I always relish Theodore Dalrymple’s description of the British underclass, with its “vulpine lope”. And I suspect he enjoys writing them too. Here’s one (emphasis mine):

It doesn't take long or cost much to have a small tattoo done...You can stigmatize yourself thoroughly in an hour or more for a mere fifty dollars. . . . Watching as yet untattooed young men browsing through the patterns in the parlor reception areas, I felt like a Victorian evangelist or campaigner against prostitution, an impulse rising within me to exhort them to abjure evil; but their adoption of the characteristic expression of the urban underclass (a combination of bovine vacancy and lupine malignity) soon put [an end] to my humanitarian impulse.

In his short piece in this week’s Spectator, Dalrymple revels once more in his subject matter:

I was waiting for my wife in a car park in France recently when I noticed that the car next to me was British. In the car, door open, was a little boy of eight or nine. He was extremely handsome, and had a heart- melting smile.

While his parents went shopping — for fast food as it turned out — he had been entrusted to the care of a man, evidently the friend of his parents, of about 40 and of quite transcendent vulgarity. I am not now referring to the charming seaside postcard vulgarity of Donald McGill; rather, I am talking of something infinitely more malign. His vulgarity was aggressive, vehement and triumphal, from his flower patterned beer-belly-bulging shorts to his Rottweiler face. No one can help being ugly, of course, but no one need look like an attack dog.

His was the kind of vulgarity that is not merely the absence of refinement, but a positive contempt for refinement. Indeed, it was a principled, ideological vulgarity; and, as its bearer, he was a true modern representative of his country.

This was fun to read, but I wonder if it doesn’t shade into caricature. Our underclass does indeed contain some nasty and unsightly specimens, but it may be that the average coarse British chav is harder to stomach when you’ve spent a lot of time in a country where some – not all, but one is too many – of the men look like this: