If you want to form a correct opinion of the Englishcharacter, you must not confine your observations to the metropolis. You mustgo forth into the country, you must sojourn in villages and hamlets; you mustvisit castles, farm-houses, cottages; you must wander through parks andgardens, along hedges and green lanes and see the people in all theirconditions, and all their habits and humors.
WashingtonIrving
PUBSAND CLUBS
In England the national drink is beer, and the ‘pub’,where Englishmen go to drink it, is a peculiarly English institution. The word’pub’ itself is an abbreviation of ‘public house’, which sounds dull anduninspiring; but there is nothing dull and uninspiring about the associationsthat the shorter form — pub — arouses in the English mind.
A bright introduction to any self-respecting pub isthe sign outside it, mounted on a post or fixed to the wall above the door. Onit will be the pub’s паше— ‘ThePig and Whistle’ or ‘The Elephant and Castle’ — with a gay painting depictingthe name. There is a good deal of folklore behind the names which pubs bear. Apub near Ambleside is called ‘The Drunken Duck’ for avery strange reason. One day the ducks of this hostelry (which was also a farm)drank some spirit which had leaked from a barrel. Where upon they fell into astupor. The good wife, thinking them dead, plucked them, and was about to cookthem when she observed signs of life — one of the plucked birds was wanderingdrunkenly round the yard.
Most pubs, besides beer, sell all kinds of alcohol,from whisky to wine. Many of them also offer light meals. Normally pubs aredivided into at least two separate bars — the public and the saloon bar, whichis more comfortable and slightly more expensive. ‘Bar’ also means the counterat which the drinks are served Beer and cider, a drink made from apples, isalways sold in pint or half-pint glasses. A pint is equivalent to 0.57 litre. Pubs have not ‘gone metric’ yet.
No alcoholic drinks may be served to young peopleunder eighteen, and no children under sixteen are allowed inside the bar.
Most pubs favour the’traditional’ image — a roaring log fire, old oak beams supporting a lowceiling, and brass ornaments on the walls. At Donaghadee,Northern Ireland, one of the authors of this book had an opportunity to see abrass plaque on the wall inside ‘Grace Neill’s Bar’. The plaquecontained the names of dignitaries (for instance, Jonathan Swift), who stayedin this seaside resort’s famous bar. Among them was the name of Peter theGreat, who supposedly had visited the place in 1698 when he was in Britainstudying shipbuilding. Another legend of Peter I is associated with anotherIrish town, Portpatrick. It is said he stayed therein ‘The Blair Arms’ and the room he occupied is still called the Emperor’sRoom. These touching legends are cherished wholeheartedly both by the pubowners and the inhabitants of the two corresponding towns. Despite the fact,that Peter the Great might have never crossed the Irish Sea for a mere pint ofbitter. For there was no large-scale shipbuilding in Ireland that time.
Comfort is essential, for here people do not drop infor a quick drink and then go. They tend generally to ‘make an evening of it’and stand or sit, glass in hand, talking to friends or strangers, until closingtime, when, with a cry of ‘Time, gentlemen, please!’ the landlord ceases toserve further drinks, and the assembled company gradually disperses into theinhospitable night. This is usually at half past ten in the evening.
In the bar of every English pub there is a dart-board,and on most evenings one may find the game of darts being played. It is a gamein which feathered arrows, called darts, are thrown at a board with numbereddivisions on it. Many pubs have a darts team which plays matches against teamsfrom other pubs. Darts matches are now so popular that they are shown on TV.
Clubs are another unchallenged English invention. Thepoint of a club is not who it lets in, but who it keeps out; and few things canprovoke more anger, than the non-membership of an English club. The club isbased on two ancient British ideas — the segregation of classes, and thesegregation of sexes: and they remain insistent on keeping people out, longafter they have stopped wanting to come in. Viewed from the outside, the clubshave an air of infinite mystery.
What does the influence of clubs amount to? Like mostthings in Britain, they are not what they seem: in the first place, many ofthem are very unsociable. Clubs can be firmly divided into those where you areexpected to talk to your neighbour and those whereyou are not. The big anonymous clubs favoured by thecivil service — ‘The Oxford and Cambridge’, ‘United University’, or The Union’— are places to get away from people, not to meet them. They have book-rests onthe lunch-tables where members can devour cold pie and The Times undisturbed.
After the war the London clubs, like so manyinstitutions, seemed on the verge of collapse: the tables were half empty, theentrance fees were high, it was hard to find staffs to maintain them. But asprosperity returned and expense-accounts mounted, so clublandcame back into its own: businessmen, solicitors, advertising men, salesmen, allfound clubs an ideal field for operation. The Conservative party has alwaysbeen bound up with a small group of clubs. The Whitehall bureaucracies all haveclublike ideas of corporate solidarity, and theLondon clubs are themselves an intrinsic part of the life of Whitehall.
LEISURE AND SPORTS
Attitudes for leisure have been much influenced by themodern love of moving around and by the ease of travel.
Britain is the only country in Europe, except Malta,where driving is on the left. There are 2,500 km of motorway (mostly six lanes)and over 2,500 km of dual carriageway (divided high-way). Since Britain has thehighest density of traffic in the world, traffic jams during rush hours and atholiday times are fairly common.
Britain is also the only country in the Common Marketwhose employers are not forced by law to give their workers paid holidays.However, many employers have written agreements with their workers giving themthree or four weeks’ holiday a year — not counting the eight days of nationalholiday.
It was the British who started the fashion for seasideholidays — not surprisingly, since nobody in Britain lives more than onehundred and twenty kilometers from the sea. The coast is the most popularobjective of English people for their annual holiday. Few English people renthouses or flats for their holidays, but one of the traditional ways of spendinga summer holiday is in a boarding-house, which may have a card in its windowadvertising ‘apartments’, or ‘bed and breakfast’.
Camping holidays in the proper sense of the word, withtents, are not so developed in England as on the continent. The summer weathertoo often can be very unpleasant for tent-dwellers. On the other hand, caravanshave become exceedingly popular. Some people bring their own caravans, pullingthem behind their cars; others hire caravans, already in position.
The British people may be conservative about the timesat which they take their holiday, but they have shown themselves very ready totake to new places. Each year more English people become familiar with somepart of continental Europe. Many take their cars, often with tents andcaravans, crossing the Channel in ferries; others use the travel agents’ schemefor group travel and hotel booking, some of them, regrettably, being taken tohotels which have been trained to provide English food. When they get homeagain they talk endlessly of these things, boasting of their bargains andcomplaining of what they were asked to pay for cups of tea.
There are holiday camps all round the coast of GreatBritain. They are ideal places for people who do not want the effort of lookingfor entertainment. Trained staff lookafter the children so that the parents can have time off to enjoy themselves.
There are youth hostels in different, parts of Britain.It is possible to arrange a walking or cycling tour, moving from hostel tohostel.
Britain has a number of preservation societies, largeand small, and the most important is the National Trust, founded in 1895. Thepurpose of the organization is to preserve historic buildings and places ofnatural beauty in Britain. The Trust owns large areas of beautiful scenery allover Britain. Its property includes ancient castles, bird sanctuaries (placeswhere people are not allowed to shoot birds or take eggs from nests),birthplaces and homes of famous people, and fine examples of the architectureof different periods.
Many of the districts are declared National Parks. Theland is in private ownership but building is strictly controlled. Owners areencouraged to let visitors walk on their land.
The English are great lovers of competitive sports.The game peculiarlyassociated with England is cricket. Manyother games too are English in origin, but have been adopted with enthusiasm inother countries, but cricket has been seriously and extensively adopted only inthe Commonwealth countries, particularly in Australia, New Zealand, India,Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the West Indies.
First class professional cricket clubs representcounties and play three-day matches against each other. Organized amateurcricket is played between club teams, mainly on Saturday afternoons. As insoccer, there are numerous amateur clubs and school teams, though the game ismaking no progress in popularity.
For the great mass of the British public the eightmonths of the football season are more important than the four months ofcricket. Football is the most popular team game in Britain. The Britishinvented it and it has spread to every corner of the world. There are plenty ofamateur association football (or ‘soccer’) clubs, but professional football isbig business. Every large town has at least one professional football club. Theplayers are bought and sold between the clubs, and ‘transfer fees’ can beequivalent to dozens of thousands of pounds.
There is no British team. England, Scotland, Wales andNorthern Ireland compete separately in European and World Cup matches. TheEnglish and Welsh clubs have together formed a League with four divisions. TheScottish League has two divisons. The champions ofthe English First Divison, and the Scottish Premier Divison qualify to play in the European Cup competition.
Recently there has been violent behavior on the partof some football supporters, which has earned British football a bad reputationboth at home and abroad. Suffice it to say that as a result of violent behaviorof the British football hooligans in 1985 alone about one hundred people died,fifty-five at Bradford and thirty-nine at Brussels.
Rugby football, or ‘rugger’,is played with an egg-shaped ball, which may be carried and thrown (but notforward). If a player is carrying the ball he may be ‘tackled’ and made to falldown. Each team has fifteen players, who spend much time lying in the mud or ontop of each other and become very dirty.
There are two forms of Rugby — Rugby Union, which isstrictly amateur, and Rugby League, which is a professional sport. Rugby Unionis played throughout the British Isles. There is an international championshipbetween England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France. Rugby has become thenational game of Wales, New Zealand, South Africa and the Pacific islands ofFiji and Tonga.
Rugby got its name from the English public school,Rugby, where, about a century ago, a boy picked up a soccer ball and ran with it.
Next to Association Football, the chief spectatorsport in English life is horse racing. Partly because of the laws, which forbidsuch activities on Sunday, most horse racing takes place on working days andduring working hours.
One of the famous horse race meetings is the GrandNational, which takes place at Aintree, nearLiverpool, in March or April. It is England’s main steeplechase (race overfences). The course is over seven kilometers and includes thirty jumps, ofwhich fourteen are jumped twice. It is a dangerous race. Jockeys have been hurtand horses have been killed. Another important horse race meeting is the Derby,taking place at Epsom, south of London, in May or June. It is England’s leadingflat race (not over fences). A very fashionable race is Ascot, near Windsor, inJune. The Queen always attends.
A popular sporting event in Great Britain is the OpenGolf Championship. The Scots invented golf, and its headquarters is at theRoyal and Ancient Golf Club, St Andrews.
Many tennis players regard the Wimbledon TennisTournament, in July, at Wimbledon, south London, as the most importantchampionship to win. There is great public interest in the tournament. Manytennis fans queue all night outside the grounds in order to get tickets for thefinals
No less popular is the Boat Race between Oxford andCambridge universities, on the River Thames in London at Easter. The course isover seven kilometers. Oxford have won about sixty times. Cambridge nearlyseventy. Henley (Rowing) Regatta takes place at Henley on the Thames (betweenLondon and Oxford). It is an international summer event and a fashionableoccasion. Cowes Week is another, yachting regatta. Cowes is a small town on the Isle of Wight, oppositeSouthampton, and a world-famous yachting centre.
When English people use the word ‘hunting’ theyusually mean foxhunting, a sport, which is popular among a small but importantminority. There are ‘closed seasons’, when it is unlawful to shoot or hunt gameand certain other animals. These seasons vary, according to the animals. Thereis no law about hunting foxes, but there is a foxhunting season — from Novemberto March. In the Scottish Highlands deer are hunted on foot, with a gun. Thisis called ‘deer stalking’. Many of the male hunters wear ‘pink’ (that is, redcoats). On the whole hunting is a sport for the rich.
However, the most popular country sport is fishing,and there are more than 4 million anglers in Britain. Many fish for salmon andtrout particularly in the rivers and lochs of Scotland, but in England andWales the most widely practiced form of fishing is for coarse fish such aspike, perch, carp, roach, dace, tench, chub andbream. Angling clubs affiliate to the National Federation of Anglers and manyclubs organize angling competitions. Freshwater fishing usually has to be paidfor most coarse fishing is let to angling clubs by private owners, while troutand salmon fishermen either rent a stretch or river, join a club, or pay forthe right to fish by the day, week or month. Coastal and deep sea fishing arefree to all (apart from salmon and sea trout fishing which is by license only).
Britain was the first home of many of the modernworld’s most popular sports. The British cannot claim, today, that they have,as a nation, surpassing skill in any form of sport when they engage ininternational competition. But they care strongly about the ‘sporting spirit’,the capacity to play with respect for the rules and the opponents, to win withmodesty and to lose with good temper.Ростовский институт иностранных языковКафедра лингвистики
дисциплина: Страноведение
РЕФЕРАТ
Entertainment outsidethe home:
Pubs and clubs
Leisure and sportsНефёдова Дарья
2 курс ДО,
группа 4 “Е”