You might well think that it is easy to write about eccentric English people. “An embarrassment of riches” is a phrase that leaps to mind. After all, “England is the paradise,” as George Santayana wrote, “of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humors.” But before making one’s selection, one has first to appreciate that the entire place has something batty, squiffy, potty, and loopy about it. For a start, Santayana’s remarks on the English appear in his work entitled “The British Character.” So, what is this country actually called? If you come from France or Sweden, you can say so when asked, and that’s it. But if you come from an odd-shaped and rain-lashed little archipelago in the North Sea, you can answer “England” (unless you are Scottish or Welsh) or “Britain” (unless you are from the six counties of Ulster). The actual title of the country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is really the name not of a place but of a distinctly odd 17th-century political compromise.

Artist Peter Armstrong at his Brixton flat, which is wallpapered with clippings from newspapers and magazines. Photographs by Tim Walker.

The naming business helps to write eccentricity into the very landscape itself. Villages are called Piddletrenthide, for example, or Botus Fleming, or East (and West) Wittering, or Upper (and Lower) Slaughter. When I was a lad we lived in a little village in Devon called Crapstone, and I yearned to move so that my school-mates would stop teasing me about it. And we did move—to a village in Sussex called Funtingdon, which somehow wasn’t as much of an improvement as I’d hoped. Of course, not all of these names are pronounced as they are spelled: that would make it too easy. Looking for the town of Leominster? Remember, please, when asking directions to specify “Lemster.” Daventry? Simply say “Daintree.” And, just to make visitors feel even more at home and at their ease, the English themselves—especially the upper-crust ones—have family names that bear no relation to their spelling at all. Marjoribanks, for example, is “Marchbanks.” Featherstonehaugh is “Fanshawe.” Cholmondeley is “Chumley.” And so forth.

Just to keep people on their toes, it has been decided that the English (or British, or what you will) should have an absurdity at the very apex of their well-worn arrangements. Accordingly, an elderly lady of German descent is the head of the Church, the state, and the armed forces (being, as far as I know, the only colonel of any English regiment to be married to the colonel of another English regiment), and just as she came by her job when her own father expired, so her son will inherit these same responsibilities when she, too, is promoted to a higher realm. Meanwhile, everyone agrees to say “the Royal Mint” (where the money is actually coined) and “the national debt” (where the money vanishes into infinity). Her Majesty the Queen has been recently photographed wringing the neck of a wounded pheasant on one of her many estates, and has a husband who has to walk several paces behind her when she appears in public (and for all I know, though there are those rather difficult children, in private). The great thing is that nobody in England/Britain/Albion/the U.K. appears to find any of this odd. Why should they? It’s not as if the telephone numbers and area codes for the nation’s different towns were the same length. Where on earth would be the fun in standardizing something like that?

There are various forms of English mania and oddity, and they tend to be more notorious among the upper classes, if only because true eccentricity requires some leisure time, and some money, for its cultivation. But a national weirdness, shared across all classes, has to do with the strong preference for animals over people. The country boasts, for example, a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It also has, but in a somewhat lower register, a National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The façade of national reserve has crumbled a bit in the past few decades, though reticence and understatement are still prized, but if you want to see the English become emotional, speak to them about foxes and pheasants and horses and pigs and deer. Alexander Waugh’s memoir of the four generations of writers and novelists in his family tells heart-rendingly of his grandmother who, even when her son lay in the hospital, wanted most of all to be back with her cows. I knew of a man, more of a squire than an aristocrat, who when taken ill would summon a country vet to attend to his wants. “Because,” he roared, “the man knows how to make a diagnosis without asking a lot of bloody stupid questions.”