David Shariatmadari: Come to Lincoln – we’re friendly, if introspective
What does Britain feel like? If its regions were members of a family, who would be the timid one, the chatterbox, the wet blanket? Well, the results are in, courtesy of a team at the University of Cambridge, and London is confirmed as the outgoing, go-getting sibling, trouncing its less flashy brothers and sisters on measures such as extraversion and neuroticism. London doesn’t worry about what people think (it’s neither very “agreeable” nor very “conscientious”) but, hey, who cares, because it knows what it wants and it gets it.
The rest of the country looks on with a show of “am I bovvered” bravado, but a secret measure of envy too. Who wouldn’t want to be the successful one? Much of the media coverage so far has focused on the fact that Wales seems a bit down in the dumps – introverted, nervy, perhaps too conscientious for its own good. But another area sticks out for me, poor old Lincolnshire, a splash of blue on the maps where everyone else is red; painfully shy, the last to be picked for the school sports team.
Part of me doesn’t want to put any store by regional stereotypes. Generalisations are always difficult because they blind you to exceptions. There are many extraverted, risk-taking, people-persons in Lincolnshire. And yet, the results of the survey, as far as my home county is concerned, ring very true. As with most small cities, the residents of Lincoln are about a million times friendlier than Londoners if you knock into them accidentally in the street or ask them for a cappuccino (yes, this new-fangled beverage has reached LN1). The pace of life is slower and allows more scope for passing the time of day with strangers. But in general, people are reserved, unassuming, men and women of relatively few words. The humour is dry and sparse, just like the landscape: acres and acres of flat fields, and more sky than is conceivably useful. And as far as I am a product of my geographical surroundings, I’m a typical Lincolnian: introspective, wedded to routine, suspicious of new enterprises. The extraordinary Lincoln cathedral is the area’s one monument to extravagant taste and world-beating ambition: for 250 years it was the tallest building in the world. London, your Shard is merely the 71st.
Dawn Foster: I’ve never met a shy Welsh person in my life
This survey, a great step forward in evidence-based parochialism, says that the land of my fathers is full of shy, neurotic, emotionally unstable people. To my mind, I’ve never met a shy Welsh person, though I have been accused of being shy when I simply don’t want to talk to a dreadful person bending my ear at a party. Perhaps that’s it: we’re not introverted, we just won’t waste our time entertaining thundering bores. We’re just not that into you.
Admittedly, the neuroticism and emotional instability may have some truth to it. But try being calm and blase about your country’s economic base being ripped out and replaced with precisely nothing. Mental health problems, low wages and life chances intersect, and Wales (including Newport, where I’m from) has more than its fair share of entrenched poverty: the mapping of neuroticism shows a deep red scar cutting through the valleys, where once there were mines, and now the highest child poverty rates in the UK.
But emotional instability is a strange term: who really wants to live life on their knees, experiencing a constant equilibrium of happiness? I’d rather see life in it’s rawest form, with highs and lows, tears and screams of joy, and I’ve seen that more in Wales than in any place in south-east England. If being responsible for the last armed popular uprising in Britain is a side-effect of emotional instability, then great. Perhaps we should embrace our national characteristics and have a few more. When David Cameron slated the Welsh NHS, maybe we should have responded by rocking up at Downing Street with sticks and faces like thunder.
And I’ve never seen people happier than on a crammed train back from Cardiff after winning a rugby match (because, sorry England, we’re better than you, probably because rugby isn’t the preserve of posh lads on our side of the fence). You can find the whole gamut of human feeling on a First Great Western leaving the capital on matchday: joy (at the score), tears (at the fact the buffet car is closed), horror (at the state of the toilet), and most importantly, camaraderie. Emotions, England: try them.
Amy Liptrot: When you’re in Orkney, anxiety seems a long way away
It’s unsurprising to me that people in Orkney have been found to have among the lowest levels of neuroticism in the country. Again and again, surveys, proudly reported in the local newspaper and radio station, find the islands to be one of the happiest places in the UK, with good standards of living, public services and longevity.
As a frustrated teenager on the isles, I found these types of reports sickening, when all I wanted was to experience the buzz of the big city. It seemed like Truman Show-type reassurance, designed to discourage people from leaving. However, returning to Orkney after more than a decade living “south” (as Orcadians tend to refer to the rest of the UK), I began to appreciate the benefits of island life. Many problems found in other parts of the country – crime, class inequality – are just not present here to the same level.
There are no private schools, for example. The local newspaper reports on scratched cars or stolen (possibly just lost) jackets as if a crimewave has hit. The stresses of gridlocked traffic or polluted air are simply non-existent. Orkney retains the aspects of community life other places mourn. An exhaustingly extensive list of local events is read out each morning on BBC Radio Orkney’s daily diary: Scottish Rural Womens Institute groups, ploughing matches, AA meetings, kickboxing and octopush clubs.
One of the defining characteristic of the Orcadian temperament is understatement – a tendency to not over-inflate problems and to comment on setbacks with humour. Hence, the strong and sometimes destructive winds that batter the islands each winter are “a bit blowy” and high seas are described as “a peedie (small) chop”. It’s not that we don’t have problems, we just know how to ride them out, like the Atlantic storms. This stoicism, combined with beautiful natural surroundings – open landscapes with the sea almost always in view – makes it unsurprising that anxiety is far away. Just keep it quiet. If everyone moves here, then we’ll have something to worry about.
Bidisha: Being a Londoner, I ignore people – it’s what we do
I’ve lived in London all my life. In the same house. I get on the Tube at the same station every day and have never swapped one pleasantry with the staff or greeted another commuter even if I see them 300 times a year. Nor would I help one if an axe was sticking out of their head – and I hope they wouldn’t impose by helping me, either. Despite that, I maintain an interest in the world around me. And that sums up the survey findings for Londoners: we’re unwelcoming, lazy, un-cooperative and quarrelsome … yet open, curious and sociable.
Once I went to a party at passé London media haunt the Groucho club, where I got ill on champagne, which I spewed in a glorious froth on the way home, once on the platform at Arsenal and again at Bounds Green. I soaked it up with a copy of Mslexia magazine – such a useful publication, especially since it had had a redesign and went with absorbent matt paper rather than gloss. While I was puking nobody did a thing, thank goodness. You can’t be interacting with strangers in London. You don’t know who they are. The person that grins at you on the northbound to High Barnet could follow you, sit next to you and start belting out hymns.
Mainly, I live in an insular, suburban London where my local high street has about 25 hair salons, two nail bars (one called Venus, one called Aphrodite), two betting shops and five charity shops, one of which being where I heard “Chanel” pronounced to rhyme with “anal”. My London is different from liberal-wealthy boutique north, arrogant white hipster east, toffee-nosed south and touristy “town” in the centre. The friendliest Londoners I’ve ever met were the destitute asylum seekers from 20-plus countries whom I do outreach work with.
The pleasing diversity one can see on a London street is steadily stripped away the higher up one goes. I’m not just talking about the current elites of the international super-rich from the Gulf states, Russia and China, whose homes around Hyde Park stand empty for half the year. I also mean the British elites in the media, politics, finance, business, you name it. Mainly white and English, mainly privately schooled and Oxbridge-educated, they prefer to chum around with people exactly like themselves. They conform exactly to the survey’s findings: they are curious, sociable, open and extroverted among their own kind; and they are unwelcoming, un-cooperative and quarrelsome with anyone different from them.
