Global Warning | 24 May 2008

Theodore Dalrymple delivers a Global Warning

It is when you see the English enjoying themselves that you realise the futility of life. Perhaps I should say trying to enjoy themselves: for in the attempt, rarely successful, they turn either glum or public nuisance.

The occasion of these melancholy reflections was a rainy weekend in Torquay, whither I had gone to attend a medical conference. It took place in the English equivalent of a grand hotel: a mixture of pomposity and grubbiness, whose management had managed to find the last waitresses in Eastern Europe trained in the Soviet school of hostelry.

During a break in the proceedings, I took a ride into the centre of the town. It was evident that 1950s gentility was in the death throes of its hopeless struggle against 21st-century vulgarity, the palm court having ceded to the cannabis plant. The taxi-driver, wheezing from the sheer physical effort of sitting at the wheel, pointed out the sites as we drove through the pastel-painted terraced houses.

‘That’s a drug drop,’ he said. ‘Everyone round here takes drugs. This is bedsit land. They come from all over the country to do nothing.’

I said something about it being a shame, that it must have been nice once.

‘They’ve all got several identities,’ he said. ‘So that they get a few cheques each week from the social security.’

Having expressed my pride in being a taxpayer, I asked him the crucial question for any taxi-driver about his job: did he work nights? He reacted as the Transylvanian peasants in Dracula reacted to the approach of dusk. ‘A friend of mine’s just got over his broken leg,’ he said. ‘Broken in three places it was when his passenger stamped on him because he didn’t want to pay the fare.