Time for a Good Moan
The tourism minister Kim Howells, the Guardian reported yesterday, has complained that the British are bad at complaining. I found this a shade surprising.
The tourism minister Kim Howells, the Guardian reported yesterday, has complained that the British are bad at complaining. Opening the Hotelympia 2002 exhibition in London he encouraged the nation's stay-at-home holidaymakers to kick up more of a fuss about shoddy hotels. "The British don't moan enough," he insisted. "We ought to be far more ready to complain."
I found this a shade surprising, having stayed two years ago in an almost completely wonderful hotel in Italy where the elegant peace of the foyer was marred only by queues of British guests lining up to complain. Invoking the old school room tenet, "begin as you mean to go on", they opened up on day one by saying their rooms weren't good enough. Apparently this is a favourite ploy of the British holidaymaker abroad.
"We always complain about our room on arrival," an otherwise civilised woman told me at a party the other day. "That way they give you an upgrade." But then maybe the snarling assassins of the hotels on Lake Maggiore are mere sucking doves when faced with damp sheets and burnt toast in a bed and breakfast in Margate.
Still, the principle Kim Howells advanced at Hotelympia (Hotelympia? What a ridiculous word! To whom should I write to complain?) appears to go wider than tourism. Does it apply to sport? "The former Indian cricket captain Sunil Gavaskar," I read on another page of yesterday's paper, "has branded the English team 'champion whiners' after their six-match one-day series ended 3-3. 'Trust the champion whiners of the world to only moan about what affects them and not utter a word about what benefits them,' Gavaskar said."
Has Howells now messaged Nasser Hussain: "Congratulations on yesterday's accolade. You may not have beaten the Indians on the pitch, but even our opponents have to admit that we out-complained them"?
Yet the strangest element in these proceedings is to hear such words from a politician. In many years of observing these matters, I have often thought that few groups of people object to complainers as much as people in government and their various spokespeople do. Ministers, of course, are different from most other categories in that groups are employed and paid by the state to complain about them. That, textbooks tell us, is precisely what Her Majesty's loyal oppositions are for.
But the notion that the British don't moan enough is one politicians rarely agree with when complainants come on to their patch. Harold Wilson, for one, used to have a favourite litany featuring the moaners and groaners, the jeerers and sneerers, possibly even the mockers and knockers - people, he sometimes added, who seemed to delight in selling their country short. Still, what goes for Hotelympia presumably goes for Hotel Blair too. If it's right for consumers who don't like the product or find the service slovenly to say so as loud and long as they can, then why shouldn't political consumers, which is what most voters are in these dealigned, unideological times, be equally scathing and voluble?
But I think I can guess one answer which may be given to that. "Of course," one hears politicians say on Today, "we have no objection to criticism, none at all, perish the thought - so long, John, and this is my one condition - so long as it is constructive ." Ah, yes: constructive criticism, that therapeutic invention which eschews all petty moaning and groaning but proceeds on the basis that complainers and the complained-against are really working together to build us a better world.
But the trouble with that is this: how and where do you draw the line between constructive criticism and mere low-grade moaning and groaning? Le Sage's picaresque novel, Gil Blas, published between 1715 and 1735, tells the following story. The Archbishop of Granada hired Gil Blas as his secretary. Whenever you perceive that my pen smacks of old age and my genius shows signs of flagging, the old man told him, don't fail to warn me, for I cannot trust my own judgment, which may be seduced by self-love. The young Gil Blas honoured these words, and one day, after a sermon that hadn't worked, very gently suggested that his grace's last discourse had perhaps lacked the energy of the ones he'd delivered before.
"You are yet too raw to make proper distinctions," the Archbishop replied. "Know, child, that I never composed a better homily than that which you disapprove. Go, tell my treasurer to give you 100 ducats. Adieu, Mr Gil Blas; I wish you all manner of prosperity - with a little more taste." We surely all know people like that.
d.mckie@guardian.co.uk
I found this a shade surprising, having stayed two years ago in an almost completely wonderful hotel in Italy where the elegant peace of the foyer was marred only by queues of British guests lining up to complain. Invoking the old school room tenet, "begin as you mean to go on", they opened up on day one by saying their rooms weren't good enough. Apparently this is a favourite ploy of the British holidaymaker abroad.
"We always complain about our room on arrival," an otherwise civilised woman told me at a party the other day. "That way they give you an upgrade." But then maybe the snarling assassins of the hotels on Lake Maggiore are mere sucking doves when faced with damp sheets and burnt toast in a bed and breakfast in Margate.
Still, the principle Kim Howells advanced at Hotelympia (Hotelympia? What a ridiculous word! To whom should I write to complain?) appears to go wider than tourism. Does it apply to sport? "The former Indian cricket captain Sunil Gavaskar," I read on another page of yesterday's paper, "has branded the English team 'champion whiners' after their six-match one-day series ended 3-3. 'Trust the champion whiners of the world to only moan about what affects them and not utter a word about what benefits them,' Gavaskar said."
Has Howells now messaged Nasser Hussain: "Congratulations on yesterday's accolade. You may not have beaten the Indians on the pitch, but even our opponents have to admit that we out-complained them"?
Yet the strangest element in these proceedings is to hear such words from a politician. In many years of observing these matters, I have often thought that few groups of people object to complainers as much as people in government and their various spokespeople do. Ministers, of course, are different from most other categories in that groups are employed and paid by the state to complain about them. That, textbooks tell us, is precisely what Her Majesty's loyal oppositions are for.
But the notion that the British don't moan enough is one politicians rarely agree with when complainants come on to their patch. Harold Wilson, for one, used to have a favourite litany featuring the moaners and groaners, the jeerers and sneerers, possibly even the mockers and knockers - people, he sometimes added, who seemed to delight in selling their country short. Still, what goes for Hotelympia presumably goes for Hotel Blair too. If it's right for consumers who don't like the product or find the service slovenly to say so as loud and long as they can, then why shouldn't political consumers, which is what most voters are in these dealigned, unideological times, be equally scathing and voluble?
But I think I can guess one answer which may be given to that. "Of course," one hears politicians say on Today, "we have no objection to criticism, none at all, perish the thought - so long, John, and this is my one condition - so long as it is constructive ." Ah, yes: constructive criticism, that therapeutic invention which eschews all petty moaning and groaning but proceeds on the basis that complainers and the complained-against are really working together to build us a better world.
But the trouble with that is this: how and where do you draw the line between constructive criticism and mere low-grade moaning and groaning? Le Sage's picaresque novel, Gil Blas, published between 1715 and 1735, tells the following story. The Archbishop of Granada hired Gil Blas as his secretary. Whenever you perceive that my pen smacks of old age and my genius shows signs of flagging, the old man told him, don't fail to warn me, for I cannot trust my own judgment, which may be seduced by self-love. The young Gil Blas honoured these words, and one day, after a sermon that hadn't worked, very gently suggested that his grace's last discourse had perhaps lacked the energy of the ones he'd delivered before.
"You are yet too raw to make proper distinctions," the Archbishop replied. "Know, child, that I never composed a better homily than that which you disapprove. Go, tell my treasurer to give you 100 ducats. Adieu, Mr Gil Blas; I wish you all manner of prosperity - with a little more taste." We surely all know people like that.
d.mckie@guardian.co.uk
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