Some of the rules of Englishness are so obvious that you could spot them from a helicopter, without even setting foot in the country. Hover above any English town for a few minutes. And you will see that the residential areas consist almost entirely of rows and rows of small boxes, each with its own tiny patch of green. In some parts of the country, the boxes will be a greyish colour, in others, a sort of reddish-brown. In more affluent areas, the boxes will be spaced further apart, and the patches of green attached to them will be larger. But the principle will be clear: the English all want to live in their own private box with their own private little green bit. What you cannot see from your helicopter, you will learn as soon as you try to visit an English home. You may have the address and a map, but you will have great difficulty in finding the house you are looking for. The Hungarian humorist George Mikes claimed that «an English town is a vast conspiracy to mislead foreigners», citing the indisputable facts that our streets are never straight, that every time a street bends it is given a different name (except when the bend is so sharp that it really makes two different streets), that we have at least 60 confusing synonyms for «street» (place, mews, crescent, terrace, rise, lane, gate, etc.), and that street names are in any case always carefully hidden. Even if you manage to find the correct street, the numbering of the houses will be hopelessly inconsistent and idiosyncratic, further complicated by many people choosing to give their houses names rather than numbers.
My taxi-driver interview can be a bit helpful to explain this: «An Englishman’s home is his castle, right? He can’t actually have the moat and drawbridge, but he can make it bloody difficult to get to».
But an Englishman’s home is much more than just his castle, the embodiment of his privacy rules, it is also his identity, his main status-indicator and his prime obsession. And the same goes for English women. This is why a house is not just something that you passively «have», it is something that you «do», something that you «work on».
2. There are some explanations for a confusing system of English streets, which are scientifically proven.
1. True
2. False
3. Not Stated
