Strange & unusual traditions of the United Kingdom

Welcome back to engVid with me, Benjamin. Today I'm going to be telling you, sharing

with you a few of our more outlandish traditions here in the UK. For a very small island we've

got lots of weird and wacky things going on. So, I'm going to be trying to explain what

some of these are. What's this video good for? This is understanding the sort of culture,

getting underneath the skin of it, and really exploring the culture and traditions of the

UK. Okay, let's go.

The "Last Night of the Proms". Not everyone is a fan of this. The Proms is a long line

of concerts that go on in the Royal Albert Hall in London just near Hyde Park every summer.

The last night is obviously the last of those concerts. And lots of people wave their Union

Jacks and sing along to slightly jingoist-... Jingoistic, which means a funny sense of pride

in one's nation. Patriotic songs, like: "Rule Britannia", etc.

"The Monster Raving Loony Party". So whereas this is very traditional and very straight

down the line, this is pretty left side, pretty... pretty out there. "Monster Raving Loony Party"

was started by a member at the aristocracy called "The Screaming Lord Sutch", he was

some sort of Earl of Harrow or something like this. Some of his manifestos: "Vote for insanity".

Now, whereas the main political parties orientate themselves in terms of left, right, or center

according to their political beliefs, Screaming Lord Sutch said that his political position

was: "Sitting, facing forward". Okay? I used short hand in my annotation at the board,

here: "Pol" short for "Political". But he has achieved some success. These are three

policies that they came up with that have all been adopted in the UK. First of all,

we have a vote for anyone aged 18 or above. Before that I believe it was 21. "Pet passports",

we now have pass... Dogs can have a passport and travel abroad. And we do have all-day

pubs. So, it was probably a bit of a joke to start with: "Let's have all-day pubs",

because they're only open in the evening 30 years ago, and now you can go in from 11 o'clock.

Not to be endorsed whole-heartedly, though, all-day drinking. Right.

"Baked Beans Museum", yes, we do have a museum for baked beans. It's in Port Talbot, number...

Port Talbot in Wales, and it's ranked number 4 out of 15 attractions in Port Talbot.

"The Ugly Face Competition", yes, we have an annual competition for gurning, going...

Pulling weird faces. It happens in September in Cumbria which is in the northwest of the

United Kingdom.

"Morris dancing", this looks a little bit like this. Okay? I wave handkerchiefs, and

I would have bells down here on my feet. So waving your handkerchief, okay? This has been

a tradition in the UK since 1448, that's the first recorded date of Morris dancing. I witnessed

it more recently. In Suffolk there's a village there called Middleton, every Boxing Day they

have a precession of the wren. It's quite strange. Basically they put sort of... They

black themselves out and there is a sort of march of a dead wren to celebrate some sort

of mid-winter pagan festival.

"The boat race", this is an annual event that happens in the middle of April. It's the...

Is it 8-man team or 8-lady team? From Oxford and Cambridge. It goes from I believe Hammersmith

Bridge to Putney Bridge, and the winner of the team, they get to throw the person who's

been steering, the cox, into the river. Okay? So that happens every year. If you're watching

this from Holland, I believe you're quite adept, you're quite good at doing similar

activities yourselves.

Now, I know Britain are doing quite well in Olympics these days, but back in the 1970s,

we struggled, and there was a couple of people who were sat outside a pub in Derbyshire,

which in the middle of the country, it's in the Midlands and they were like: "Aw, we're

not winning anything at the Olympics. We've got, you know... All our teams are doing terribly.

Let's invent a sport we can actually win at." So they invented "toe wrestling". The problem

was that in 1976 a Canadian came along and won the competition. They were so upset by

this that they decided to call the whole thing off for a few years; they went into a sulk.

But I'm pleased to say that toe wrestling is now back on, and if you go out to Derbyshire

maybe you can find it yourselves.

"Bog snorkelling", so this is a very English kind of idea or British idea, the idea that

you would go swimming through a kind of nasty, muddy, long puddle. Bog, mud, okay? Dirt.

Snorkel going up so that you can breathe whilst you are under water. This was invented in

Wales in 1976. And if you have a look at the pictures of bog snorkelling, you'll see that

people wear fancy dress, all sorts of unusual costumes. There was one that I particularly

liked where... Obviously the person is swimming like this, but they had a boat on top of them.

So all that you could see as the person was going along was this boat going along the

water. Now, you're not allowed to use swimming strokes, and no breast stroke, no front crawl,

no back stroke, you kind of just have to sort of push your way through. And it's 60 yards,

you go there and then you go back. Sounds quite fun, give it a go. Right.

The next in our sort of calendar of strange events: "Guy Fawkes night". So this commemorates,

this remembers when Guido Fawkes, the Catholic revolutionary-shall we say?-tried to explode

the Houses of Parliament with his gun-powder plot in 1605. Now, at the beginning of November-well-remembered,

Benjamin-we make a model of Guy Fawkes. Okay? And we put him on a bonfire and we set fire

to him, and we say: "Remember, remember the 5th of November, gun powder, treason, and

plot. And we never will forget", dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. So it's quite strange. There's always an odd

feeling as you see this person, this effigy being burnt. Right.

Some vocab. What I thought I'd do is provide a few different ways of saying: "Weird". You

could say: "Unusual". Okay? So we have "usual" means ordinary, I put the prefix in, it means

not ordinary. "Quirky", this is more for sort of conversational English, the word "quirky",

but it means, again, weird. Slightly eccentric. "Odd", I wouldn't want to be called odd by

someone. It's a little bit insensitive. "The odd one out" means the one you would... The

one that is different. "Odd", different. "Bizarre", "bizarre" means strange. "Oh, that's so bizarre,

it's so kind of... That's unusual. It's different". "Un peu bizarre", so we use that word in French,

too. "Creepy", this has a slightly dark connotation. If something's creepy, it makes you... You

get a bad feeling about it. "Curious", okay? So there's a play on the west end at the moment

called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. "Curious" means unusual. "Eccentric",

so this would be a good word to describe the Monster Raving Loony Party. They're very left

field, very... They're very, very unusual. "Far-out", this is an American composite word,

"far-out", again, it means weird, strange. "Kooky", this is not a word you would use

in your writing. Again, meaning weird. "Magical", this is a sort of a polite way of saying that

someone is odd. They're magical. Okay? Their head's in the clouds maybe slightly. "Mysterious",

and we've got the noun, "mystery". Okay? We want to know, we want to wonder, we want to

imagine what it is. "Mysterious". Okay? So what does "mysterious" mean? It means having

something unknown about it. Okay? We don't fully understand. "An oddball", "an oddball"

is probably slightly more familiar than "odd", it's slightly more affectionate, slightly

nicer, but it still means very strange. "Outlandish", this is a good word, this is a word that you

could use in a piece of writing. "Outlandish", again, it means strange. Okay? Maybe think

of out of the land, it's kind of pretty far, far out. "Peculiar", "peculiar", okay? This

is another good formal word, here. And, again, it means strange.

Hope you've enjoyed. Why not have a go at the quiz now? I'm sure it'll be a little bit

of fun for you. And do come and visit our wonderful and strange island, and maybe attend

one of these. I'm sure it'll be fun. Until next time.