Don’t get me started

With elec­tions just gone, my nat­ural in­stinct this month would have been to use this col­umn to be­moan the fact that I can’t vote here de­spite hav­ing been a res­i­dent and tax­payer for over 20 years, but given that my col­league Neil Stokes so elo­quently cov­ered that topic in his col­umn last month, I in­stead de­cided to go off the beaten track a lit­tle and ask some Brita­lan friends of mine for some ideas - in case you’ve for­got­ten, “Brita­lan” is a term I in­vented for British peo­ple who live here and have in­te­grated to some ex­tent, i.e. they at least speak Cata­lan and/or Span­ish with some de­gree of pro­fi­ciency, as op­posed to the term British ex­pats, i.e. Brits who live here with­out hav­ing in­te­grated. The two re­sponses I got were from Brita­lans long mar­ried to women from these parts, al­though they would both ob­ject to the term Brita­lan, given that they feel 100% British de­spite their level of in­te­gra­tion. I got the fol­low­ing from one (I’ll leave you to work out which cul­ture he’s re­fer­ring to in each point):

“Drink­ing tea (any time is a good time); meet­ing for a beer rather than a cof­fee; fin­ish­ing said beer, not leav­ing a quar­ter of it in the glass; pay­ing in the act and not just for your own (there are ex­cep­tions); meal times; cakes for so many oc­ca­sions and the price of them (we only do birth­days, Christ­mas pud­ding and hot cross buns); not un­der­stand­ing that “in­ter­na­tional” cui­sine is part of our cul­ture (es­pe­cially for us Lon­don­ers); ask­ing who is last in the queue even though it is bla­tantly ob­vi­ous; ask­ing some­one if they are get­ting off the bus/tube as they are too im­pa­tient to wait and see; going out at mid­night”, and then in spe­cific ref­er­ence to foot­ball ”ac­tu­ally going to sup­port our foot­ball teams in­stead of just talk­ing about it; still going to the ground if it rains; going to away games; hav­ing cen­tre for­wards that don’t fall over and then moan about it.”

As you can tell, this Brita­lan took my in­vi­ta­tion as an op­por­tu­nity to get a few things off his chest about liv­ing in a cul­ture other than his own. I won­der how true those things ring with read­ers, given that they are an (al­beit some­what neg­a­tive) ex­pres­sion of what it’s like to live in Cat­alo­nia from the point of view of a British man fully in­te­grated into a Cata­lan fam­ily.

An­other Brita­lan in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion, namely being mar­ried long-term to a local woman, had the fol­low­ing to say: “walk­ing too slowly; spend­ing hours try­ing to sort out a bill; adults drink­ing Fanta; think­ing a crois­sant means break­fast; cel­e­brat­ing Saint’s days when they haven’t seen the in­side of a church since the pass­ing of Franco; hold­ing a loud con­ver­sa­tion in a bar with the fur­thest away per­son in said bar; TVs blar­ing out ter­ri­ble pro­grammes at top vol­ume; think­ing we love Benny Hill and Queen; say­ing “good-bye” when pass­ing some­one in the street; not using please and thank you.”

Now it had been my in­ten­tion to use these com­ments as in­spi­ra­tion for fu­ture columns, but then I re­alised that in them­selves they rep­re­sented quite an in­ter­est­ing in­sight into (some) for­eign res­i­dents’ views of where they have de­cided to live. Please re­mem­ber when di­gest­ing them, how­ever, that as Brits, dry hu­mour forms a large part of their life view. So you can take their belly­ach­ing with a pinch of salt. They love liv­ing here re­ally.