British values

[cosmolinguist]

Got this e-mail from Andrew yesterday; it made me laugh a lot.

The Tories have been going on about British values again, so I posted this to Tumblr:

Nobody has ever told me what these “British values” are. My wife’s American, so I tried to figure it out by looking at my own values and comparing them to hers. Logically, British values must be only those values held by me (a British person) and not by her (an American).
The conclusion I’ve come to is that British values are liking the Beach Boys, taking milk in coffee, only owning one pair of shoes, and thinking the joke about Yorkshire cows liking their udders feeled is funny.
I look forward to that being the Conservative party’s manifesto in the next General Election.

I look forward to him convincing anyone that it's far more British than American to eat sweets, or that Americans drink ale and love cricket but British people don't.

Comments

[pseudomonas]

Well, I laughed at the cows joke. </anecdata>

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

See, I'm with him on the sweets, the ale and the cricket. So statistically this is getting to be at least as sound as that Northwestern University research on bisexuality. Hold the New York Times front page!

[cosmolinguist]

And of course British people don't eat vegetables either, only Americans do that!

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

Times were hard in the early days of the colonies and you developed bad habits. It's just a shame you passed them on to your children.

Every vegetable you eat is a meal stolen from the mouth of a hungry pig and a bacon sandwich made just that bit thinner.

[uglybuffy.livejournal.com]

I'm not a Brit either, but keen to integrate, so await further instructions from Andrew.