Return of the Native - Part 10 - The Finale

Things I've found particularly memorable or peculiar - in no particular order - Part 2

I'm not precious about airline food, and anyway, I lived in college for four years.  It always reminds me of an Expression of Interest though, not quite the full Curriculum Vitae.  It also makes me think of the lolly chemist shop my childhood neighbour, Sue Taylor, got for Christmas one year.  I'm amazed we didn't end up prescription drug abusers or perhaps she did!  Anyway, North America aside, airline food really isn't that bad and the Canadians do at least try but I suspect they're constrained by some kind of 'make-no-effort' free-trade agreement they have with the US.

Tattoos are rampant among men of all ages and classes in the UK.  I would have said bad tattoos but that's tautological.  The ever practical British don't get a sharp, well defined tattoo though, they go straight for the mohair look; a blurry, aged tatt, the kind you'd expect to see on a 60 year old who's smoked too much, drank too much and had too much sun for his entire life and also in utero.

Then there are bad haircuts which don't have to become a permanent affliction but sometimes are.  Shaved sides and spiky bits are popular, particularly in conjunction with fuzzy tattoos.  I like to call this the 'unemployable look'.  When we were at the amazing outdoor museum in Beamish I spotted a family where the young father and all five boys under the age of seven sported the same savage hairstyle with speech patterns and vocabulary to match.

Parenting tip from a teacher of 35 years experience:  If your son has ADHD he's already different enough.  Giving him a punk haircut and allowing him to dress as a superhero isn't going to help him fit in. 

Haircuts and tatts aside, people in England are delightful and generally quite polite and helpful.  I stopped to talk with fruit barrow men, station attendants, shop keepers, bar staff, taxi drivers, whoever was up for a chat and it was all good.  Sadly, they were sometimes grateful for a little time and  acknowledgement - tourists can be rather rude and we saw plenty of that too.

Accents intrigue me.  There was an absolutely charming young woman at the canal side pub in Yorkshire, the very part of England from where my father's family originated.  She was pleasant to a fault but I didn't understand a single words she said and I was an ESL teacher for 20 years!  I just smiled, nodded and said positive things which seemed to work.  Interestingly enough though, everyone understood us, for which I credit soapies like Neighbours and Home and Away.

By contrast, we had lunch at a rather excellent Turkish restaurant in Islington where I understood the staff perfectly just as I did all the Muslim-from-wherever station staff on the London Underground.  Of course this could be a product of living in the Municipality of Auburn for 15 years.

The second language of London is Italian.  The first is Russian.  English probably comes in fourth after Spanish.

The London Tube is freaky small and crowded - built for Hobbits who crave intimacy.  When she was Minister for Transport, luminary NSW Deputy Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, approved a tube-style metro to run from the urban fringe at Rouse Hill to Chatswood without ever actually understanding what a metro is.  They run no further than 15km from a city centre because they're designed to carry more passengers standing than sitting.  Sydney will eventually have a world first with a 45km long line that won't even actually reach the city for another 20 years.  Nice one Glad!

British money is a bit mysterious because, apart from the coins, there is actually no such thing.  Notes are issued by the Bank of England but these are primarily for use in England and Wales.  Three other banks issue notes in Scotland and four in Northern Ireland.  Then the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey and a number of Crown Colonies have a go at it as well.   The only things they have in common is that they all have the same value and they're ugly; made of paper; people write on them; and the same denomination note does not necessarily correspond in size between banks.

The coins don't have numerals on them.  The value is written in text, very small, difficult to read text.  And don't expect to tell them apart by design; when the die was cast it wasn't cast very firmly.  There's something there but it's difficult to tell what even with glasses on and I know that because I had to wear them to sort change.  I was pleased to come home to colourful, clean plastic notes that actually fit my wallet; and coins with numbers on them - cumbersome and unnecessarily large though they are.  It's time to downsize the shrapnel as New Zealand did some years ago.

A good English cream tea is extraordinary - well worth every kilojoule and each yummy gram of fat!  It will make the best Australian Devonshire tea you've ever had look like it came from McDonald's!  Being a devotee of all things from King Island Dairy, I thought I knew cream, but not English clotted cream with a skin of butterfat on top.  English cream teas are quite literally to die for except at Harrods where they're nothing terribly special but are shockingly overpriced as everything is in that wankers' paradise.

And speaking of wankers, let's consider the House of Lords for a moment.  When we visited the Palace of Westminster we took the standard guided tour plus the House of Lords Cross-dressing Auto-erotic Asphyxiation Option which was well worth the additional £20.  The number of hereditary lords now eligible to sit in Parliament has been reduced from several million down to just 92 but at the end of the day the whole house is just unelected swill who can do nothing but delay legislation which eventually passes despite them.  So what's the point?  Are you beginning to see why Monty Python's Flying Circus isn't so much funny as simply ironic?  Any American folk who might happen to be reading this do look up that last word.  It's not generally well understood in your part of the world and almost always falls terribly flat when applied as it quite possibly has here.

And last, but certainly not least, we have the Almost People's Republic of Scotland.  Full marks to that Trout woman and her SNP for very nearly destroying the economies of two countries whilst driving a few more rusty nails into Europe's coffin.  Then there's the global flow-on to consider but SNP voters were too busy thinking about how they can have cheap healthcare and free tertiary education.  Oh, hang on, they already have both of those, unlike the English.  But it's not over yet, in their desperate bid to turn Scotland into a cold-climate version of Portugal, the SNP has given 7 year-olds the vote.  That's why I couldn't help but stand on the England-Scotland border facing north and yell "Fuck you, Jimmy!"

Now, is there anyone I haven't offended?  Equity is important to me so I do hope these ten blogs have provided something just a little distasteful for everyone.  If not please let me know and I'll do my best to expand the repertoire next holiday but for now I must bid you all a very jolly "Cheerio!"