Is it possible to isolate an English ‘folk philosophy’ – a ‘set of beliefs and assumptions that informs how we live and how we think’? Only in terms so crude you’d be wasting your time. But that doesn’t stop Julian Baggini,
editor and co-founder of The Philosophy Magazine, from having a crack at it.
After consulting demographic profiler CACI Ltd, whose data powers the property website UpMyStreet.com,
he discovers that the most ‘representative’ English postcode in terms of social mix is S66, on the outskirts of Rotherham in South Yorkshire. So he moves there for six months, into a small, noisy house next to a dual carriageway, and tries to live a typical English life. He swaps Kant and Heidegger for the Sun and the Daily Mail. He goes to a working men’s club. (Cue a lengthy analysis of the popularity of Peter Kay.) He watches films at the local multiplex. He buys a dodgy second-hand car. He goes to the pub, where he hangs out with a bunch of old men who have forthright views on all the subjects you’d expect, but who don’t seem representative of anything much except old men who hang out in a pub.
Though his prose can be puzzlingly flat, Baggini is an intelligent, amiable guide to this alien(ish) territory,
and ‘Welcome to Everytown’ does haveperceptive things to say about class and suburbia and Englishness. As it drifts along, though, you sense its author’s escalating awareness that his status as someone who, as he puts it, ‘stands somewhat outside of mainstream life and therefore doesn’t get what people see in it’ makes him the wrong person for this particular job.
Unwilling – and, to be fair, unable – to immerse himself in his surroundings, Baggini falls back on celebrating his estrangement from them. But when he does this, he mostly sounds silly. My favourite bit is when he visits a shopping mall and takes a break at M&S’s Café Revive: ‘It was a horrible place,’ he writes. ‘The noise, the clatter of pots and cups, the rows of screwed-down plastic tables.’ Crikey. Does Pret fill him with similar dread? Or is it okay because they play jazz and serve chocolate fridge cakes ‘like the ones you used to make when you were little’?
