Am I a spirited Englishman or a repressed one?
A few years ago, a Mexican actress decided to move her family to London.
The reason she gave for this mass migration was because she believed we, the English, were so spirited, but also so repressed. Well, I thought, I have been called worse. I decided to delve into a dictionary to see what she was on about.
There are a few entries for both words, but for this article I am going to take the ones that I like and make it easier for me to write. I am not stupid.
Spirited can mean (and does for this post) Lively, animated, ardent, lively, energetic and bold.
Repressed, however, can mean hold back, keep under control, restrain, smother and stifle.
How, I thought, could I, an Englishman, be both of these things at the same time?
But then it dawned on me. In a way she was right, and I am going to explain right here and now. Yes, I am.
Every morning I wake up, and I am spirited, lively, energetic and ready to take on the world, and I would, if it wasn’t for my fascist, repressive duvet stifling me, and pinning me to the mattress.
So perhaps the Mexican actress was actually trying to say, is the English are lazy.
Well, let’s face it, after years and years of conquering, colonising, and teaching everybody a useful language, we as a nation surely deserve an extra hour in bed. Well I think I do.
But it was not always thus.
I was once a newspaper delivery boy. Every morning, seven days a week, I would be up with the proverbial Lark (although I never saw a Lark, proverbial or otherwise)
I would be up and out delivering the news to a selective number of people in Hoxton.
News they had already heard on the radio, courtesy of the BBC, but still could not begin their day without the sound of a chirpy cockney whistling a chirpy tune, and calling out “wotcha guvner”, and “Cor, you’re a real toff guv.”
(Actually, the only people I have heard speaking those phrases were middle class actors, in black and white films from the thirties and forties. Thank goodness Michael Caine arrived and we could all talk proper. Also, I cannot whistle.)
I kept this public spirited (that word again) occupation until my teenage years began to tell on me.
When the lovely old gentleman who owned the newsagents, I worked for, sold the business, the new owner, obviously keen to keep his star paper boy and municipal asset, bought me an alarm clock.
This was in a vain attempt to prevent my morning paper round blending with my evening paper round.
I gratefully accepted this gift, but after a month or so, my repressive blankets (no duvets in those days) kept me pinned down.
I reluctantly left the news distribution business.
But I kept the clock.
I figured that some people had to work fifty years to be rewarded with a clock. I had cracked it in eighteen months.
My future success was assured.
If I could achieve so much in such a short time, I could be prime minister by the time I was nineteen, and world ruler by the time I was twenty-five.
Repressed: not me.
I was spirited.
Life was going to be a doddle.
More stories from me.
The things I discovered in America.
Sherlock Holmes where are you?
What is worse fox hunting or bull fighting?
I owe a Swiss village an apology.
