails and bits of mashed bat.

I know I'm more pathological than most about wasting time, but surely you too must froth at the mouth when you sit down to watch a DVD and you are electronically prevented from fast-forwarding through the legal disclaimers that precede it. This is lawyers stealing our lives. And we hate it.

It's strange, though. We fume in traffic jams and curse when people on pavements walk too slowly, yet we are prepared to waste hours and hours of every day gurning and engaging in idle chitchat with people we don't know.

The British middle-class obsession with good manners means we feel obliged to discuss the weather with our postman and our holidays with our hairdresser. We write ridiculously long thank-you letters to people we've already thanked verbally. In business emails we use words that aren't necessary simply because we feel the need to be polite, and if we want directions we always start out by saying, ‘Excuse me. I hate to be a bother but …'

Been on a flight recently? The obsequiousness is now so rampant that it takes half an hour to make every announcement. ‘Any bread items for yourself at all today, sir?'

I bring all of this up because I've just spent a week in Russia where manners don't seem to have been invented. When a hotel receptionist needs your passport, she doesn't say, ‘Would it be possible to see your passport for a moment, sir, if it isn't too much trouble?' She says, ‘Passport.' And if you can't find it within three seconds, she says, ‘Now!'

When you order a dish from a menu that isn't available, there's no tiresome hand-wringing explanation from the waiter. He just says, ‘It's off.' And if you are struggling to get your luggage through a revolving door, no one waits patiently until you've sorted the problem out. They repeatedly shove the handles until everything in your suitcase is smashed and your fingers have been severed.

When a British
Top Gear
fan wants my photograph, they spend hours explaining how their son watches the show on Dave and how he can impersonate me and how it's a religion in their house. Whereas in Russia they just say, ‘Photo.' And if they don't happen to have a camera, you are told to stay where you are until they have been back to their house and got one.

Ever been stuck behind two British people while waiting for a ski lift? ‘After you.' ‘No, you were here first.' ‘No, really. I'm sure you were.' ‘Oh, it's okay. I don't mind waiting. It's such a lovely day.' ‘Much warmer than last year.' After a while you are consumed with an urgent need to stab both of them with your poles.

Queuing is much easier in Russia – because no one bothers. You just walk to the front and if anyone objects – this actually happened – you pull out your wallet and show the complainant your credit cards. This is Russian for, ‘I am richer than you, sunshine, so shut up.'

It's the same in what we call polite discussion. You don't dress up counter-arguments with subtle innuendo. Russians just say, ‘You're wrong,' and move on. Here's one conversation I had:

‘Jews are running the world.'

‘I hear what you say, but I don't think that's the case.'

‘You're wrong.'

‘But there are plenty of examples …'

‘I said, “You're wrong.” '

Being British, it's all very upsetting. But after a while I started to realize that being impolite saves an awful lot of time and costs you nothing. When someone is wasting your evening with their harebrained nonsense, just tell them they are wrong and walk away. When you are in a butcher's shop, don't bother with small talk. Just say, ‘Two chops,' and wait to
be told the price. When someone is dawdling on the pavement, push them out of the way. And in a bar, don't try to catch the barman's eye. Just shout what you want from the back of the queue.

It certainly works on Aeroflot. Planes set off before everyone is seated, and when you are coming in to land, you don't get any rubbish from the pilot about the weather and he doesn't wish you a safe onward journey. You are told to sit up straight and to remain seated until the plane has stopped. Which no one does.

Back at Heathrow, the immigration official was very chummy. ‘Been away long?' he asked politely. I saved two seconds by not bothering with an answer.

I felt terrible. Guilty as hell. But that's the curse of being British. That's why we need 4G and buttons that close the lift doors and high-speed rail links. Because they free up more time for writing very long thank-you letters and making small talk with the milkman.

3 March 2013