seconds later I looked around, I could not see my friend anywhere. At last I noticed he was lying on the floor, flat as a pancake. When he realised that nothing particular had happened in the pub he go up a little embarrassed, flicked the dust off his suit, and turned to me with a superior and sarcastic smile.
“Good Heavens! Were you so frightened that you couldn't move?”
About Simple Joys
It is important that you should learn how to enjoy simple joys, because that is extremely English. All serious Englishmen play darts and cricket and many other games; a famous English statesman was reported to be catching butterflies in the interval between giving up two European states to the Germans; there was even some misunderstanding with the French because they considered the habit of English soldiers of singing and playing football and hide and seek and blind man's bluff slightly childish.
Dull and pompous foreigners are unable to understand why ex-cabinet ministers get together and sing “Daisy, Daisy” in choir; why serious business men play with toy locomotives while their children learn trigonometry in the adjoining room; why High Court judges collect rare birds when rare birds are rare and they cannot collect many in any case; why it is the ambition of grown-up persons to push a little ball into a small hole; why a great politician who saved England and made history is called a “jolly good fellow.”
They cannot grasp why people sing when alone and yet sit silent and dumb for hours on end in their clubs, not uttering a word for months in the most distinguished company, and pay twenty guineas a year for the privilege.
The National Passion
Queueing is the national passion of an otherwise dispassionate race. The English are rather shy about it, and deny that they adore it.
On the Continent, if people are waiting at a bus-stop they loiter around in a seemingly vague fashion. When the bus arrives, they make a dash for it; most of them leave by the bus and a lucky minority is taken away by an elegant black ambulance car. An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.
The biggest and most attractive advertisements in from of cinemas tell people: Queue here for 4/6; Queue here for 9/3; Queue here for 16/8 (inclusive of tax). Those cinemas which do not put out these queueing signs do not do good business at all.
At week-ends an Englishman queues up at the bus-stop, travels out to Richmond, queues up for a boat, then queues up for tea, then queues up for ice-cream, the joins a few more odd queues just for the sake of the fun of it, then queues up at the bus-stop and has the time of his life.
Many English families spend lovely evenings at home just by queueing up for a few hours, and the parents are very sad when the children leave them and queue up for going to bed.
Three Small Points
If you go out for a walk with a friend, don't say a word for hours; if you go out for a walk with your dog, keep chatting to him.
There is a three-chamber legislation in England. A bill to become law has to be passed by the House of Commons and the House of Lords and finally approved by the Brains Trust.
A fishmonger is the man who mongs fish; the ironmonger and the warmonger do the same with iron and war. They just mong them.
2. How To Be a Particular Alien
A Bloomsbury Intellectual
They all hate uniforms so much that they all wear a special uniform of their own: brown velvet trousers, canary yellow pullover, green jacket with sky-blue checks.
This suit of clothes has to be chosen with the utmost care and is intended to prove that its wearer does not care for suits and other petty, worldly things.
A walking stick, too, is often carried by the slightly dandified right-wing of the clan.
A golden chain around the ankle, purple velvet shoes and a half-wild angora cat on the shoulders are strongly recommended as they much increase the appearance of arresting casualness.
It is extremely important that the B.I. should
A certain amount of rudeness is quite indispensable, because you have to prove day and night that the silly little commonplace rules and customs of society are not meant for
Literary opinions must be most carefully selected. Statements like this are most impressive: “There have been altogether two real poets in England: Sir Thomas Wyatt and John Ford. The words of the rest are rubbish.” Of course, you should include, as the third really great, colossal and epoch-making talent your own friend, T. B. Williams, whose neo-expressionist poetry is so terribly deep that the overwhelming majority of editors do not understand it and refuse to publish it. T. B. Williams, you may proudly claim, has never used a comma or a full stop, and what is more, he has improved Apollinaire's and Aragon's primitive technique by the fact that he
As to your own literary activities, your poems, dramas and great novels may lie at the bottom of your drawer in manuscript form. But it is important that you should publish a few literary reviews, scolding and disparaging