How to Be English Read Online Free

of No. 1 hits written by McCartney: 32
    Number of Beatles’ songs with a woman’s name in the title: 18

IF MANY OF the quintessentially English elements listed in this book actually came from somewhere else, the exception is beer. The link between England and beer goes back so far that it actually pre-dates the English themselves, because it was being consumed in these islands for some centuries before the arrival of Hengist, Horsa, Cerdic or any of the other Anglo-Saxons.
    The Celts certainly brewed ale from malt, water and yeast, and the Romans – having sent Caractacus off to Rome – carried on the same tradition. In fact, we even know the name of one Roman brewer. He was called Atrectus the Brewer and he came from Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall, a place where surviving the winter probably required a great deal of beer-drinking.
    Since this is one tradition that really does go right back, we are forced to conclude that the link between beer and these islands really is something to do with the climate. The key point is that the climate was not, except perhaps until recent years, very good for growing grapes, which ruled out making wine. What else was there to do, in fact, than make beer? The result: they made beer in the most enormous quantities, house by house, pub by pub, and river by river.
    Strictly speaking, this wasn’t actually beer but ale: by definition it could not be beer until hops were added, and – admittedly – this was not an English innovation. In fact, you can almost hear the squalls of protest when the first hopped beer was imported from the Netherlands in the fifteenth century. There was indeed opposition to the idea, but the only regulation was that brewers were not allowed to produce both beer and ale. It had to be one or the other.
    Not only have they been at it for a long time, the English have also always drank a prodigious amount. By the late Middle Ages, this seems to have been an average of sixty to sixty-six gallons a year per head of population – men, women and children. Perhaps this was inevitable when beer was drunk at every meal and was practically the only safe liquid available.
    That was one reason why, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, campaigners like William Cobbett were sharpening their pens at the expense of tea – sapping the moral strength of the nation – and urging people to go back to drinking beer.
    One of the peculiar aspects of English life, well into the twentieth century, was the enormous quantity of beer that was drunk, especially after factory shifts – when anything up to fifteen pints might be drunk by an industrial worker escaping from the furnaces.
    It was in the twentieth century that the traditional English warm beer (actually cellar temperature), and its variations – bitter, mild, brown, India pale, and all the other London specialities, drawn from casks on tap at the bar – began to make way for the array of refrigerated international lagers produced by multinationals.
    The English never made a fuss of their beers. They had no beer festivals like the Americans. They had no Oktoberfests like the Germans. So they stood drinking by the bar without really noticing that their beer companies had been consolidated and consolidated until there was nothing left except global mush. Nor did they realise that much the same was happening to their pub chains.
    One very important innovation for the English came in 1963 with the legalisation of home brewing. At last, it meant that anyone could make their own beer again. In fact, it is here that the English have been masterminding something of a fightback for their own culture – via the microbreweries and the brewpubs, where they have been once more brewing their own beer, and via the Campaign for Real Ale that has popularised the insurgency.
The Rat, meanwhile, was busy examining the label on one of the beer-bottles. ‘I perceive this to be Old Burton,’