The Mobile Castle Rule

I mentioned at the beginning of this section that the ‘personal-territory’ factor is an important element of our relationship with the car. When Ford described their 1949 model as ‘a living-room on wheels’, they were cleverly appealing to a deep-seated human need for a sense of territory and security. This aspect of car-psychology is a cross-cultural universal, but it is of particular significance to the English because of our obsession with our homes, which is in turn related to our pathological preoccupation with privacy.

An Englishman’s home is his castle, and when an Englishman takes to the road in his car, a part of his castle goes with him. We have seen that on public transport, the English go to great lengths to maintain an illusion of privacy: we try to pretend that the strangers surrounding us simply do not exist, and assiduously avoid any contact or interaction with them. In our mobile castles, this self-delusion becomes much easier: rather than an invisible ‘bubble’ of stand-offishness, we are enclosed in a real, solid shield of metal and glass. We can pretend not only that we are alone, but also that we are at home.

The Ostrich Rule

This illusion of privacy results in some rather strange and decidedly un-English behaviour. Like ostriches with their heads in the sand, English people in their cars seem to believe that they are invisible. You will see drivers picking their noses, scratching themselves in intimate places, singing and ‘bopping’ along to music on their radios, having screaming rows with their partners, kissing and fondling – things that we would normally only do in the privacy of our own homes, all performed in full view of dozens of other drivers and pedestrians, who may often be only a few feet away.

The sense of home-like security and invulnerability provided by our mobile castles also encourages some more offensive forms of disinhibition. Even normally fairly polite English people find themselves making rude gestures and mouthing insults and threats at other road users from the safety of their cars – in many cases saying things we would never dare to say outside this protective shield.

Road-rage and the ‘Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used To Be’ Rule

Despite these lapses, most foreign visitors acknowledge that the English are, generally speaking, remarkably courteous drivers. In fact, many visitors are surprised, and often rather amused, to read the now regular diatribes in British newspapers about how we are suffering from an ‘epidemic’ of ‘road rage’. ‘Have these people never been abroad?’ asked one incredulous, well-travelled tourist. ‘Don’t they realize how polite and well-behaved English drivers are, compared to just about anywhere else in the world?’ ‘You call this “road rage” ? said another. ‘You want to see road rage, go to America, go to France, go to Greece – hell, go anywhere but England! What you people call “road rage” is just normal driving.’

‘This is so typically English,’ an anglophile but perceptive immigrant friend told me. ‘You have a few incidents where a couple of drivers lose their temper and start hitting each other, and immediately it is a big national issue, it is a new dangerous disease sweeping the country, it is not safe to go out, the roads are full of violent maniacs . . . It makes me laugh. The English are the most fair and courteous drivers in the world, but you are always so determined to believe that the country is going to rack and ruin.’

He has a point. The English do suffer from a sort of ‘nostalgia isn’t what it used to be’ syndrome. The belief that the country is going to the dogs, that things are not what they were, that some cherished bastion or emblem of Englishness (such as the pub, queuing, sportsmanship, the monarchy, courtesy) is dead or dying, seems to be endemic.

The truth about ‘road rage’ is that humans are aggressively territorial animals, and the car, as a ‘home on wheels’, is a special kind of territory, so our defensive reactions are aroused when we perceive that this territory is being threatened. So-called ‘road rage’ is therefore, not surprisingly, a universal phenomenon, and for all the sensationalist headlines, English manifestations of this universal human trait tend to be rather less common, and rather less violent, than in most other countries.

I am always somewhat wary of making such positive statements about the English, and tend to overload them with endless hesitant qualifiers, as I know from experience that praising the English – whether in published work or in ordinary conversation – invariably provokes much more argument and controversy than criticising them. When I make critical or even damning remarks about some aspect of English culture or behaviour, everyone nods gloomily in agreement, sometimes even providing supporting examples from their own experience. But praise, however mild and anxiously qualified, is always challenged: I am accused of wearing rose-tinted spectacles, and bombarded with counterexamples – everyone has some anecdote or statistic that contradicts my observations and proves that the English are really quite an awful and unpleasant lot.⁴⁰

This is partly because social scientists are supposed to study problems (deviance, dysfunction, disorder, delinquency and other bad things beginning with ‘d’), and I am breaking the unwritten rules of my own profession by insisting on studying nice things instead. But that does not explain why it is only the determinedly unpatriotic English who object to my more positive findings about them. When I am interviewed by foreign journalists, or just chatting to tourists, visitors and immigrants, they are always quite happy to acknowledge that the English have some pleasant and even admirable qualities. The English themselves just cannot seem to accept this – at the merest hint of a compliment, they become sceptical, stroppy and argumentative. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I cannot alter my findings just to appease all these Eeyorish grouches and doom-mongers, so they will just have to swallow the odd bit of well-deserved praise.