If you haven’t already, pick up a copy of Watching the English
from your nearest bookshop. It’s an attempt by a professional (English) anthropologist, Kate Fox, to analyse the English and English behaviour.
While it’s a bit repetitive, she does manage to make explicit most of the implicit rules of social behaviour in English society. This is sometimes amusing, mostly enlightening and occasionally irritating, mainly when she highlights things you’ve already noticed. It is well worth a read, particularly if you’re English and think that some of your behaviour is “natural” and the “way everyone is”. Is should also help foreigners avoid making various faux pas and help English readers be more tolerant of those that do.
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I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
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