Do the Brit's Suck at Service? (Not Likely Guv'na)

Before we left on our big adventure, we were told by several people that we should not expect any level of service whilst travelling in the United Kingdom. This immediately brought forth visions of Ronnie Barker as Albert Arkwright or Dylan Moran as Bernard Black (or dare I mention the hotelier in Torquay?) Although an entertaining thought, this was not our experience and we enjoyed a reasonable to excellent level of service almost entirely across the holiday.

Now I must admit that during our time there we did not have one person fawn over us (maybe the sycophants were on Summer holidays) or become, in any way, gushy. But, with only one exception (which I will explain later) we found the Brits and the huge amount of foreigners working there very friendly and pleasant.

Now this may have been due to the fact that Christine and I were friendly and not demanding or impatient. We always greeted people with smiles (we were on holidays, why wouldn't we be smiling?) and used the manners that our parents taught us (thanks Mum and Dad).

In Portobello Road we met one of the funniest men on our trip. Guiseppe (try to pick the nationality) ran a gift shop in the road and was one of the warmest crazy people I have ever met. I swear that if we had stayed in his shop five minutes more we would have been invited to his niece's christening. We left with some lovely souvenirs, a discount, a gift for "The beautiful lady", and very nice shopping experience. Hey, we were probably ripped off, but is was Portobello Road. We finished off our Portobello Road trip with possibly the biggest waffle I have ever seen, and (up until then) the most drinkable cup of coffee I'd had in the UK. The Spanish lady behind the counter even did a little curtsey when we complimented her on her fare.

The mad pseudo-Cockney* driver on our nightime open-topped bus trip found out that Christine and I completed a passenger list full of Melburnians (travel halfway round the world and share a tour with people from Coburg and Mt Waverley). He spent the entire trip taking the good natured mickey out of his wife ("Five foot six of green-eyed Irish monster") and Melbourne. As he had spent some time in Melbourne and he was so much fun we let him get away with it.

(*Dave, the driver, admitted to being born in Fulham. To be a true Cockney you need to be born within earshot of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow church in Cheapside.)

Actually, it was on a bus tour a couple of days later where we had our only showing of shoddy service. We spent an hour and a half on two buses to travel the distance that we could have directly walked in 15 minutes. After another hour of being herded on to, and squeezed into, a third bus we got off and took The Tube. I understand that a mixture of lost Arab, Asian, and North American tourists, speaking limited English (yes, I know what I wrote) must be extremely frustrating. However, I think that maybe you shouldn't work for a tour operator in London if these things bother you.

A lunch in Covent Garden market provided us with some personal entertainment regarding 'true English service'. Christine, like myself, grew up in Adelaide on a steady diet of British culture. Given many people working in hospitality and retail in London are Eastern European or Asian, she was somewhat disappointed not to see Caucasian characters out of Coronation Street, or The Bill, dropping rhyming slang and talking about "Our 'arold's 'ernia". Christine lamented this fact at lunch and ten minutes later we walked past a fruit cart. Not wanting to miss out on nectarines months before I can eat them in Australia, I bought some from the lad at the cart. He was just the ticket: about 19, thin, Caucasian with freckles and blond hair, and short striped apron. He spun the nectarines in the brown paper bag to seal them and said, "There you go guv'na". I turned around to see the look of delight on Christine's face only to find she was (yet again) off taking photos somewhere and had missed the whole episode. I'm sure she believes I was making the story up.

People in the hospitality and retail industries in Wales and Southern England were the same and we really did enjoy conversing with them. The bloke in the Premier Inn at Cardiff left his post to help me with bags I was handling quite easily. We had a great conversation on the way to the car that, unfortunately, due to his incomprehensible Welsh accent I cannot share with you. This is because I have no idea what he actually said, except for something about rugby. While a woman in Eastbourne, who had sold us tickets to the Bandstand the day before, tracked us down across the foreshore to ask if we had enjoyed ourselves (which we had immensely).

The poorest service we had on the entire trip was on the shuttle bus at Sydney airport. The driver openly berated me for not putting our cases, back to back, in the storage shelves, remarking "Obviously some people can't listen to simple instructions". In my defence I a) can swear that he did not offer this gem of storage advice; b) did actually store them back to back, but in a way that would make them fall over with the movement of the bus; and c) had just lost all of Friday shoved in a high-speed tin can and had left my brain somewhere over Pakistan. I was too tired to even respond and let it ride. Now that I am fully cognisant: Mr Sydney airport shuttle bus driver: I wish you corns on the toes of your accelerator foot (there, I feel vindicated now). His attitude is one I am finding more and more here in Australia.

Maybe we should rebel against the level of service we experience at home before we worry too much about what the Brits are doing.