The other day, I was in a restaurant wolfing down some food with my son Alfie before heading into Saturday’s Britain’s Got Talent Final when the familiar tinny sound of a phone loudspeaker interrupted the familiar hum of traffic, pedestrians, and over-hot Londoners.
Now, bearing in mind it was the tail-end of the heatwave, not a single heat-afflicted Brit had any patience for any nonsense by that point. We’d been fried to within an inch of our lives and had spent days trying not to lose our s**t in a city ill-equipped for temperatures above tepid.
Then you throw a Gen Z-er into the mix loudly talking to her mate on a video call without a headphone or AirPods in sight, and… well… that’s where it all gets a tad spicy. Well, spicy, with a soupçon of British passive aggression, obviously. I looked up, annoyed, and took a ridiculously large and loud intake of breath, in that typically British way where you hope your actions get the job sorted (because God forbid you actually use words).
But that was wasted on Madam Gen Z, because her phone speaker was so loud it was near-on impossible for her to hear my annoyance. I glanced over to the adjoining table and the eyeballing from the couple opposite was so sharp and pointed, it could’ve easily sliced through the tension between Sir Keir and Andy Burnham. But again, Madam Gen Z was oblivious.
Then the tutting started from the table opposite me; the group of women clearly in no mood for listening in great detail to the step-by-step plans the two friends were making for that evening. The whole restaurant was being held hostage and forced to listen in.
And yet no one was saying a word, despite the fact that you could just feel everyone’s blood pressure rising, minute by minute, as the whole farce continued to unfold. Our annoyance was compounded by the fact that Madam Gen Z was blissfully unaware that any of this was happening.
I can’t lie – at that point, as annoyed as I was, it was quite amusing watching the whole thing unfold. It was so perfect in its Britishness; it was like being an audience member in a play celebrating all that makes us who we are, and the nuances that go hand in hand with it. Like our love of passive aggression, though we’d never actually admit to it. I carried on watching as a gentleman changed tables, throwing the nastiest look of disdain in Madam Gen Z’s direction. But it was of course a complete waste of a physical manifestation of emotion because… again, she didn’t notice.
Despite settling in for the show with my caesar salad and fries, it all became too much. Glances across the room confirmed to each other that, yes, this was tipping us all over the edge. But we all remained seated in a weird game of statues, waiting to see who would put their head above the parapet and make the first move to remedy the situation. To see who would become the hero of the story.
My short attention span dictated events by this point, I was bored and back to being annoyed again. So, I turned around to Madam Gen Z and apologised (the standard British passive aggressive way of starting a conversation bursting at the seams with annoyance) for interrupting. Then, I explained that the whole restaurant could hear her conversation, and would she mind not doing it on video call. She was mortified. While the whole restaurant was losing its collective s**t in 28-degree heat over her actions, she genuinely had no idea there was a problem.
She started texting her friend instead, and the restaurant breathed a sigh of relief at being able to sweat their a**es off in peace, ready for another chapter in the life of quintessentially British behaviour to begin.
Honestly, sometimes I think our cultural passive aggressiveness will be the death of us. All that blood boiling, tutting, eye-rolling and anger over something that could be sorted through a tap on the shoulder and a chat. And sometimes, rather than be our own worst enemy, especially when divisions are being stoked within our brilliant little island, it’s worth remembering that a tap on the shoulder and a chat can dissipate even the most stubborn supporter of British Passive Aggression.
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