The English were only just getting over the new American ambassador spitting at British cooking – complaining of being served lamb and potatoes “180 times” to date on his tour of duty – when their most celebrated roast meat is now used as a metaphor for the dismal state of the nation.
In a Portuguese book, Bifes Mal Passados, that translates into English as Undercooked Beef, physicist Professor Joao Magueijo depicts England as a place of, among other things, inedible dinners, loose lavatorial hygiene and drunken young women giving blowjobs to strangers in the street.
But whereas this latest entry on the shelf of Anglo-phobic volumes by foreigners considers English women too free with their sexual favours, the Parisian journalist Agnès Poirier once notoriously suggested that the local blokes were too stingy with theirs. Her book Touché: A French Woman’s Take on the English (2006) encourages the popular canard that the boyfriends and husbands of Blighty are either secretly gay or not much cop at hetero-sex.
Outraged headlines greeted Paul Theroux’s The Kingdom By The Sea (1983), in which the American author toured the British coastline, finding Scots mean and boarding-house beds hard as boards but causing most offence by suggesting that Brits were self-deludedly “holding on” to past glories. Another American travel writer touring the UK, Bill Bryson in Notes from a Small Island (1995), got a lot of jokes from road signs (“place names like Farleigh Wallop, Titsey and Shellow Bowells”) and the existence of a major Radio 4 series in which people ask whether it’s time to plant their begonias.
Theroux and Bryson also dissed the rancid cuisine, a common theme in these books.
The American journalist Sarah Lyall, in A Field Guide to the English (2009) marvels that her English husband likes “puddings consisting largely of stale white bread”, while also complaining that brutal British loo-paper makes the consequences of eating harder.
Intriguingly, in common with most of the other authors, the genre’s latest contender, Professor Magueijo, has lived in Britain for a long time which means that they can’t be accused of having taken an instant or surface dislike to the place.
But what is possibly the most complete denunciation of the country was written by an Englishman, although one who had, at the time, exiled himself to France. In 1961, the playwright John Osborne (Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer) published in Tribune magazine a piece that began: “This is a letter of hate. It is for you, my countrymen. I mean those men of my country who have defiled it.”
Osborne, though, lived his final years in a Shropshire village and is now buried in the churchyard. So perhaps the old place grows on its foes in the end.
