Text 4

K.Whitehorn

I had a friend who never knew what to do with her hands or meals; brought up half in England – “hands on your lap, dear” – and half in France – “les mains sur la table” – she was thoroughly confused.

Another couple I know built a little house in Greece, and joyfully completed it; the Greeks thought they were mad, because once the house is finished you have to pay tax on it – which is why so many Greek houses have iron rods sticking out of the top, to show there’s more concrete to come. And a man who went to live in Turkey speaks feelingly of the unique piece of Turkish plumbing which combines a lavatory with a bidet-douche: “if you don’t know what that little handle is for, you rapidly learn how high you can jump from a sitting position”.

It is the small things which make the interesting differences between countries, and there are far more of them than ever appear at the level of diplomatic meetings and grand hotels. We think of ubiquitous pizzas and hamburgers, but forget the food you buy in the street – the chestnuts you get in London, tapas in Spain, lihapiirakka (meat parties) in Finland. Western medicine may be all of a piece – but how much plaster you get depends on where you are; right up the arm for a broken wrist in France, a whole-body plaster (or so I am told) for a little finger in Italy – and you’d better up the nurses, too.

Cookers may be made anywhere, but the Dutch scarcely use their ovens, they prefer to wallow in margarine on top of the stove; the French don’t expect a grill except inside the oven, and rarely seem to sell non-stick spatulas to go with their non-stick spatulas to go with their non-stick pans; the Spanish don’t go in for kettles. I thought the Americans were just unbearably fussy, the way they obsessively rinse plates – until I realised that American dishwashers actually don’t have filters. And there’s a school of sociology which says you can determine a country’s level of civilisation by the efficiency of its bottle tops: the more gashes on your hand, the more primitive the country you’re trying to drink in.

Computers, compact discs, cameras may be the same everywhere – but we go to a chemist’s to buy film, because the British used to get their developing fluid there; other nations don’t. A continental chemist may austerely sell nothing but drugs, few will sell hair-slides and tights and hot water bottles like ours; and none of them sell two eggs over easy and a cup of coffee, as in the States.

In some ways one wishes things were more standardised: if only all telephones made the same noises to tell you they’re engaged or ringing or on the blink. Or if they put the lights and screen-wipers always on the same side of the steering-wheel, we’d flash our wipers in anger so much less often. And even if countries can’t agree on how much summer time to have, could they not at least agree to change on the same day? As it is, airline schedules are total chaos for two weeks every autumn.

But times and festivals are among the hardest things to shift. It’s no good telling a Turk to celebrate his birthday and not his name day, or trying to make an Italian child, all agog on Christmas eve, wait till Christmas day, like us – quite apart from EC directive number 4783/AB 7, which decrees there shall always be a bank holiday in any country where I happen to have run out of currency.

Or take Sundays. Our flat traditional Sunday of churchgoing and inertia has just about had it; the only pity is that they didn’t legalise proper shopping before car-boot sales turned half the nation into fences for stolen goods. But do you remember when they spoke with horror of the wicked “continental Sunday”? It conjured up visions of the bibulous French singing in the streets; plainly, no one cared even to think about a German Sunday, when you not only can’t shop, you can’t even wash your car lest the swooshing of your hose disturbs your neighbours.

It is the fear of losing these differences, I am sure, that makes people scared of getting close to Europe; my guess is that they will stay unchanged, like molluscs on the ocean floor beneath the tide of change. For it is a tide. Just as businesses go with a rhythmic predictability from centralization to more on the spot autonomy back to centralisation again, so nations group together into larger units and then split up again, with local habits going on very much as before.

The big groups seem immortal – while they last. We take it for granted the USA is forever, but it’s been all in one piece for less than a century; Bolivar’s vision of a united South America didn’t even last as long as his lifetime. No one would have guessed that the monolith of the USSR would break up so suddenly; yet when it did, there were Georgians who had gone right on speaking Georgian, Ukrainians with their national identity intact, Muslims who’d struck to their customs throughout. What matters is not that the groupings and re-groupings happen; they always will; but whether people carve each other up in the process. The astonishing achievement of the EC is that they haven’t.

The remarkable resilience of nationality, of tribal instincts and regional habits has always been the despair of reformers and tyrants alike, from Butcher Cumberland to Lenin to Saddam Hussein; I now see it as a saving grace. We British might or might not man the barricades for our defence policy or working hours or ramshackle legal system, but try and tamper with the pallid sanctity of our sausages and the spirit of Churchill and Drake awakes at once; which is how it should be.