The  Problem With Being English

Or “I Blame It on British Rail”

Up to 1993 British Rail was a nationalized conglomerate monstrosity that was owned and run by the British Government and run very badly.

It’s 1985, I was living in Manchester and on this day, I was travelling down to London for a business meeting. I turned up at Piccadilly station and discovered I was twenty minutes early or what was as likely, British Rail had the time of the train wrong.

So, to pass the time I bought myself a newspaper to do the crossword and went to the buffet to get a cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits or as you Americans would call them a packed of cookies. Let’s just call them that for simplicities sake.

I digress – Rich Tea I think they might have been – doesn’t matter.

So let me give you the layout. While waiting, I sat at a table in the waiting room – on my left the newspaper, on my right the cup of coffee and in the middle of the table, the packet of biscuits, sorry cookies.

Does everyone see it? What you don’t see because I haven’t mentioned it yet is a man already sitting at the table across from me.

Now here is a perfectly ordinary man. Briefcase, business suit, smart tie also doing the crossword. He didn’t look like he was about to do anything weird. So why am I telling you this. On the face of it this has all the makings of a completely boring story.

Not so fast!

He then did this: he leaned across the table, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out and ate it.

Now this, I have to say. Is the sort of thing that we British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches us how to deal with someone in broad daylight that’s just committed grand larceny on your cookies. Now if that had been in, say South Central Los Angeles there would very quickly have been gunfire, blood would have flowed, helicopters, CNN you know the lot. But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of copy, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, What the heck am I going to do now?

In the end I thought, nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet had already been opened.

I took out a biscuit for myself. I thought that settled him! But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. Yes, that’s right he took another biscuit.

Having not mentioned it the first time, I simply couldn’t raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice . . .” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

So we went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight biscuits, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one.

Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief and sat back.

A moment or two later my train arrived, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my biscuits!

In conclusion, the thing I like particularly about this is the thought that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last thirty-eight years a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punchline.