Letters from England/Escape
Escape
TO end up, I shall betray terrible things; for instance, the English Sunday is awful. People say that the use of Sunday is to enable them to go into the country; this is not true; people go into the country to protect themselves in a wild panic from the English Sunday. On Saturday every Briton is assailed by the blind instinct to escape somewhere, just as an animal flees in a blind instinct from an approaching earthquake. Those unable to flee away, at least seek refuge in church, there to tide over the day of horror in prayers and song. This is the day when nobody cooks, nobody travels, nobody gazes, and nobody thinks. I do not know for what unutterable guilt the Lord has condemned England to the weekly punishment of Sunday.
English cooking is of two kinds: good and average. Good English cooking is simply French cooking; the average cooking in the average hotel for the average Englishman explains to a large extent the English bleakness and taciturnity. Nobody can beam and warble while chewing pressed beef smeared with diabolical mustard. Nobody can exult aloud while unglueing from his teeth a quivering tapioca pudding. A man becomes terribly serious if he is given salmon bedaubed with pink dextrin; and if for breakfast, for lunch and for supper he has something which, when alive, is a fish, and in the melancholy condition of edibility is called fried sole; if three times a day he has soaked his stomach with a black brew of tea, and if he has drunk his fill of bleak light beer, if he has partaken of universal sauces, preserved vegetables, custard and mutton—well, he has perhaps exhausted all the bodily enjoyments of the average Englishman and he begins to comprehend his reticence, solemnity, and austere morals. On the other hand, toast, baked cheese and fried bacon are certainly the heritage of merry old England. I am convinced that old Shakespeare did not soak himself with tannin, and old Dickens, as long as he lived, did not make merry on preserved beef; as for old John Knox, I am not so sure about it . . .
English cooking lacks a certain lightness and floweriness, joie de vivre, melodiousness, and sinful voluptuousness. Indeed, I should say that English life also lacks this. The English street is not voluptuous. Ordinary and average life is not bestrewn with joyful noises, smells and sights. The ordinary day does not sparkle with the amenities of chance, with smiles, with the budding of incidents. You cannot make friends with the street, with people and voices. There is nothing which winks at you in a friendly and affable manner.
Lovers carry on their love-making in the parks heavily, morosely and without a word. Drinkers drink in bars, each by himself. The average man proceeds homeward reading a newspaper and looking neither to the right nor to the left. At home he has his fireside, his little garden, and the inviolate privacy of his family. 
Besides that he cultivates sport and the week-end. More about his life than this I have been unable to ascertain.
The Continent is noisier, less disciplined, dirtier, madder, subtler, more passionate, more affable, more amorous, fond of enjoyment, wayward, harsh, talkative, more reckless, and somehow less perfect. Please give me a ticket straight away for the Continent.