For at least six months after the death of Princess Di, going to the States was an endless merry-go-round of heartfelt condolence – whenever an American, upon hearing the accent, expressed regret at the passing of our rose, it somehow seemed rude to say: ”Hell, don’t mention it, she was an overprivileged dumbo who should have been wearing a seatbelt.” So instead I remember a whole minibreak of accepting kind wishes with earnest thanks.
Besides that, being British never seems to trigger that much response, and certainly not in Manhattan, beyond the very courteous ”I love your accent” – the only statement in the world to which there is absolutely no answer. (What are you supposed to say? ”Thanks! My mum has got one just like it!”)
But I’m in New York right now, and there’s a whole new response to the sighting of a British person. It goes ”Here to shop?”, or maybe ”The shopping must be great”, or even, today, a hysterical ”God, it must be like ONE HUGE SALE to you guys”.
I know, the pound’s strong, and the dollar’s weak, and it all has something to do with a nefarious plan for re-election by George Bush, but all it really means is that it’s a good time to go to Gap. Provided, of course, that you aren’t still boycotting it from that time you said you were going to in the 90s.
So in many ways it is like one huge sale to us guys. And, yes, the place is full of British voices. Everywhere rings with that distinctively British overloud laugh, which gives all the shops the air of a one-eyed Calais confectioner, overrun by 30 schoolkids with a very short window of free time and a fierce yen for boiled sweets from around the world.
It’s not, in other words, unreasonable for them to think that we’re really into buying stuff. It’s not unreasonable that they watch us shopping as you might a bulimic who you didn’t know very well – like, not that it’s any of their business, but are we sure we want all that?
However, I thought there was one thing, in this very complex and textured relationship between our two nations, that we all agreed on. The debate could rage on over why their telly was better than ours, and whether or not their fruit and vegetables tasted of anything – but I thought we were clear that they are the consumers, the fevered gannets with the sports utility vehicles and the total recklessness and the insatiable appetite for all things box fresh. We, on the other hand, are more laidback; less intoxicated by material goods; more interested in getting drunk. It turns out that they think more or less the same, only the other way around.
It’s true that our behaviour is pretty absurd – people who think of Bluewater as an incredibly long and irksome way away will nevertheless travel that far just to shop for things identical to the items on any British high street. The only area in which there is genuinely greater choice and value in New York than London is dog coats with matching booties. How do I know that? Because I’ve been in every shop. And I genuinely am more interested in getting drunk.
But beyond exchange-rate vultures, more lasting cultural input, from British expat journalists and suchlike, seems to typify vapid acquisitiveness for Americans in much the same way as their exports – Sex and the City, Glamour (the mag, not the concept) – typify it for us. The British journalist and socialite Plum Sykes published her first novel, Bergdorf Blondes, at the weekend. It’s about a bunch of birds who want rich husbands. The windows of the Bergdorf (yes, it’s a shop) are festooned in blonde wigs, an ironic (I guess) paean to the work. And Choire Sicha, reviewing it for the New York Times, wrote: ”If we can resist the temptation to burn Plum Sykes’s book, we can smuggle it into the future. Perhaps the next breed of humanoids can learn from the holocaust of culture and commerce that destroyed our icky civilisation.”
All basically just, but very much related to the nationality of the author – the subtext being, we might overdo it a bit, but the British … they really don’t know where to stop. Which is, again, pretty much what we say about them.
It seems that consumerism – well, greed, really – is much like a conversation on public transport; for no particular reason, it seems much louder when foreigners do it. In the same way as we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions, we judge our own culture by its worthiest striving, its farmers markets and its cyclists, and other cultures by their excesses, their giant and comically unnecessary SUVs.
It’s all eminently understandable, but a bit of a surprise – like discovering that all America thought we were mainly hardline Christian fundamentalists who liked chicken. And invented Bon Jovi. — Guardian Unlimited Â