Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
An accumulation of poor lifestyle choices means I have to spend an inordinate and unwanted amount of time with the British public. I am left to my own devices, among other lost souls, in what I can only increasingly describe as an increasingly dysfunctional and unhappy public realm. This is a world of delayed trains, run-down chain coffee shops and itinerant co-working spaces — the backdrop to viral moments of public meltdowns, spats over racism and the delinquent behaviour that now makes up the disenchanting bric-a-brac of civic life.
Maybe I am paranoid or simply jaded, but I am convinced the English are going through a wholesale transformation of their character. Normally, this sort of ambient misery would be balm for our famous sense of humour and moderating impulse. But I can’t remember the last time anyone made me laugh in the wild. This is a world we seem increasingly eager to pretend does not exist. I don’t think we’re about to get a sitcom set in a multi-national HMO in Zone 6 revolving around the antics of a dodgy high street. There is a vast realm of England that now exists like a rock we are reluctant to lift up in case we discover what’s lurking underneath.
No one is particularly self deprecating or modest in conversation anymore. True eccentricity, or individuality, is frowned upon — the conformity of English life now only coloured by the genuinely mentally unwell and over-indulged attention seekers. There are of course the old English archetypes of busybodies, rule enforcers, curtain twitchers and rogues, but now they are backed by genuine state power to completely ruin your life they have somehow lost their charm.
A.A. Gill described England as the “Angry Island” but I don’t think he ever quite touched on the sort of simmering trauma that now accompanies people as they try to make their way in England of 2026.
Reading this book in 2026 can sometimes feel like watching a family film of a once beloved relative who now has increasingly violent dementia
These suspicions about my fellow citizens were recently confirmed while reading Kate Fox’s 2003 book Watching the English. Fox opens her study drinking brandy at a pub near Paddington station so she can pluck up the courage to queue jump and bump into strangers to elicit their reaction. It’s probably the funniest book of anthropology ever written, and as Fox hints in the 2014 reintroduction, with mild regret, has turned foreigners and citizens alike into amateur anthropologists eagerly attuned to the eccentric and loveable quirks of English behaviour.
But I’m not entirely sure I always recognise her subject of study. Reading this book in 2026 can sometimes feel like watching a family film of a once beloved relative who now has increasingly violent dementia. The national catchphrase — a product of our dislike of earnestness — is apparently “oh come off it” (a phrase I haven’t heard for years). And then there is our moderation — our “default mode” as Fox puts it — which boils down to the avoidance of extremes, a fear of change and fuss. This is something that seems incompatible not just with our new electoral landscape but the now weekly protests, flagging and coterie of bizarre micro-influencers that populate provincial cities, suburbs and towns like Faversham, — a Ballardian no man’s land where people throw bricks through their neighbours’ windows, run vigilante groups, and seem increasingly set free to explore their simmering resentments.
Fox’s central observation is that English behaviour is underpinned by what she calls social dis-ease, a “sub-clinical combination of autism and agoraphobia” or a “general inability to engage in a normal and straightforward fashion with other human beings.” This is an affliction we have solved by mediating our life through pubs, clubs and committees, and as Fox suggests rears its head through everything from football hooliganism to the famous English reserve. (Mind your own business, don’t make a fuss, don’t draw attention to yourself are what Fox hears. Again, phrases I haven’t heard for a while.)
Is this still the guiding principle of our increasingly unsettled behaviour? I’m not so sure. Fox’s book, I expect to her great irritation, has inspired me to follow in her footsteps. At Waterloo station, bumping into people did not elicit a single “sorry” but a series of strange, implicitly threatening and even disturbing psycho-sexual encounters. In the shared office space I work in, Fox’s social dis-ease has given way to an atmosphere of radical transparency where people spend their lunch breaks talking about mental health and being passive aggressively nice to each other — less out of social embarrassment than some sort of hysterical possession.
Like Fox, I have tried to go in search of new underpinning rules. I think the biggest one that has emerged is what I’m going to call Paranoid Normalcy. This I think is in response to us being increasingly suspicious of each other’s inner worlds guided by cyberspace, and a mistrust of what is taking place beneath the surface in response to a country that is unravelling. The assumption when meeting someone now is to prove you are normal or blissfully unfazed lest you reveal the monster within (it is what it is, log off and have a normal, anything with the word folks and you ok bud? being the recognisable mores and manners)
The effect is a national temperament of suffering conformity and dullness, punctuated by sudden flares of repressed anger and unhinged strangeness. Hiroshi Suzuki, the loveable Japanese ambassador who likes to impose himself with a Paddington bear on all the touchstones of heritage and Englishness is the biggest culprit of this suffocating sphere. The result is that the actual national character, once acutely diagnosed by Fox and others, has become so laboured and bowdlerised that anyone wanting to feel like a normal human being in England is increasingly driven inwards and to the lunatic fringes.
Who are the English now? I think to get a proper grip you’d have to abandon the old medium of polite conversation about the weather, conversations in pubs, football matches and snatches of George Orwell and create some sort of disturbing experimental film. A canvas of people scrolling online alone in their bedrooms, middle-aged men on the commuter trains forced to listen to drill rap, and private speculation around increasingly bizarre happenings that make up the crime section of any given local newspaper. I think then you might get a little glimpse of what’s unfolding beneath the surface.
