I have been living in London for nearly two years, and last Tuesday I watched a man walk into a lamppost, bounce off it, and say “sorry” to the lamppost. Not to the pedestrian he then bumped into as a result – though he apologised to her as well, obviously – but to the lamppost. The inanimate, unfeeling, utterly indifferent metal lamppost. He patted it, almost reassuringly, and continued on his way. The pedestrian accepted her apology with a reciprocal sorry of her own, because she had, in the chaos, slightly grazed his sleeve. Neither of them broke stride. Neither of them found any of this remarkable. I stood on the pavement outside Borough Market and had what I can only describe as a quiet existential moment.
I say this with enormous affection, because Britain has been good to me and the British people I work with are some of the finest humans I have encountered in my thirty-three years on this planet. But the culture of politeness here – its customs, its unspoken rules, its creative applications, and its absolutely stunning deployment in situations that, in Sydney, would not occasion any social gesture whatsoever – remains one of the most genuinely fascinating things I have ever tried to understand. This is my attempt to document it, in the spirit of an anthropologist who is also deeply bewildered and occasionally implicated.
“Sorry” Is Not an Apology – It Is a Multi-Tool
The first and most important thing an Australian needs to understand about British politeness is that “sorry” does not mean what you think it means. In Australia, we say sorry when we have done something wrong, occasionally when we have not, and rarely for anything else. In Britain, sorry is a Swiss army knife of social interaction with at least eleven distinct functions, only one of which is an actual apology.
There is the Attention Sorry, used to begin a sentence addressed to someone you do not know, in place of “excuse me” or “hey.” There is the Misheard Sorry, which means “please repeat yourself,” and which is deployed with a slight upward inflection to distinguish it from the Actual Sorry. There is the Preemptive Sorry, issued before doing something minor that might inconvenience another person by a margin so small as to be scientifically undetectable. There is the Passive Disagreement Sorry, which – and this took me months to decode – actually means “I think you are wrong and I would like to say so now,” which it then does, softly, in the subordinate clause that follows the sorry.
In a clinical context, this last one is important to learn quickly. When a British colleague says “sorry, I just wonder if perhaps we had considered -” they are not expressing uncertainty. They are making a clear, considered clinical point that they would like actioned. Missing that is a very specifically British form of miscommunication and I watched it happen in the handover room more times than I can count before I worked it out.
The Escalation System – or, How to Know When a British Person Is Actually Upset
Here is the thing that took me the longest to understand: British politeness is not a flat register. It has levels. And once you understand that politeness here is not an absence of feeling but rather a highly structured encoding of it, you stop misreading the room quite so catastrophically.
The baseline is pleasant and friendly. A step above that – in terms of displeasure, not pleasantness – is the addition of qualifiers like “a little,” “perhaps,” and “I just wanted to mention.” When you hear these, something is actually wrong. Above that is “I’m afraid,” as in “I’m afraid this isn’t quite right,” which in British English is the verbal equivalent of a firmly raised eyebrow and should be treated as a serious expression of concern. And at the very top of the scale, reserved for only the most extreme circumstances, is the deployment of full names, extended eye contact, and sentences that begin with “I think we need to have a conversation about -” followed by a pause. At this point you are in genuine trouble and you should know it, even though nothing in the sentence has technically signalled distress.
In Sydney, when someone was frustrated with you, they would, broadly speaking, tell you in terms that could not be misread. I am not saying that is always better. I am saying it required a significantly different interpretive skill set.
The Queue – a Sacred Institution and a Mirror to the Soul
There is no faster way to understand the British character than to observe a queue. The British queue is not merely a practical mechanism for managing demand. It is a moral framework. It is a compact between strangers based on shared values of fairness, patience, and the collective understanding that the alternative is chaos and that chaos is not acceptable.
I have watched people queue in Britain in circumstances that, I promise you, would not have produced a queue anywhere in Australia. A queue in the rain outside a sandwich shop that has not yet opened. A queue to wait for another queue. A queue that formed spontaneously, without any signage or instruction, simply because two people happened to stand one behind the other near a thing that might eventually be available and a third person, rather than standing beside them, chose to stand behind them in an act of social solidarity that I found deeply moving.
Jumping a queue – whether accidentally, through genuine confusion, or through the particular Australian tendency to approach a counter directly rather than locating the back of a line – is among the more serious social transgressions you can commit on British soil. Nobody will say anything to you directly. This is important to understand. Nobody will say anything to you. But the silent disapproval of twelve people who have been standing patiently in the rain will follow you for a block and a half.
My Personal Queue Incident and What I Learned from It
It was my third week in London. I was at a small post office near London Bridge and I made a terrible mistake. There was a cluster of people near the door, and a counter with a person at it, and I interpreted the cluster as a crowd rather than a queue and I walked to the front. I was a new arrival. I was tired. I did not know.
The response was extraordinary in its restraint. Nobody said a word. There were some meaningful glances exchanged. One woman adjusted her position very slightly. The person at the counter served me – as they had to, I was there now – and as I turned to leave I suddenly understood, from the arrangement of the room and the body language of every person in it, precisely what I had done. I did not apologise to the queue as a whole, because I did not yet have the presence of mind to do that, but I did apologise to the woman nearest to me in a way that I hope conveyed appropriate remorse. She said it was absolutely fine, which it clearly was not quite, but which was kind and very British of her.
Politeness on the Ward – Where the Culture Really Shows Up
Nowhere has the British politeness culture struck me more forcefully than in the clinical environment, and I write about this with genuine appreciation rather than criticism. The way British nurses and doctors interact with patients – the patience of it, the particular formal courtesy extended to elderly patients, the way people are spoken to rather than across during ward rounds – has made me a more careful communicator than I was before I arrived.
There is also a specific texture to the way distress is expressed in British patients that I had to recalibrate for. An Australian patient in significant pain will, broadly speaking, tell you they are in significant pain. A British patient of a certain generation will tell you it is “a bit uncomfortable, really” and apologise for bothering you with it, and you need to develop an ear for the gap between what is being said and what is being experienced. I have seen patients apologise, mid-procedure, for the inconvenience of requiring the procedure. I have had patients thank me for the cannula. The cannula.
What I Have Actually Come to Love About It
Here is where I make my confession. I came here mildly bemused by British politeness and I am leaving – well, not leaving yet, but hypothetically leaving – genuinely charmed by it. There is something in the culture that treats the comfort of strangers as a legitimate concern of the self, and which operates on the collective assumption that most people, most of the time, are doing their reasonable best. The default is charitable. The instinct is to smooth rather than to escalate. And in a city of nine million people all living in very close proximity and using the same buses and pavements and hospital waiting rooms, that cultural instinct turns out to be, on reflection, a rather elegant civic technology.
I still think “sorry” is doing too much work for one word. I still sometimes walk up to counters without identifying the queue. I still have to stop myself from responding to “how are you?” with an actual answer, rather than the contractually obligatory “well thanks, you?” that the greeting requires here.
But last week, I walked into the corner of a trolley in the corridor outside the ICU, and without thinking, I said sorry to it. I stood there for a moment and thought about the lamppost man. And then I adjusted my lanyard, picked up my coffee, and walked back onto the ward feeling, in some small and hard to articulate way, like I was starting to belong here.