Karen Hewitt - Understanding Britain Today

Some other facts about cricket: besides the professional teams, we have many local amateur teams. But where amateur football conjures up an image of a lot of men running around a muddy field and attacking the goals at either end, amateur cricket conjures up an image of summer, a village field, and twenty-two men in white shirts and long white trousers walking in a leisurely fashion backwards and forwards from one mysterious spot to another. Tourists cannot hope to understand the intense pleasures of this game; readers should be warned that well-loved novels, plays and poetry in English have celebrated cricket and described, often at great length, the exact details of a few hours of an imaginary game. Accounts of real games are kept in a precious archive and brought out every few years by the BBC so that enthusiasts can watch or listen, once again, to that sound of a ball on a bat made of wood from the willow tree.

Team games, so beloved in British schools a hundred years ago, are not our chief sporting activity if you count the number of people who actually take part. For if you extend the list to cycling, swimming, keep-fit classes, fishing, climbing and walking, far more people claim to take part in regular active sports. These activities are mostly non-competitive, easy to organise, and popular with people on their own or enjoying themselves in twos and threes. The list is by no means the same as a Russian list. For example, hunting in Britain, whether on horseback with dogs, or on foot with a shotgun, is only for a few rich people - we have virtually no forests, and those which exist are owned by private landlords. We have plenty of rivers and many angling clubs which organise fishing sites and competitions: coarse fishing is cheap, but fly fishing for trout and salmon (on private river banks) is very expensive. Most weekends you will see anglers sitting beside the rivers and canals, seemingly immobile for hours, waiting for the fish to bite; however, since our waters rarely freeze over, we have no tradition of ice-fishing through little holes: our fishermen sit on muddy grass at all seasons of the year.

Weather affects not only the games we play, (no ice-hockey, but football throughout the year) but also the independent sports such as cycling, golf and walking. In southern Britain snow is unusual, while even in the hottest summers we rarely reach 26 degrees. So these sports can take place at almost any time. In Scotland we have skiing centres in the Cairngorm mountains, but the snow is not as reliable as in the Alps. Geography affects us too. The seas - tidal, restless, excitingly bespeckled with islands, and always liable to gales - surround us. So the British go out in boats. All children are trained to swim, and almost all learn to do so. Some children are taught to sail on local lakes and reservoirs. Real enthusiasts progress to sailing round the coasts, and then to crossing the Atlantic. And for those who have neither the money nor the expertise to sail, there are always rowing boats for rowing down our beautiful winding rivers. Not surprisingly, the British are internationally successfully at sailing and other boating sports.

We also have mountains in Wales, the Lake District and Scotland which are (by Russian standards) very close to all of us, and which provide ideal conditions for rock climbing and for practice in climbing far higher mountains in the Alps, the Himalayas, and elsewhere. The mountains are not high but they are rocky, steep, and in winter provide experience of sub-Arctic conditions. Mountaineering was another sport invented' by the British in the nineteenth century.

Neither football nor fishing is the most popular physical activity in Britain. Apart from gardening which I discuss in another chapter, by far the most common vigorous physical activity is 'walking'. Russians do not think of 'walking' as a sporting activity, for reasons of geography, transport and culture. For many British people it is as commonplace as digging a dacha garden is for Russians - a necessary part of the weekend, an activity for all ages but especially the middle-aged and elderly.

For some decades now it has been customary for Britons to drive to work, or to take the train or bus. People only walk or cycle very short distances. Long hours of work, narrow crowded pavements, pollution from traffic all discourage regular daily exercise during the working week. Consequently by the weekend many of us are restless and hungry for the countryside. Although most of our land is privately owned, a network of 'Public Footpaths' allows people to walk across farmland, through woods, along by streams, up and down hills, through small villages, across valleys and into woods of different trees and animal life. From all the big towns, even London, it is easy to reach beautiful varied countryside.

'Walking' can consist of no more than four or five kilometres along these footpaths; a country ramble for an hour or two. For more ambitious walkers, specially designated 'long-distance national paths' exist across the country and around the coasts, which can stretch for two or three hundred kilometres. People will typically walk the paths for two or three days at a time, spend each night either in a bed-and-breakfast room or in a hostel, complete perhaps a third of the distance and return a few weeks later to continue where they left off. In hilly and mountainous country marked paths provide hours of strenuous walking, although many people prefer to take their own routes across the mountain tops.

Is this custom of moving one foot in front of the other for fun any different from the walking which most Russians take for granted as a means of getting to work, to the shops, to the bus every day? It seems to me that although Russians will walk steadily for long distances, you do not think of walking far in the countryside, and because of the underlying geography of your country, most of you spend little time walking up and down hill. The elderly English 'rambler' will easily cover twelve or fifteen kilometres, walking steadily and constantly ascending and descending our rolling countryside or our steep sea-coast cliffs. Our walking seems to me to be closer to your skiing; it is usually more vigorous than the strolls which Russians allow themselves in summer near their dachas. Sometimes it turns into jogging or running or scrambling over rough and rocky ground. In any case, very brisk walking uses many different muscles and exercises the heart - like weekend work in the dacha garden.

In eighteenth-century Britain, gin was widespread, cheap and for many desperate poor people, a drug of addiction. Pregnant women who did not want to give birth to their babies believed that a bottle of gin would produce an immediate abortion; sometimes the method worked, but often the damage was to the mother rather than the unborn baby. The artist, William Hogarth (1697-1764), painted pictures of miserable alcoholic women lying in alleys, dying of an overdose of the drug, alcohol.

Today, in Britain, gin can be bought on any premises licensed to sell spirits; and when mixed with tonic or a vermouth it is a popular drink, notably among the respectable middle classes. Gin is one of several spirits sold in Britain. By 'spirits' I mean distilled alcohol. The standard spirits available in our bars and shops are whisky, brandy, vodka, rum and gin. The standard alcoholic content in these bottles is 40%, as it is in Russia. Like all spirits, a bottle of gin is heavily taxed, and costs five times as much as a similar bottle of vodka costs in Russia. For adults to drink alcohol is perfectly legal in Britain. Many people would describe it as the official drug.

In the early part of the twentieth century, as the film industry developed, almost every screen hero would be seen smoking a cigarette. The message sent from the screen was that you were not a Real Man unless you smoked; by contrast non-smokers in films were often portrayed as pathetic, nervous, irritable people who were rarely successful with the girls. Off the screen, in British streets, most men and some women smoked, many of them incessantly. There were no bans on smoking in public places; cinemas and trains stank of cigarette smoke. The government assumed that soldiers needed cigarettes and sent special supplies to the front during the war.