And now, really more than you ever wanted to know, 2008 Closeout Edition
Five excellent places I visited in the UK:
—Fountains Abbey
—Salisbury Cathedral
—Snowdonia
—Inverness
—Cumberland Pencil Museum
Five ridiculously spelled words brought to me by England:
—queue [what we have here is a failure to eliminate four wholly unnecessary letters]
—tyre
—kerb
—gaol
—manoeuvre [seriously, England? England: seriously?]
Five excellent words brought to me by England:
—Tararabit ["goodbye" in Black Country dialect]
—Pop ’round [as in "pop 'round to the shops"]
—Jimjams [pajamas]
—Juicy bits [pulp in orange or similar juices]
—Clogwyn [technically Welsh for"cliff," though we like to pretend it means "danger!"]
Five excellent and highly underappreciated things about the US:
—Clothes washing appliances
—Geico commercials
—Compulsory and complimentary grocery bagging
—Mixing taps
—Breakfasts that don’t consist of grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, eggs, toast helpfully pre-cooled on a toast rack, and assorted pork products including sausage made of congealed pig’s blood
Five or so excellent foods brought to me by England:
—Tomato ice cream [featured in Best Indian Food Ever dinner in London; will presumably never happen again]
—Kettle Chip-brand sea salt and balsamic vinegar chips
—Magnum-brand ice cream bars [particularly Mayan Mystica flavor, by which they mean "chocolate with cinnamon added"]
—Cadbury-brand Wispa bars
—Clotted cream
—Staffordshire oatcakes
—Yarg, Stilton, Leicester, Wensleydale, Cheshire, Gloucester, Lancashire, and West Country Farmhouse Cheddar cheeses
—Golden syrup
—Innocent-brand smoothies
—Multitudinous Quorn-brand frozen fake foods not yet known in the US
Five or so excellent new-to-me songs:
—”Ain’t No Reason” by Brett Dennen
—”Father and Son” by Cat Stevens
—”Neapolitan Dreams” by Lisa Mitchell
—”Run” by Leona Lewis
—”So What” by Pink
—”Those Three Days” by Lucinda Williams
—”Thrice All American” by Neko Case
Five most important things I learned:
—Phonetic alphabet [alfa, bravo, charlie...{note: not "alpha" out of consideration for non-English speakers}]
—Superstitious English magpie poem
—How to read train timetables
—How to employ Google Reader to great effect
—How to knit for reals
2 Comments
Awesome post, Kathryn! Don’t forget “naughty bits”! I so agree with your dislike of the cold toast. I do love that English cheese, too!
Have you been eating lots of Branston pickle? One of my other favorite English foods is tomato chutney (and all kinds of chutney, now that I mention it). And Jaffa cakes.
Oh, and of course the weirdly euphemistic “front bottom”!
Stephan is the Branston pickle connoisseur—he insisted we switch from big chunk to small chunk and puts in on hotdogs. I go for the Colman’s mustard instead. And I just tried Jaffa cakes for the first time right before we went home for the holidays. Yum!
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