Pi-Consulting

“C’est pas normal, ça”. The phrase means “That’s not normal”, in a pejorative sense. The French say it all the time. It is a measure of the cultural and attitudinal divide between Britain and its continental neighbor that there is absolutely no equivalent colloquial phrase in English.

Now here’s something weird. When a British person says “That’s weird!”, it is often with a barely-hidden undercurrent of sneaking admiration. Ever since the UK unleashed the Monty Pythons on an unsuspecting world, Britons have sniggered at ‘normality’ as something rather sad. In Britain, it seems, “weird is good”.

Could it be that the general lack of enthusiasm for ‘normality’ in Britain signals a deeper truth? Is there something not quite normal about Prince Charles, Camilla and most of their fellow-countrymen?

Consider the UK’s national obsession with mastering useless information; (witness the epidemic of pub quizzes on Tuesday nights, with questions about past soap-opera plots, ancient football matches and long-extinct vaudeville acts). In London, Millennium Domes and “National Monument” Ferris wheels rise where other cities would build integrated urban developments. Scavenging at the Boot Fair (a true British institution: a boot fair is a vast open-air sale of people’s bric-a-brac — picture 5000 garage sales taking place simultaneously in a muddy field) constitutes a Sunday outing all over the UK. Snooker (okay, pool to you Americans) and gardening are national spectator sports on primetime TV. Cocktail party conversations can be dominated for twenty minutes by earnest discussion of the best route by car between Datchet and Salisbury; (“Ah, but if you go that way, my dear chap, you’ll get caught in the tailback from the traffic light just past the Red Lion!”). And of course Europe is routinely referred to in England as if it were somewhere else, when Britain has been a full member of the European Union for decades.

Anecdotal evidence aside, the question “Is Britain normal?” deserves a more scientific answer. Happily, periodic studies in France, Spain, Germany and Italy permit us to make numerical comparisons with British studies on lifestyles, attitudes and consumption behaviour. The results are revelatory.

Take food. Over half of French people think fast food is junk; in Britain, the figure is not much above a quarter. Over half of UK respondents say they tend to treat themselves to foods which are not good for them, an indulgence practiced by only a third of Germans, Spaniards and French people. British women are on average the least calorie-conscious of the major European countries. “It’s naughty but it’s nice” is an often-heard justification for eating big gooey cream cakes. Working women everywhere except Germany say they are too busy to cook, but in the UK a big percentage of non-working women say the same thing. This makes it odd that Britons who dine out in restaurants on a weekly basis represent less than a third of the levels habitually seen on the continent. (Clearly British home cooking is too good to miss, even if it is produced in a bit of a rush).

There is some evidence for the continental perception that British dress-sense inclines towards the determinedly dowdy. Both sexes lag way behind the European continent on “Wanting to keep up with fashion” and “Having a good sense of style”. (UK shoppers tend to choose garments on the basis that, as they put it, they will “stay in fashion”. Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians would dismiss such a statement as a contradiction in terms, and intrinsically absurd).

This site can now reveal why the British don’t care much about their appearance. They have a comparatively reduced interest in attracting members of the opposite sex. Astonishingly, this is even more true of women than men. Sorry, girls, it seems that British lads are not worth the bother of getting all dolled up for. They’re presumably more interested in the football than how their girlfriends look anyway.

On shopping habits, the indicators are that the UK is no longer the quintessential “nation of shoppers”; those immediately to the south of the English Channel seem to enjoy ‘shopping as process’ more than those to the north of it. Paradoxically for an island race, the British lead Europe in their desire to travel, (though when they get to that interesting place called “abroad” they still want chips, warm English beer, only two small lumps of ice in their cocktail, and up-to-the-minute soccer or cricket results from home).

In Britain, c’est normal.

**Note: February is Fashion month in Paris, NYC, Las Vegas with all the major fashion houses rolling out their fall collections**