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Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

To save you a click, the "most British thing" is drinking tea. British tea consumption has been going down over time.

I was trying to guess what it would be as I clicked... I figured it would be drinking tea, but the other candidates were:

- Unspoken but rigidly-followed rules of decorum

- Comedy that's mostly about someone breaking said unspoken rules of decorum as the people around him sit stone-faced

- Eating boring food

- Extremely good rock and roll

- Classism

> - Eating boring food

Hey, don't you diss fish and chips! It's awesome.

Big pieces of meat, roasted. Yorkshire Pudding. British food has its moments.

soggy peas have their place as well.

> - Extremely good rock and roll

This. Whatever happened to the pure magic they produced for several decades.

Queuing, bad teeth are missing too I suppose.

I wonder if this is correlated with the huge immigration there. The last few times I've been to London and Oxford, I found it hard to even spot a native Brit when walking down the street.

As someone who has lived here for 6 years or so -- it is pretty rare to work with people who are actually from here -- the tech scene here is mostly people from outside london, or from somewhere in europe, or somewhere else... There's a rather big financial draw (we have some of the highest day rates in the world)...

Whenever I meet/hire a real londoner, though, they do get the "So you DO exist!!!" treatment for a bit ;)

Many other cultures are just as much into tea as the Brits!

Maybe. That's why I'm just throwing a hypothesis - that if tea drinking is a strong tradition there, then the influx of new citizens who didn't grow up with that tradition over generations may be diluting tea drinking stats.

But yeah, lots of other cultures like tea. Hell, I'm Polish and I'm a total tea addict :).

How can you tell who's native by sight alone?

It's all about eye contact, real Londoners will go to incredible lengths to avoid any sort of interaction with strangers. When forced to, it'll be overly polite and with a certain mutual derision that's kind of hard to explain. As for correctly identifying someone who doesn't exhibit that behaviour -- all the scottish ones tend to reek of booze, the french people who are around all wield baguettes, the welsh are making weird sounds instead of talking and when you can understand what they're saying it's usually uncomfortably correct things about the other uk rugby teams... The few americans can be deduced by mass... At least, that's how I do it :P

“I know that astrology isn’t a science,’ said Gail. “Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what’s that strange thing you British play?’

“Er, cricket? Self-loathing?”

“Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves."

How about we use your summary as the title, in place of the baity one.

Now I'm wondering what the actual most British thing is. Something very common in Britain, but rare elsewhere, presumably, but not actually definitional.

Possibly cricket and cucumber sandwiches?? :)

The gear head in me had a slight moment of panic "they're killing the Mini??"

I hate to break the news. But that ship's sailed.

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