British Culture and Multi-culturalism

Little snippets of Britishness:

In one hour of walking up New Oxford Street and going into the shops, I heard 17 people say “Sorry!”  The British have a keen sense of personal space, and they know when they have violated yours by accident, and take great care to apologize.  And as for saying “Sorry!” in a conspicuous and permanent way–as I walked to the local health food store, I noted a big tablet mounted next to the door of one of University of London’s brick buildings, saying: “Birkbeck College apologizes deeply to the Russell Family for not having gained permission before erecting this building, the design of which was therefore not approved by the family trust.”  The building wasn’t half-bad – a nondescript box from the 1980's – but one of the Russells (of Russell Square fame?) must have hated it!

London is notoriously multi-cultural these days, and an American just off the plane really notices it.  In my first long walk (Russell Square, Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, near the British Museum), I spotted 12 women in Islamic dress, some of them in burkas (most of them with faces showing, but two with complete coverage, veil over the nose and all), several of them with young children who looked completely Westernized, in striped polo shirts, jeans, and sneakers.  Our first encounter with a neighbor was with the lady downstairs, whose blasting radio proved annoying at 4-hour intervals.  The sounds coming through the air vents sounded sometimes like very angry Arabic men shouting at each other and sometimes like Arabic chants.  We surmised that our neighbor must be hard of hearing (otherwise the sound would be more moderate), and maybe she was listening to the news at some hours and to religious services at other times.  Mike had the good sense to e-mail our landlords in Canada to ask how to approach our neighbor.  Turns out our speculations were pretty close to the mark.  The lady downstairs is an Iraqi widow who runs a support network for Arabic women–-battered woman shelter, etc. Though she’s not home much, she sometimes listens to Arabic radio, and she is hard of hearing.  We were advised to go down and introduce ourselves and say that by some fluke of acoustics, her radio reached us as if it were in our rooms, and could she just turn it down a bit at night and early morning.  She was as sweet as could be and told us that she’s been listening to the radio more avidly just recently because this is the time of the Iraqi elections, and she’s hanging on the results.   Now when she has her radio on it’s a bit more moderate, and we turn on BBC Classic to neutralize it.

On the Telly, at least half the announcers are brown-skinned, with a variety of extremely British accents, from Cockney to Oxbridge to Posh.  My yoga instructor and Pilates instructor are both of Caribbean descent–one with an East End accent and one with a Caribbean lilt–and they are both wonderfully funny.  That’s one of the things I noticed two years ago and was very surprised by: “strangers” you meet during the day are very apt to make you laugh.  Londoners love a giggle (this may not extend to the upper classes–we don’t meet those, so I don’t know).

Another cultural oddity is that everywhere there are posters advertising novels–on the tube, on the bus, on the street, inside stores.  These are mostly for comic novels and mysteries (Minette Walters’ newest is advertised everywhere).  But I see lots of people reading serious novels on the tube, not just pop stuff.  In the newspaper yesterday, Ian MacEwen, author of the timely novel Saturday, noted that when he tried to give away a couple of hundred of his extra books, only women were takers. He concludes that it’s women who read novels.  If so, women are being targeted by a lot of posters.