England: What I Dislike

So, as I'm sure many of you are aware, it is the Queen's Diamond Jubilee this weekend, and we have two bank holidays to celebrate. In honour of the grand occasion I decided to be 'patriotic' and share a few things I do and do not love about my home country. I would do it about the United Kingdom itself, but not having been to Scotland or Northern Ireland yet I didn't feel that would be appropriate, so these two posts shall just be about England (although  much of it probably does apply to the rest of the UK).

First up, things I generally dislike or even despise about England (some are a bit heavy, but most are just for fun):

Winter. It's usually one or all of these things - really cold, very wet, ridiculously windy, bleakly grey.

Volume of traffic. There are just too many cars and too many ugly bypasses. The problem is particularly bad in historic towns, which cannot cope with so much traffic. For example, where I live there is a bypass immediately to the south of the town but an obscene amount of traffic still travels through the narrow streets, shaking the foundations of centuries old buildings and making life difficult for pedestrians and cyclists alike. I just don't get it - who are all of these people and where are they all going in their cars? It makes my head hurt.

The obssession with talent shows. Programmes like X-Factor, Britain's Got Talent, and Strictly Come Dancing seem to have a fierce grip on the nation. My husband and I try to live in a blissful bubble of ignorance as we don't own a television, but work colleagues and friends will go on about these shows incessantly. Their opinions about the winners and losers, and the sheer injustice of it all, plague daily conversations and the walls of Facebook. Urgh, there's no escaping it.

The Daily Mail. This video pretty much sums up my reasons why:

Xenophobia. This is not common to most English people, and believe it or not, not all of us refuse to learn other languages, but the minority xenophobic voice shouts loudly, particularly in relation to asylum seekers and refugees. I get so frustrated by the lack of understanding and compassion when it comes to these issues. It's not really a surprise then that English xenophobes are usually Daily Mail readers.

Scaremongering by the media, most notably whenever they call anything a "crisis" - the water crisis, the housing crisis, the petrol crisis, the seagull crisis. Yes, we have an issue with water resources but we aren't dying from lack of it. Yes, petrol is expensive but at least we still have it for now, and is it really that inconvenient to sometimes get the bus or train or even (dare I say it), walk!? In my mind, crises are wars, famines, human rights abuses by governments, natural disasters, exploitation such as the sex trafficking industry or paying people a wage that will not even feed one of their children let alone their whole family. Since when is it a crisis to pay over £1 for a litre of petrol? Get some perspective! And anyway, what happened to that whole stiff upper British lip attitude? Keep calm and carry on good sirs!

Houses named Something Cottage that are actually the size of small mansions. If they are real cottages no problem, but if they are manor houses then please name them something more appropriate.

Irritating names for cottages. For me the name, 'Tudor Cottage' particularly grates, as it invariably seems to be a name for houses that were not even mere dust during the Tudor period (which according to a recent BBC article isn't even a valid term for the years between Henry VII and Elizabeth I - I have to agree) let alone an actual building. Perhaps they were built on the site of a Tudor property, I can't necessarily prove that they weren't, but you never see ones called Georgian Cottage, Saxon Cottage, Roman Cottage, Neolithic Cottage, Modern Cottage, Any Other Age Cottage... you get my drift...

Arguments over how to pronounce certain words. Because of regional dialects there are frequently disagreements (these happened a lot when I was at university) about how to say certain things, such as "grass" or "bath" - Southerners generally pronounce it "grars" or "barth", and Northerners, "grass" or "bath" (Midlanders can often fall anywhere between the two in my experience). OK, so those from t'up North pronounce those words how they're spelt, but why should they necessarily follow that rule? Look at words like "tomato" and "potato" which have the same ending but are pronounced differently ("tomar-toe" and "potay-toe"). The biggest argument, however, seems to lie with how to say, "scone." Is it "scone" as in "gone", or "scone" as in "bone"? Let the battle commence!

Enjoying a cream tea on honeymoon in Devon

On that note, I shall end, for I have been party to far too many "scone" debates, and it just makes me really want a cream tea. A good time to stop, no?

Except I forgot to mention the following things, but we don't want to be here all day so here's a list of further irritations: football hooligans, toffs, Ricky Gervais, muck spreading on a windy day, Tesco, binge drinking, British Telecom, litter, Alan Sugar, government bureaucracy, Simon Cowell, constant development and the never ceasing sound of building works, Cheryl Cole, the Conservative party...

On with the more positive stuff tomorrow :D

Photos my own.