Road rage and Eeyorishness

Despite these lapses, most foreign visitors acknowledge that the English are, generally speaking, remarkably courteous drivers. In fact, many of the visitors and immigrants I interviewed were 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.

“This is so typically English,” said one. “You have a few incidents where a couple of drivers lose their temper and start hitting each other, and immediately it’s 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 the country is going to rack and ruin!”

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 it is being threatened. So-called road rage is therefore, not surprisingly, a universal phenomenon, and English manifestations of this universal trait tend to be rather less common, and less violent, than in most other countries.

Fair-play rules

English driving behaviour can be seen as an extension of our queueing behaviour, in that the same basic principles of fairness and good manners apply. As with queueing, people do “cheat”, but breaches of automotive fair-play rules provoke the same righteous indignation as pedestrian queue-jumping. Like pedestrian queuers, drivers are acutely aware of “potential” cheats and will, for example, inch forward in a pointed manner, with suspicious sideways glances, while carefully avoiding eye contact.

The horn is rarely used in queue jumping cases, however, there being an unwritten rule to the effect that honking and beeping “in anger” should be reserved for admonishing driving behaviour that is potentially dangerous rather than just deeply immoral.

These tactics seem to be somewhat less effective at maintaining fair play among drivers than similar techniques among pedestrians, because there is less potential for embarrassment. In the security of their mobile castles, with the ability to escape quickly from disapproving looks or angry gestures, the English are less vulnerable to these subtle deterrents and thus more inclined to break the fair-play rules. But even so, the majority of English drivers, most of the time, “play fair”.

Car care

Car-care habits — especially those relating to frequency and method of cleaning, tidiness, decoration, dirt and dogginess — are also reliable class indicators. How clean is your car? Do you wash it yourself, take it to the car wash or rely on the English weather to sluice the dirt off? How tidy is your car? Do you hang your jacket on the little hook or just sling it on the back seat? All give useful signals to the student of English behaviour, but put simply dirty cars are associated with both the highest and lowest ends of the social scale, while clean cars slot you firmly in the middle ranks. But of course, you don’t care about such things.

Kate Fox is a social anthropologist and co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford. Her book, Watching the English, is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £20