I’ve just read Kate Fox’s excellent Watching the English, and I must admit it’s quite a revelation.

Fox provides a convincing study of how much English culture and behaviour is driven by social dis-ease – a difficulty with social interaction. She brings in everything from the English obsession with the weather (not really that much interest in metereology at all, but rather a safe method of establishing contact without opening up) to the strangely money/power independent English class system.

Whether you are a visitor to England who finds the natives baffling, or a local wanting a bit of an insight into the way we behave, it’s excellent. Time and again I found myself thinking, ‘yep, I do that.’ I’d always thought I had a mild disorder of the kind that makes social interactions difficult – it’s very reassuring to discover that this is actually the norm for the English.

Perhaps the only disappointment is that Fox doesn’t give much insight into why the English should have this character, though she does throw in a few guesses. As the book is largely observational anthropology, it is more about the ‘what’ than the ‘why’. Even so, highly recommended.