Something un-English

WE HAVE OUR last-Monday-of-month dinner at one of our local hostelries; I play safe and order soup for starters, and then fish and chips and mushy peas.

And oh, dear me, what a mistake the latter dish turns out to be!

The fish resembles nothing that I can identify - it's unpleasant in flavour, tough and rather stringy.

"Is everything all right for you?" the waitress asks.

And of course I'm far too English and polite to complain. In any case I don't like to make a fuss in front of our friends and maybe become an embarrassment to them.

"Fine," I say with a tight smile. Well, at least the mushy peas taste okay.

Compare this with Mr P's attitude.

He too is dining out the other evening with his wife - not at the same pub, but a nearby one.

He too is eating fish and chips.

"Is everything all right for you?" asks his waitress.

"No, it's not!" says Mr P, bluntly. He points out that the fish is badly over-cooked, while the batter is actually soggy. Moreover, the tartare sauce tastes vaguely of disinfectant. "And where's the salad that's supposed to come with it?" he demands.

The waitress doesn't know what to do - she's completely at a loss. She mutters something about nobody else complaining...

"I don't care," says Mr P, politely but firmly, brooking no nonsense of this kind. "I'm complaining!"

The young woman scuttles off, and he hears no more about it until he comes to pay.

"Did you tell the chef what I said?" Mr P asks.

"Yes," says the girl, weakly. "He just said, 'Oh'."

"'Oh'? Is that all? 'Oh'?" Mr P is becoming a indignant. He points to the bill. "I will pay this," he says, in his strictest, schoolmasterish tone, "but it's the last time I'm coming here. And I'm going to warn everybody about how I've been treated. So it's not just my custom you've lost, but a lot of my friends won't come either."

And it's at this stage that the girl burst into tears...

"She was totally thrown by this situation," says Mr P to us, relating the story. "Clearly she hadn't been trained to deal with it. She's in tears and now I don't know what to do. I can't cope either... We just came out for what we hoped would be a pleasant evening meal - and now this!"

I remark that complaining is a very un-English thing to do, and it's no wonder that the girl didn't know how to cope.

"Well, maybe we should start becoming a bit more un-English," says Mr P.

I have to say I do rather agree with him. Without complaining nothing is likely to improve, ever. Things will just drift along.

All the same, though, I'm not sure whether politeness - or maybe it's cowardice - will still prevail with me; maybe I'm just too English!