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A young Russian woman's book about the pitfalls of living as an immigrant in
Britain has become a surprise best-seller in Moscow ... and it paints a
distinctly unflattering portrait of the natives.
Instead of finding London the city of her dreams, 23-year-old Olga Freer
moans about the shopping hours, the public transport and the bad manners she
encounters. In a litany of complaints about her adopted country, in her book
The UK For Beginners she claims that Britons:
• Habitually scratch their bottoms in public places;
• Never remove the price stickers from the soles of their shoes;
• Fail to iron their clothes; and
• Are obsessed with TV programmes about buying and selling houses.
She says the country is full of "prudish, arrogant people who eat healthy
food for breakfast – porridge or bacon and eggs. But in reality the nation
suffers from obesity".
Some 60 per cent of the female population wear size 22 clothes, she says.
Do you agree with Olga's opinion of Britain? Tell us what you think in
Reader Comments below
"But being overweight doesn't stop red-faced English women wearing minis and
shaking their haunches at discos – some spectacle! It's a nation with girls,
debauched girls to the last degree. The only sacred thing for them is
Christmas, for which they wait 364 days a year."
Olga, who faked her CV to find work as a pizza-leaflet distributor,
nightclub hostess and shop assistant in Oxford Street, is particularly
damning about the "lazy" British working class.
"Every second immigrant achieves much more here than the ordinary Brits,"
she writes.
"The ordinary Brit, having a choice between education and a job on one hand,
and unemployment on the other, would always prefer to live on the dole.
"Then all they have to do is send ?10 notes through the mail as birthday
presents for their various children who they don't see. The greed of these
islanders was a real shock to me."
Olga came to Britain in 2002 when she was 18, and married a year later. She
now has a son but the marriage ended in divorce, though she secured British
citizenship.
She writes: "By settling in England I made my dream come true. The only plan
I had since I was about 13 was to come here as an immigrant. I had no idea
how it would work, but I knew that one day I'd become a UK citizen.
"I was so taken up with this idea that it never occurred to me that living
in a foreign land, without friends, without mum's cooking and Latin American
soap operas on Russian TV in the evenings, may not make me happy but rather
vice versa.
"I'm not surprised any more how awful the free health service is. Like
everybody else, I curse unreasonably high taxes. I've got accustomed to
Indian cuisine, which seems to have replaced the traditional fish and chips
that I used to dream about."
Olga, whose father was an official in the Ministry of Agriculture and mother
a company financial director, says she is currently studying law at
Westminster University and working in a London legal practice.
She told The Mail on Sunday last night: "Russian people are more heartful
and soulful. I was bought up in the centre of Moscow, but here things are
much worse.
"Here, for example, you switch on the water in the kitchen and the water in
the bathroom goes off; here the central heating sometimes works and
sometimes doesn't. At home it is always warm because the Government takes
care of it for you.
"In Britain if it is your birthday, people send you a ?10 or ?20 note inside
a card – like they can't be bothered with you.
"In Russia 99 per cent of people have been to university. Here you get on a
bus and the way people talk, you can tell they aren't interested in anything
other than football.
"I used to go to the theatre in Russia with my family a lot. But here I went
once with my then in-laws and in the interval people were bringing in beer –
were they there for the performance or a pint or what?"
She added: "Britain has a lot of exhibitions from abroad here, but English
people don't seem to appreciate it. I go to museums or exhibitions twice a
month and apart from a few Britons, most of the others are Chinese
tourists."
Olga did concede one thing: "You can cook – I quite like Sunday roast
dinners."
But she added quickly: "When you come home here, you open the fridge and
what do you see? It's all supermarket food or half-cooked stuff. Do Brits
ever cook from scratch? It is not because your society is incredibly
advanced, it is because it is lazy. Ironically, though, Olga is no fan of
the British Government's immigration policy. She says: "I am against it. You
should close your borders."
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article?in_article_id=515116&in_page_id=1879
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