Wack shit Britain does
I moved to London in early April 2020. Just before that, the UK government announced the first COVID lockdown, and in fact, the same day I arrived, Airbnb restricted UK bookings to key workers and essential stays because of COVID, which meant off the bat we had no accommodation. Maybe this initial chaos and the permacrisis that ensued anchored my impression of Britain in a way I can’t unsee, but I also think Britain has a natural state that makes it feel like a soap opera on fast-forward. From least to most off-the-rails, I collate below my humble anthropological observations.
Larry the Cat 😼
Let’s start easy: in 2011, Downing Street adopted a cat, appointing him to the adorable but no less insane position of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. I’m a patriot, so I love cats as much as the next guy, but I know that not only would this idea not have occurred to me had I been working in Downing Street, but if it had, I would’ve overthought the shit out of it and it never would’ve happened (”What would the public say?” “Will they think we’ve finally lost the plot?”). In classic British style, everybody thought this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, including the fact that police officers now knock on the famous No 10 front door so that an employed human adult opens the door to let Larry in the house.
The Bale of Straw 🌉
When London’s Millennium Bridge opened, it wobbled. That’s weird, but nowhere near as weird as the fact that the 900-year-old charity that is responsible for the bridge had to, by law, hang a bale of straw off the bridge due to repair works in October 2023 because that’s the way to alert river traffic of the reduced headroom. It’s right there in clause 36.2 of the Port of London Thames Byelaws. This isn’t exactly what I picture when I think of British pomp and circumstance, but it also has an air of quintessential Britishness that I can almost hear Gary Oldman in his Winston Churchill voice say “get on with it man! Just hang a bale of straw off it!”.
The Goat Major 🐐
Because of the UK military’s unpreparedness for conflict of any scale, naturally in December 2023 Grant Shapps, the then defence secretary, steadfastly led us to accept a modern reality: it’s time for army soldiers to have beards. Nested in that story, however, was the even more deranged fact that up until that moment of Shappsian political courage there was only one member of the British army exempt from the no-beards edict:
The Goat Major—actually a corporal—who tends the Royal Welsh regiment’s goat is allowed to have facial hair. So is the goat, which is technically a lance-corporal. (Britain is like this.) Everyone else is expected to be clean-shaven.
I’m sorry, I’m going to need more than a parenthetical Britain-is-so-random aside to process the fact that we’ve institutionalised a goat with a rank and a handler with special beard privileges. Don’t get me wrong, the goat is grand, but together with Larry the Cat we’re only one anthropomorphised pig away from Britain becoming a real-life re-enactment of Animal Farm.
The Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds and of the Manor of Northstead
Members of the UK House of Commons can’t resign.
Alex c’mon, what do you mean they can’t resign? Don’t they just get up and say “Not for me” and that’s it?
Nope. Since the House resolution of 2 March 1624, MPs are prohibited from resigning their seat. The reasoning is rooted in the belief that an MP, once elected, holds their seat as a matter of public trust. The idea is that the seat belongs to the electorate, not to the MP personally, and therefore an MP cannot simply give it up. It’s one of those quirky old-timey things that made sense at the time, like “Wouldn’t it be a wild ride if we had a well-regulated militia?”
So how did BJ skedaddle back in Jun 2023? Well, MPs can ask to be appointed to one of two unpaid offices of the Crown retained from antiquity for this purpose only – Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds or Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead.
Yup, Britain is indeed like this.
Submarine Deathwish Letters 💌
Vigil was all the rage in 2021, but I personally didn’t think it lived up to the hype. Despite that, I’m forever grateful to it for introducing me to what I call the UK’s submarine deathwish letters. On their first day in office, the Prime Minister pens (by hand!) a letter of resort for each of the UK’s four Trident missile-armed Vanguard-class submarines secretly roaming the depths of the world’s oceans. In the letters are the Prime Minister’s orders to the submarine commanders in the event of total nuclear annihilation, chosen from a set of four options:
- Retaliate with nuclear weapons
- Do not retaliate
- Use your own judgment
- Place the submarine under an allied country's command, if possible (such as the US or Australia).
The above has become a hilarious albeit morbid conversation starter in my arsenal, and I can imagine it would perform swimmingly (or horrendously, dunno) as a dating app opening line.
Maybe it’s because I’m the guy who thinks that wills are stupid and that dead people surrendered their rights when they, you know, died, such that they should not be able to affect any outcomes for the rest of us. But I find it jarring that any hope remaining after a devastating nuclear attack could be extinguished by the wishes of a dead PM who most of his population probably didn’t vote for.
Wack.
The half-hour when no-one knows who the PM is 🤔
For thirty to forty minutes every time the government changes, British intelligence sweats bullets. After the newly elected PM and the monarch are done snogging, there is a short period during which the question “who is the Prime Minister right now?” doesn’t have an obvious answer.
Although the time between quitting and kissing is brief—almost always under an hour—that is still too long for intelligence services who, as one insider puts it, really like to know “who’s actually running the country at a particular minute of the day”. That is just in case, says Gus O’Donnell, a former cabinet secretary, there is a plane “heading towards Canary Wharf… and we wanted to shoot it down”. So fudges are made: the outgoing PM retains some powers until the new PM has kissed the kingly hand; in extremis a new PM can be anointed over the phone.
The things we do to satisfy the labial demands of our God-anointed regents.
Is the mayor of High Wycombe fatter? ⚖️
Accountability is public shaming in a business suit. Nowhere is this better embodied than in High Wycombe, a 75,000-strong English town northwest of London. The people of this town take public service and corruption seriously. Do you think the town’s mayor may be wining and dining on the taxpayer’s purse? Well, the people of High Wycombe (Wycombrians? Wycombeites? Wycomptonites?) have it all figured out: weigh the mayor at the beginning of each year. Mayor fatter? Mayor badder. The scales of justice have never felt so real.
Swan Upping 🦢
No list of the unhinged is complete without some mention of ornithological micromanagement. Charles III — or as he’s more colloquially referred to among us residents of this great kingdom, the Seigneur of the Swans — must, among other heavenly duties, ensure that every swan, right down to its downy offspring, remains unblemished and accounted for. So, His Majesty enlists a flotilla of ornately clad swanherds who embark on a cygnine census of each feathery denizen of the realm’s rivers: they count the swans. They boat around the Thames, pull swans out of the water (or “up” them out, I guess), make health assessments, and tally them. This, of course, because of the Crown’s hereditary right to claim ownership of all mute swans. Rule, Britannia!