Britain and the British.

The first thing a visitor notices about Britain is that the British do things differently.

To begin with, the British are polite. They let other people go through doors first, they wait patiently in queues (except in London which is full of foreigners), they say 'please' and 'thank you' a hundred times a day, and they are always ready to help strangers who are lost.

They also drive on the right side of the road- that is the left, they have eight cups of tea with every meal, and they eat an English breakfast three times a day.

These days, the British have got a reputation for having a good sense of humour, and people think that the Bristish are as funny as their comedians. In fact, British humour is probably just like humour anywhere.

For example, the English, the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots love to joke about each other:

An Englishman is a man who lives on an island in the North Sea and is governed by Scotmen.

If one could only teach the English how to talk and the Irish how to listen, life would be quite civilized.

So the Scots play the role of misers in many jokes, and the Welsh have a reputation for telling "tall tales". Like the Welshman who wanted to tell a friend about a big fish he'd caught. He held his hands about half a metre apart. "It was enormours," he said. "but half a metre isn't very big," his friend replied. "Oh no," said the Welshman. "That was the distance between its eyes."

If British humour is different, it might be because the British don't mind joking about themselves. Everyone has a way of staying sane in a mad world, and the British way, it seems, is to joke about it. A visitor to Britain once said that the humour is the only thing the British take seriously.