There is an advert for Virgin Atlantic running on US TV at the moment that depresses me every time I see it. “The British pound is at a 31-year low,” says the cheerful voiceover, “which means you’ll be saving on literally everything when you travel to London.” Viewers are directed to an online “Brexit calculator” to do the maths on all the things that are cheaper for visitors, when travelling to a country that just shot itself in the face.
Dismay at this sales pitch is, I know, churlish. It makes sense to capitalise on the weakness of the pound and tourist spending is, at least, one of the few areas that has been encouraged by Brexit. In the run-up to Christmas, visitors to Britain from North America were up 15% year-on-year.
But it is astonishing how viscerally offensive the tone of the ad feels, when British friends living in the US with non-British spouses don’t want to return to the UK, a country that “doesn’t want us”, and the looming election promises to deliver Britain more firmly into the hands of the people who got it there in the first place.
The feeling of some Americans, meanwhile, seems to be that Britain’s self-image has finally had to catch up with reality. Several of my neighbours in New York, when mentioning Brexit, have done so with a smile and a half-shrug that seems, in my paranoid state, to imply that a small nation still labouring under delusions of grandeur is about to have its exceptionalism called out.
Lessons from the old country
Dual-language preschools are popular in my area of the city and practically every European nation – plus China – has one. You can enrol your three-year-old in French, German, Spanish, Mandarin or any number of Scandinavian programmes, not merely for the benefits of a bilingual education but for what these schools discreetly promise are the superior cultural and behavioural norms of their nation.
There is one obvious anomaly in this landscape. Apart from the international school attached to the UN, there are no British programmes. You can see why; without a language component, it is a hard sell, plus Brits aren’t very good at enumerating our virtues. We like to sell our failures instead, as an advertisement for being above the sordid business of competition altogether.
This week, a friend and I were trying to figure out what a British preschool syllabus might actually look like. The French ones all emphasise self-reliance and manners at the lunch table – where no junk will be tolerated – plus a lot of stuff that subtextually hints at correcting what the French perceive to be hysterical American parenting. The Scandinavian schools are invested in encouraging children to be, as one puts it, “independent, democratic, wholesome”.
Britain’s contribution to this fight for young hearts and minds could really shake up the scene. Useful lessons from the old country: how to get the thing that you want by robustly refusing to admit that you want it; precisely what inflection to put into the phrase, “it’s fine” to imply its exact opposite; and the complicated mechanism – every child should learn it! – of bigging yourself up while appearing to run yourself down.
Marvellous Midwife
Season six of Call the Midwife just started in the US and, as I watched it this week, I realised that I love it more than any other show. I was a Midwife sceptic when it started all those years ago. I thought it was horrible, Sunday night nostalgia, but it was nothing of the sort and, as the hugely hyped Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale debuted this week, I found myself thinking that in its quiet way Midwife is as feminist as this blockbuster, and all the better for having no pretensions. And while I love Jenny Agutter, can someone please give an award to Linda Bassett, as Phyllis Crane, the best rendered character on TV?
