I once stayed the weekend at a friend’s home, and was having a bath (Americans are stumped that some of Britain’s grandest homes don’t have showers, only baths, which we consider petri dishes) when another guest – themselves a scion of a grand British family –knocked on the bathroom door, asked if I was done, and proceeded to strip off and hop into my (now tepid) bath water. Apart from containing all of my day’s germs, it was also full of shampoo suds. “Boarding school, you know,” she remarked when she saw the horrified look on my face.
This was one of my first encounters with what Americans call ‘British slovenliness’, a subject that has recently been highlighted by American writer Mike Harling in his blog, Postcards from America. His focus was on the British habit of washing up dishes in a washing up bowl full of already dirty dishes, then placing the (still dirty) dish on the drying rack without even rinsing.
I first arrived in the UK over 30 years ago and what struck me is that – unlike other countries – British slobs belong equally to the lowest and highest ranks of society (the middle classes are somewhat exempt). It is not uncommon here to invite a titled guest with a huge estate and fortune to your home only for him to pitch up in a moth-eaten sweater with greasy hair and black fingernails that have never seen this side of a bar of soap.
This state of hygiene will continue to their teeth of course – another shocker for us Americans – and inevitably everything else, including the ramshackle car they arrived in. Although they might look like a homeless person with the faint smell of the compost heap, they will then pay the highest attention to dinner etiquette: turning to your right after 20 minutes of having spoken to the woman on the left; standing when you do, pulling out your chair and repeating the exercise when you return from the ladies. Americans have no such mannerisms.
In his blog, Harling’s example of the kitchen sink exemplifies the sloppy British relationship with hygiene. Such behaviour makes absolutely no sense to Americans, who naturally lean towards order. “Apparently, your mother was wrong – you can eat off dishes that have not been thoroughly rinsed and not get sick,” Harling writes. “In time you’ll get used to the idea.”
Americans feel faint at the thought of this, but the British argue that they’re missing the point. Apart from saving money on water, there is supposedly some logic. One reader argues: “If you start with the least dirty items, such as glasses, progress through medium soilage and then wash pots and pans last, you’re not really washing anything in dirty water.” (As an aside, Americans rarely wash up by hand: many households now have two dishwashers. So washing up in a bowl of dirty water sounds as primitive as cutting off limbs without anaesthetic.)
I have seen many other things in Britain that have made me shudder but washing dishes without rinsing is not one of them. This is because in my experience the British do not let people into their kitchens full stop. Whereas Americans open other people’s refrigerators and help themselves, the Brit who shares bathwater weirdly considers this a gross invasion of privacy. You can see why Americans get confused: slovenliness suggests informality, a laid-back approach to all things in life, a bit of bohemia: actually it’s the opposite.
A moth-eaten sweater worn to a dinner party is camouflage for a rigid personality underneath whose standards in other areas would stump any American. Our yellow-toothed aristo might not wash his hands or trim his cuticles (what is that?) but make the slightest grammatical error and he will instantly correct you. So there are standards in these parts, just not for cleanliness.
Professor Aileen Ribeiro of the Courtauld Institute thinks the contradiction between dress, habits and manners can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution. “After this, clothing became more sober to indicate that you were a worker; any sense of drawing attention to your clothing was frowned upon,” he says. The upper-class British weren’t decapitated by the mob and overthrown like in France, so to take attention away from their privilege, they purposely downplayed themselves and their homes to fit in.
Whereas an American adult will speak like a high school freshman so as not to intimidate others (even though he is a professor of English), the British will do the opposite. They’ll look like a hobo while reciting Latin verses by heart (does Boris Johnson come to mind?)
Brits are suspicious of the façade that well-dressed Europeans present or their squeaky clean, over-scrubbed American equivalents. Showing up at an event with undone hair, food stains and muddy shoes suggests one isn’t trying too hard (this backfires in the corporate world where physical tidiness is linked to professional discipline). Trying too hard is the American way.
All you really have to do to gauge Britain’s slovenliness is fly a low-cost airline. The state of disrepair and disrobing that you see at British airports is frankly shocking. Some travellers at least put a jacket over what looks like pyjamas before heading out, but some genuinely pitch up straight from bed, teeth unbrushed. Tracksuits and jogging/pyjama bottoms are now normal attire in the UK. For Europeans, this is not only highly offensive but also vulgar – Americans do wear jogging attire though… perhaps theirs tends to be clean.
There is slovenliness and then there is shabbiness. The latter is an entirely British invention, which was adopted by my protestant relatives in the US. Shabbiness is, I think, the result of Britain’s wet and damp conditions, which meant interiors had to obscure all the damage (hence skirts around sofas and busy wallpapers to cover up leaks from overflowing pipes). I once looked under someone’s sofa and saw a broken crystal glass with sticky contents that no one had bothered to clean up.
To this day it continues as a decorating trend (think Soho House), a manner in which to hide the fact the cleaner hasn’t been for a while. Dark walls, busy wallpapers, oriental rugs, dark wooden floors and objects everywhere make it impossible to see the dust balls and dog urine stains – a Scandinavian house, by comparison, has to be kept impeccably clean. A bit of fraying of the fabrics also suggests the sofa has been in the family for generations, which is a boast in Britain. Our architect purposely put in floors whose finish would age quickly so (he said) the house wouldn’t look so “new”.
Then there is the fashion of slovenliness. I live in Notting Hill, where supermodels and famous actresses walk around with wet, greasy hair in tracksuits and soiled (but very expensive) trainers, looking as if they just stumbled out of bed. Anyone polished looks suspicious (what do they want exactly?). Of course, it’s a sham, because these same ladies turn up at dinner in couture dresses with a £75 blow dry. In public, Brits play the pleb, but the moment no one is watching, out comes the finesse and privilege.
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I used to find this all a bit theatrical (why drive a beaten-up car to dinner when we all know you use the brand-new top of the line Range Rover at shooting parties), but now I understand it. Britain is a small island where fitting in is more important than personal style. Italian sunshine meant that strutting around in your finest gear was what you did on a Sunday, whereas in Britain people were huddled in their damp houses alongside their muddy dogs. Protestantism and a post-war mentality explains the sharing of bath and washing up water.
My New York girlfriends get their hair and nails done every week. They use dry cleaners to press their jeans – that’s how freakishly clean-minded they are. I get why the Brits resist. Grooming and cleaning is unbelievably time-consuming, and furthermore, boring. My British girlfriends and I talk about how we “can’t be bothered” to do this or that.
It wasn’t until I read that cleaning is the best exercise and endorphin producer that I took to it with gusto. Before then, I was team British. Between the overdressed Italian peacock male and the moth-holed British aristo with unwashed floppy hair, I’ll take the latter anytime.
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