Trainspotting To understand a culture, you have to know how the people insult each other. When two Arabs are having an argument, they will call each other a camel, or a donkey. French football crowds jeer about their opponents' lack of sexual prowess. German bar-room insults are based on lavatory humour. England, of course, is different. The big insult is to call someone a 'train spotter'. There was a recent film about drug addicts who lived in a squalid shared house in Scotland. The title had to describe a sad group of people shunned by society, who practised a dreadful habit. So was the film called 'Drug addiction'? No. It was called "Trainspotting". This is because, in England, train spotting is a habit considered even worse than drug abuse. What is a train spotter? Everybody in England has a clear image in their mind. A train spotter is a single man aged 25-50 who still lives with his mother. He wears an anorak and has a supermarket carrier bag. He has little sense of humour. He wears spectacles, one arm of which is broken and held together by sticking-plaster. His life is spent on station platforms with a notebook and pencil, writing down the serial numbers of the carriages on every train he can see. He says things like: "Aha! The 5.36 from London Paddington has carriages in reverse formation today, which usually happens only on Sundays! The 6.10 to Weymouth is running with D-class bogeys! The last time that happened was in June 1988!" And so on. So the 'train spotter' insult is a versatile one. 'He looks like a train spotter' means the person's clothes are drab, mismatched and quite unfashionable. (In England, we are not known for our fashion sense. So you have to dress very badly indeed for anyone to notice.) 'He behaves like a train spotter' means the person has no social skills, and is obsessed by unimportant detail. For example, at a dinner party, suppose the two men start are talking about roads. 'When I drive to Bath, I find the A4 is ten minutes faster than the M4', one says. 'Have you tried the A303? If the traffic's not too bad, that can be faster still...' says the other. 'Shut up! You're like a couple of train spotters!', say the women. The men shut up, ashamed. 'He sounds like a train spotter' is an insult too. When people pretend to talk like a train spotter, they put on a strangled voice which sounds a little like the former Prime Minister John Major. (It is not certain whether this is an insult to Mr Major, or to train spotters.) In fact, you see very few train spotters out in public these days. (Possibly because, since the recent privatisation of the railways, there are fewer trains to spot.) Like kingfishers or otters, everyone knows they exist, but you only catch a glimpse of a few of them, from a long distance. Train spotters don't spend that much time out on platforms. When they do, it is with a video camera, not a notebook, and they are far away from everyone, right on the end up by the engine. They don't wear anoraks or broken spectacles. Like murderers, they appear just like normal people. Look at any train station bookshop. You will see lots of normal-looking businessmen around the 'Train' section, eagerly examining books on steam trains of the 1950s, drooling over pictures of Great Western branch lines that were closed in 1963, or picking up videos of the Carlisle-Settle railway. They buy their books and videos guiltily, looking round all the time to make sure no-one from their work or family has seen them. If you go up to one of these men and say, 'Are you a train spotter?', he will be very insulted. That's because he really is a train spotter. But if you call a colleague at work a train spotter because he has been obsessive about something, he will laugh, and take it as a joke. That is because he is not a train spotter. This is a paradox. But it is also a good way of being able to identify a train spotter. 'I don't want to sound like a train spotter, but...' is a good phrase to remember. We often use it in England if we are about to point out something very technical - a small mistake in someone else's work, for instance. A typical example might be: 'I don't want to sound like a train spotter, but in your report here, you refer to our phone number as 0171 123-4567 on page 3, but 0171 123 4567 on page 5 - it has a hyphen the first time and not the second...' This is a good tactic, for several reasons. First, it looks as though you have read the report very closely. Of course, really, you haven't; you have only skimmed it quickly for one insignificant inconsistency. Second, you sound modest by apologising for your desire for perfection. Third, it appears that you know all about train spotters, and therefore English culture. If you want to avoid the risk of meeting a train spotter, the safest place to go is on a train. A real train spotter would not sit inside a train, looking out at Britain's lovely scenery. He would be sitting out somewhere in the scenery, looking at a train.

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