Lazy Us

By ANGELA MILNE

LYING in bed on Sunday morning, wondering by what message to what bit of brain one summons the energy to get one out and on one's

feet, I found myself realising more clearly than ever before what is wrong with the British. Not class-consciousness or reserve or hypocrisy or Puritanism or Philistinism or rice pudding. Just the plain and simple quality of laziness.

I don't mean that the other things aren't wrong with us too, oh dear no. But laziness, when you think it over (and non-getters-up will think anything over), embraces all these qualities. The most obvious example, of course, is rice pudding, which is rice slung into a pie-dish with milk and sugar and bunged into the oven. The alive approach to a rice pudding coming out of the oven would be: `God, it's exactly the same as last time!' But, in spite of the food know-how unleashed over this country through the years, that's what Britishers like about rice pudding. They go on with it (and how they go on with it; try and buy Patna rice in a village and you'll realise the strength of the pudding-rice public) simply because they're too lazy not to. I say `they' but though I don't eat rice pudding my own cooking is just as lazy—I have that rooted British aversion from throwing too much heart and time into the daily meals, and in this mood of illumination I can see why.

Somebody who knows the North will tell me that up there (look at the baking that goes on) this aversion does not obtain; that the Welsh scrub their doorsteps like mad things; that I am making the old mistake of equating the South of England with Britain. Yes, but my point is that in this small island we are all exposed to the infection of laziness in some form or other; perhaps the pure Celt escapes it in Wales, but north of the Wash they probably beat us in that flourishing form of sloth called reserve. Ah, there's laziness for you. Sitting with a poker-face through a rousingly emotional play may hide the fact that you are being emotionally roused, but it may equally mean that you've gone through life so long with a poker-face that you've stopped being rousable. As you feel less, you do less, you get better at doing nothing. 'Lazy' southern-type foreigners may lie in the sun with their hats over their faces, but what ardour they put into their loves and feuds and friendships, the real doing of life!

The Puritan does not think that love and

friendship matter; he even thinks that they are worse than negligible, they are wicked. Puritanism is basically, I suppose, envy. The Puritan says to children, 'You can't shout and bang doors because I, who am no longer a child, can't either. Why should you have the sort of life I can't?' The Puritan says to lovers, 'I'm

not in love, why the hell should you be?' This turning from other people's experience, this anti- empathy, is laziness because it is the opposite of exercising the imagination.

We could stop at imagination and hail that as our besetting British sin—even if it does come up in times of crisis as a virtue. Refusing to face the facts (e.g., walking about in an air-raid) can

look like courage, can perhaps be courage. Non- imagination and Puritanism (you can't separate them) are what make us so cruel to children and kind to animals. If you don't love people, that is if you won't undertake a relationship you have to work at, you go for animals; in whose com- pany, without budging an inch from your nasty personality, you can bask in what looks like judicious love for a nature worthy of it.

And all this is laziness. So is our clinging to the familial., our refusal to peep over the sides of the rut, that makes us class-conscious, insular, frightened of art, addicted to tea-breaks, devotees of any TV or radio show that sticks to the same form every week; and nationally satisfied with the world's most negative form of Christianity.

I wonder when, why, how Britain got so lazy. After the last war, when we had done a bit of mixing and had a better look at ourselves, when in our new mood of self-realisation we were wondering why everybody beat us at tennis and athletics, we were inclined to blame our apathy on rationing, or to look for some other topical scapegoat. I remember a Chelsea friend confes- sing that her net curtains were losing out in the struggle with the Lot's Road soot, and saying she thought it was the Socialist government (then on its last legs) that was stopping her washing them as often as she used to. She wasn't against Socialists, but there was something in the air besides soot that had taken the heart out of life

and she couldn't think what else to blame it on. We certainly did flop in a special way at that time; but I suppose our real laziness began a

long, long way further back. And surely British weather is a cause. As Robert Lynd pointed out, intellectual energy goes with feeling hot. (I've never known a writer who could write in any- thing but a sub-tropical fug.) Our climate may be divine for grass and wheat and cows and prim- roses, but it also conduces to crawling around in an old woolly and putting jobs off tilt tomor- row—not because, as in sunny Spain, tomorrow will be blessedly there, but because we hope it will be blessedly different.

My Chelsea friend said when the Conservatives got in that she didn't feel any better after all. But today, in an area hardly less sooty, she keeps her curtains telly-ad snowy. She says darkly that she blames it on the telly-ads. Whatever you call Jonesery you can't call it lazy. I don't call my

THE SPECTATOR, NOVEMBER 23, 1962 Jonesery flows across the Atlantic, ideas clash 7 Station Parade and the Manor House, you get is lifting, the climate is breaking up. The w°rId flows in and out of Britain, we flow with it, and flash and we're shaken up as never before' As the television commentators and the news- papers and the young ideas break like waves ove' a dazed feeling that never in history can such irresistible forces have dented such immovable .—tolerance, political stability, loyalty to had'it comedians, love of quaint old thatched cottage; with pump water and of quaint old bearskinne° sentries on horseback—laziness is a good thing' friend, or any individuals in Britain, whollY or under our blanket of sloth, we have bent °Lir minds to thinking that in its various pious guises automatically lazy. Sitting on our drizzly island The glory of the present day is that the blanket objects. What it is to be British, now! British and middle-aged, that is. To be British and young is (I hope) to lie outside the scoPe ( these remarks, to be latched to the teeng,f. Zeitgeist and belong to an international race Win; a sense of branches everywhere. British teenagers who are like this are not really. British at all; al!! aren't dotty about animals, they squeal at the rousingly emotional performances of their P°Pr singers, they are unlikely to drop a friend ,f° using the word 'mirror' on what they have just a learnt to call looking-glass' and they don't [tic°

painting they can understand. Is/i"

Here in this gliMpse of a new national un t ness is something we ought to think hard ah°1'1,,' We can yawn and heave over and settle dog.'" again, sniping at our young for looking mad 3riAj having fun and being swoony if they're girls ariti; continentally extrovert if they're boys; and tas world will go on and we shall die out and with . ,,,e pale, cold-handed, fishy-eyed image of Alb;0n;i, I like to think, the legend of British laziness,. 0. Or we can stay awake and join in the Personally, I have never felt so much like Prtm't ing actively at every manifestation of the an its clement which still in so many ways bogs et down. When a commuter wrote to his paid liatiP3d complaining that a silly chattering woman spoilt his precious train journey, he nearlYLiws. me marching to his address to break his win"'

„ en'

But then my last train journey had been riched by two boys and two girls, one Pel g • Ws stranger to the other, who before the traul._tid, out of Waterloo were doing some tentativedwovei hailing across the open carriage and by were a mixed foursome holding selected Pan a I .1 01 his The TV man who spent one minute rep.- ides n valve in my set and sixty-five telling Me 3 side-career as an artist—he had the righE,,o as too. So had the curmudgeon on my bus vv",00

wow

we passed the crowd waiting for the first with judge to arrive at the Law Courts, came dut,.3rOf what he thought of woman judges. Let us `',11;e on the good work of behaving ever more life American film comedy bit parts and less v oor British film comedy bit parts. Let us b10‘. rooe tops, let us chatter and wrangle. let us begin. ourselves and each other, for here is the

d os to ping of unlaziness. . . .

So, I reflected as I slid out of bed an to, my feet, is getting up. It is not that I am 401 you will understand; but in our house we 1130'011 quite got round to heating in the bedroonss. it, we've only been here four years.