Skopo, consider the curse lifted and may your gonads live long and prosper…(apologies Leonard)
Skopo:
You can’t just take the piss, you have to take it out of someone. Or you can just have a go at him.
Things I miss about England. My friends.
Since the Isle of Man is England with all the dials turned up… not much else is missed.
(Actually I miss train journeys, my hometown, cheap take-out food, towns that consist of more than one shopping street, big old buildings, road-users who do not stop where they friggin like, people without a manx-chip on their shoulder)
Utahns are just plain weird. Nothing in MormonLand is typical of life in the rest of the US. Here in Oklahoma, we have tomatoes at the breakfast table on a regular basis in most small-town cafes, we just don’t stew them first. We eat them as the Creator intended: freshly picked, sliced, and salted. Sometimes, I can’t even wait until they’re sliced; I just eat 'em like apples. Gives breakfast the perfect amount of extra kick.
'fraid that’s not correct, Skopo was right first time.
Tomatoes eaten with a cooked breakfast are more likely to be halved and fried/grilled than stewed. I also eat them like apples, and the best I ever tasted were from my dad’s greenhouse when I was a kid – like sweetcorn, the shorter the walk the sweeter the taste. No salt needed either.
What on earth are you babbling about, man? That’s just the marine layer (I almost spelled it lair). It burns off by noon and the rest of the day is pleasant sunniness. Who gets up before noon on beach days, anyway?
I lived there (Buena Park in Orange County) for18 years and we never used the term June gloom.
You missed warm toast? What kind of hell tour were you on, the cold toast special history tour?
I haven’t been to the British Isles for… okay, it’s only about six months, but I really really really miss being in a place where even poeple who don’t drink that much know a lot about wine and good, reasonably-priced French, Spanish, and Italian wines are everywhere.
Even in Manchester, it’s easy to find lovely wine.
My fellow Americans - I say this with love - most of you wine snobs are glossary memorizing idiots who wouldn’t know skunk juice from champagne.
j.c.----give me your addy, ill post you any wine you like. Well said.
Marmite…it’s the most important thing to pack!
J.C. What do you mean by “even in Manchester”
I’ll have you know my good fellow that Manchester is now the in place of the UK
Things I miss from the US - Tex-Mex food, beef jerky, and cheap Levis. Things I’d miss from the UK if I ever leave - beer, and cars that actually handle.
Hey Fretful, I’ve got a cupboard full of pint glasses from various beer festivals, I can send you a few if you like.
Hmph. What’s to argue about? Plainly, someone was homesick, that’s all.
…and there’s culture shock to consider. When I spent a few months in Japan, I loved the place. Wildly different from anything I had ever known, but you could still buy a beer. Street vendors that sold fish sticks. Vending machines that sold nearly ANYTHING!
It was great. Loved it.
…but in time… the culture shock began to really get to me. I began to long to see and hear a crowd of people who WEREN’T Japanese. Hell, I’d have settled for people with different colored HAIR. And ENGLISH! I wanted to hear a crowd speaking ENGLISH!
Am I a racist? No. I was homesick, that’s all.
And for what it’s worth, the only place I’ve EVER been able to get toast served at above room temperature is at home. Do English restaurants somehow manage to serve it warm?
Too true. And, on a slightly related topic, what about the concept of dry counties in the U.S.–counties wherein the sale of alcoholic beverages is prohibited at all times?
Liquor laws vary quite a bit from state to state and county to county. For example, in Florida, most counties are wet, meaning you can buy whatever kind of alcohol whenever you want. However, Santa Rosa county (northwest FL, close to Pensacola) is dry, so you can’t buy liquor there. On the other hand, you can normally buy beer. Except on Sundays, when the sale of all alcohol is prohibited.
I learned this lesson one Sunday at the beach, when I tried to order a beer to go with my fried shrimp.
When I was in Britain I missed California wines-- I know them pretty well. I had to guess at the French wines (uh, it’s a Chardonnay… it looks tasty…)
Whatever. Give me my skunk juice, er, I mean Russian River Zinfandel.
What I miss most is, oddly, haggis. You can’t get proper fresh haggis in the states anywhere seemingly. I know where to get salad cream, British ales staight from the cask, Cadbury flake, and even “Mind the Gap” underwear but there’s NO haggis anywhere. And frankly, no one here sympathizes with my plight: “What? Haggis? Are you sick, woman?”
I also miss walking into a Scots bar and trying to decide between 50 types of single-malts, driving through the countryside past the seventh old castle, getting lost in London and NOT caring because the tube was always nearby, and first-class on the GNER Royal Highlander to Edinborough where my teacup was never empty.
While there I did miss drinking my beloved Lapsang Souchong the way the Chinese meant it to be-- just hot water and nothing else. “What, no milk? Are you daft, woman?”
That’s odd, didn’t people ask how you took it? Nobody puts milk or sugar in my tea unless I say so.
Apropos of nothing much, it seems that this is going to be a bumper year for English wine.
I’m not sure whether English places manage to serve warm toast, Wang-Ka, but when i was on holiday we had to eat breakfast out everyday and I’m never up early enough to do that at home. I don’t really know why I’d want to either.
Really sorry Pizzabrat, i thought you were being serious. I was still really tired, which is my excuse for verything stupid i’ve done recently.
I really missed English tv. I know when all of my favourite programs are on ever here and which channels they’re on and i have time to watch them. Every hotel we stayed in had different channels (we stayed in 9.) , or at least they seemed to and i could never find anything good to watch. Don’t even get me started on the amount of adverts, i watched malcolm in the middle on bbc2 earlier and it was really strange to watch a program without a single interruption.
I don’t know why anybody would actually eat Marmite. Eurgh.
Why is this thread still alive? It began with the delerious ramblings of a bored/boring teenager after being awake for god knows how long. i thought it would be dead within the hour. How the heck did it get more than 1000 views?? I don’t understand!!
I’m finding it quite difficult to reply to this post, because I keep collapsing into giggles whenever I look at your biscuit list. Reet funny, that.
Now, off for a wee snackette of Bimbo Bomby Puffs.
BfT.
if we were to make a list of things to hate about England, and things to love about England, which would be the longer column?