Tea for few

Early last month and for the first time since Brexit, Barcelona’s metro sta­tions were graced with a small num­ber of of­fi­cial tourist posters urg­ing (local) pas­sen­gers to come and visit the coun­try I was born in. The first thing that might have struck any trained eye was the large-font head­ing: ’Great Britain’. In the 62 years since I learned to un­der­stand my par­ents’ na­tive tongue, I have never heard any­one British talk about Great Britain, as in: ’I’m from Great Britain’ (and much less: ’I’m Great British’). Peo­ple nor­mally use an un­adorned ’Britain’, al­though nowa­days they’re more likely to break it down fur­ther and say they’re from Eng­land or Wales or Scot­land or (North­ern) Ire­land. Two cam­paign slo­gans have been in­vented to per­suade the Cata­lans to sam­ple the plea­sures of what Lawrence Dur­rell liked to call ’Pud­ding Is­land’. One of them is: ’Te guste lo que te guste, lo ten­emos’ (’What­ever it is that you like, we’ve got it’). Un­less you hap­pen to like eggs and cer­tain types of fruit and veg­eta­bles which are often scarce due to sup­ply chain is­sues, a short­age of man­ual labour, and ex­ces­sive red tape for im­ported goods at cus­toms. What­ever: the afore­men­tioned posters form part of a brand new 11.08 mil­lion euro cam­paign by Vis­itBri­tain (yes, with­out the ’Great’) which is what the British Tourist Au­thor­ity has been called since 2003. No in­ge­nu­ity, no mat­ter how con­trived, has been spared: the Eng­lish ver­sion of the cam­paign, for ex­am­ple, aimed mainly at the US, in­cludes, among other things, the catch­phrase ’Fake (Br)it ’til you make it’ which, aside from being mean­ing­less is quite hard to say. But where the cam­paign re­ally be­comes all but cer­ti­fi­able is with its mer­ci­fully brief pro­mo­tional car­toon in Span­ish, in which a be­suited man in­sists that ’when you think of us, you prob­a­bly think about dou­ble decker buses, Big Ben and tea, lots and lots of tea...and we have tea for graf­fiti artists; tea for surfers; tea for mon­ster hunters; tea for party-goers.’ This fatu­ous pseudo-hip­ster hog­wash is fol­lowed up with the cam­paign’s sec­ond major slo­gan: ’Come and be sur­prised’. And you bloody well will be. Sur­prised like the three mem­bers of the Ger­man punk band Trig­ger Cut who spent months prepar­ing their UK tour, hired a van, paid for cus­toms de­c­la­ra­tions, bought a ferry ticket...only to be turned away by the UK Bor­der Force at Calais last month, be­cause they had a ’per­mit­ted paid en­gage­ment cer­tifi­cate’ in­stead of the more bu­reau­crat­i­cally chal­leng­ing ’cer­tifi­cate of spon­sor­ship’. No tea for them, then, party-going or oth­er­wise. Hot on the heels of this hu­mil­i­a­tion came that of Ukraine’s Khmel­nit­sky Or­ches­tra, sched­uled to play iconic pieces from ’The Lord of the Rings’ at var­i­ous UK venues but whose visa re­quests were turned down, some­thing which cost their pro­moter over €100,000. Ac­cord­ing to Eng­lish music agent Ian Smith, in­ter­viewed in The Guardian, this kind of cul­tural ob­struc­tion is rou­tine. So yes, Great Britain has what­ever you want, un­less you fancy a tomato or an egg and can ac­tu­ally get into the coun­try in the first place. One so­lu­tion for en­ter­pris­ing Cata­lans might be to go in as a tourist, which is still rel­a­tively easy if you have a pass­port, then get a job, get ar­rested for that now il­le­gal act, and be de­ported back home by the Bor­der Force goons for free (that would be a nice sur­prise). This might just be the rea­son why - to­wards the end of April - every sin­gle one of the Vis­itBri­tain tourist posters was qui­etly re­moved from every sin­gle one of Barcelona’s metro sta­tions.