After work in London
Ai Lin Chun
Monday, 22 October 2007 12:13 UTC
Hello everyone,
I’m working and living in Tokyo but am curious about what Englishmen and women do after work.
In Japan, salarymen (this is a term for white-collar workers in suits and tie; and yes, it’s written as one word) go to izakaya’s to eat, talk loudly, smoke, moan about their bosses in front of their bosses and drink beer and sake. Then they exit the izakaya in herds and bow at great lengths with each other before running to catch the last train home, which is usually at midnight. For those interested, you can read this little book on Japanese Salarymen (ISBN4-533-00665-5).
I presume a similar eat/drink/chat scenario happens in London but I’m curious to know what people talk about apart from sports. What is/are the Englishman’s and Englishwoman’s favourite topic(s) of discussion?
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Replies
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Haha, that made me laugh, because that’s exactly what happens here in the UK. I can’t speak for everyone, but I would say that main topics of conversation in London pubs (other than sport) are:
- Moan about work / boss
- Complain about London prices
- News / current affairsObviously is depends on who you are with. I will argue with my friends over anything, but we’re mostly too polite to argue with someone we don’t know very well.
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Facebook. Everyone talks about Facebook. It’s replaced mortgages/house prices as the single most-talked-about topic.
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The Weather! It unifies us all. We all experience it, we all complain about it.
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Everyone goes to the pub after work. My poor liver, since I started to work in London…
The atmosphere is a lot more balanced in terms of male/female ratio compared with Japanese izakaya in my experience.
Oh and if anything important is going on in football, that will be the topic (the whole pub watching if game is on)
Otherwise like others said, favourite topics of conversation in the UK are weather (which you are almost required to talk about multiple times a day) and how expensive everything is. It’s also always fine to complain about transport.
If you work with some really enthusiastic people, it’s not uncommon to design experiments on napkins while drinking at the pub…
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