How the English Do Multiculturalism

It’s pretty much a mishmash of, “Here’s some shit we brought back from conquering people we now intend to honour, why are they always mad at us?”

St. Patrick's Day display with wrong things in it

Actual display in Cambridge today, untouched photo.

If I wasn’t so tired and busy (as you can tell from the lack of updates to this blog as we’ve gone back and forth overseas making our UK move permanent), I’d run a contest to name how many things are just so very utterly wrong with this display.

I Guess It Beats “Crunchy Frog”

It’s well known that the UK has a dessert named “spotted dick” and that it’s funny. They know it, I knew it growing up in Canada, and I’m pretty sure Americans and other English-speaking nations know it. It’s a joke so overdone that it’s fairly boring.

But what I wasn’t prepared for was how weird other food and grocery store items would be here in the UK. I have posted before about Tesco offering strange substitutions and I’m always glad when the bad substitutions they’ve brought me have never been a whole, loose octopus in lieu of walnut bread. Truth be told I’m rather terrified to ever order walnut bread from Tesco given our family’s constant issues with sharknadoes.

Still, avoiding the sea-life-inducing nutty pastries hasn’t kept me safe from stumbling across all manner of weirdness on the Tesco site. For instance, they offer romantic drug pairings:

Tesco recommends pairing paracetamol and ibuprofen

I suppose it’s better than recommending a nice chianti to go with your fava beans and MAOIs.

They can only sell you two of them because UK law prevents non-pharmacies from selling larger quantities of over-the-counter drugs. Also, because allowing paracetamol-ibuprofen combo parties to rage all night long would be inappropriate in a nation that has historically been corked to the gills by a respectable bedtime.

Then again, you might need multiple kinds of pain killers if you had to deal with jerks all day long and were required for some reason to glue them together:

tesco jerk paste

Or maybe this is something we’re supposed to slather on Steve Martin?

And yes of course I understand what it actually is. Just be glad I didn’t make a much more disgusting joke about it.

Not that anyone could make a disgusting joke or three about putting toads in one’s holes on a daily basis:

Tesco everyday value toad in the hole

Don’t you value toads in your hole every day?

Or even leaving such strangeness to your poor aunt:

aunt bessie's large toad in the hole

Aunt Bessie is apparently looking for a reason to have an all-night paracetamol-ibuprofen party.

No doubt there are Brits out there right now ready to rail at me about the deliciousness of “toad in the hole” and okay, fair enough, hot dogs on a bready base is probably quite tasty. I’ve been meaning to try making some, especially since our rental house here has no smoke alarms (!!!) so the whole bit about super-heating oil in a pan first at least won’t be as loud here as it would back in our Austin house.

But sometimes when you’re browsing Tesco’s website you stumble across something even more disturbing than imagining your aunt with large amphibians in her orifices.

Sometimes there’s this:

Mr. Brain's pork faggots

* mic drop *


Keeping Abreast of the Charity Shops

Back in the US I shop at Goodwill a lot, especially for kids’ clothes. They grow through them so fast and boutique prices are insane, but you can get the high-quality boutique stuff for dirt cheap at Goodwill. In addition to saving money, there’s a huge environmental boon to reusing clothes instead of always buying new. Plus if you have a hard-to-fit kid like I do with Peo, having lots of brands in one place makes it more likely that something will fit. And that variety often lends itself to really great finds of rare, weird clothing and other good stuff.

Protip: if you can find inexpensive used plates at Goodwill – especially holiday-themed ones – you can use those to give out holiday cookies to teachers, colleagues, friends, etc. They’re sturdier so you won’t risk collapses as can happen with cheap, disposable trays, they look nicer, and the recipient can either reuse the plate, give it back to you if they wish (make it clear to them that they don’t have to), or regift it forward. Major environmental win, nicer presentation, everyone’s happy.

Peo and I went on a quest to get some used dishes at the charity shops here in Cambridge in November so we could use them for cookies we were going to sell for a Christmas charity bake sale. There isn’t one big umbrella organization like Goodwill running the shops; instead, you have to go to a bunch of different itty-bitty shops for different charities like the Heart Foundation, Oxfam, Cancer Charities, RSPCA, and others.

Each of these shops has its own style in terms of what they carry, and the prices can vary significantly. But what they do have in common is the rare, weird stuff, and some of them have it more than others.

We didn’t find individual dishes as readily as we’re used to with Goodwill – the shops here tend instead to sell complete sets and we didn’t need that many – so we failed on that account. But boy howdy did we find some weird stuff!

We also had one great find: a giant tub of about 100 solid wooden blocks for Robin for Christmas for only £3.50 which now double as burglar-deterrent-caltrops all over the living room floor.

And in that same store was this gem:

Mr. Creosote Vomting Sauce Dispenser

It barfs sauce at you. I almost bought it just to put pea soup in it and call it a Python-Exorcist crossover. Nobody expects the Spanish Expectoration. Nobody.

You have to understand, this scene in The Meaning of Life horrifies my husband to the point of him not wanting to watch the film, despite liking the rest of the film. So I took this photo mostly so I could show it to him when we got home and say, “Do you see how much I love you because I totally didn’t buy this to vomit sauce at you?”

He was duly appreciative.

Anyway, you’d think that’d be the strangest thing we saw on our charity shop journey, but you’d be wrong. See, that’s just a bit of slightly disgusting Python silliness, which is pretty much what they’re known for and thus, by extension, what England is known for. That’s right, Brits…all Americans think you’re a nation lethal to parrots and that it’s easy to catch a train from Bolton to Notlob. Totes truth. Yes.

This is also why Peo and I almost lose it every time Robin’s music teacher here brings out the coconut shells to simulate a horse.*

But moving on to the Oxfam shop, Peo and I entered a world of weirdness that even our Python-filled brains were not ready to grasp.

First we found this, and would have bought it except that Robin would have eaten the pieces on account of her having no respect for invading aliens whatsoever.

Dalek Operation Game

I am horribly disappointed that they didn’t rename this version OPERATE!

But that’s not really so odd. I don’t think there’s a store in this country that doesn’t have at least some kind of Doctor Who paraphernalia in it. It’s pretty much a mandatory national industry at this point.

Where it got weird was with the naked bodies.

Yes, I said naked bodies.

Because if you’re going to have a mannequin in your home, why wouldn’t you decoupage it with comics and then ensure it had hooks for hands, navel, and nipples?

comic covered mannequin

So. This is a Thing.

hook nipples on mannequin detail

And if you’re going to have that Thing, I guess it should have these things. For…hats? Small paintings? Teacups? Probably teacups. This is probably how you’re supposed to hang your teacups in the UK, all dainty-like.

O.o

And if I said, “Hey, look over there, I see a Barbie mirror!” you’d assume I meant something like this:

Barbie mirror

And not this:

barbies stuck to a mirror

The zip ties on some of the legs really sell the horror, don’t you think?

Suddenly the Daleks’ strategy seems a lot less terrifying. They just want to exterminate you, not affix your still-smiling naked corpse to a vanity device.

o.O


* Waiting for the sharkreados on this one.

Trash Talking

Recently when I took the girls to a museum downtown, we passed a man in a trashcan playing music.

man in can

His sign says, “If you feel inclined to take a pic, please be kind and leave a tip.” Then there’s something in another language followed by 50p.

As we were going by, a lady dropped a coin on his blanket and then took a photo of him. He stuck his head out the other side to yell at her for having not given him money. She pointed to the coin and he kept scolding her anyway, saying nobody was allowed to take photos without paying first.

As she insisted that she had paid, someone else took his photo and he started yelling at them.

So while I had no interest in taking a photo of him until that point, I then did take his photo and am now sharing it here publicly without having paid him because frankly if your business is to engage with the public, you ought to learn how to do that without being a complete asshole. I’ve happily supported many indie musicians for years – even having done volunteer PR stuff for more than one – and will continue to do so, but none of them ever needed to go looking in the trash for their talent or for their customer service attitudes.

Fuck you, trash dude! We are too allowed to take free photos, and the way you yell at your actual paying audience is even more rubbish than your music.

#ohSNAP


PS If you want some awesome indie music from wonderful people, I strongly recommend The Biscuit Brothers, The Roving Gamblers, and Monty Harper. Those are all folks that treat customers well, produce great stuff, and do tons for their community, all without yelling at anybody.

Circle Jerks

It’s a well-known fact that the British love their roundabouts and that most Americans don’t know how to use them. There’s one by the Costco in South Austin and the number of people who simply don’t understand the yielding procedure makes it a miracle every time we get out of there unscathed.

Because I do have some experience with them I thought I could probably deal with roundabouts while we’re over here, although granted not in those first few days when I was ridiculously exhausted and still coming to terms with the other-side-of-the-road thing.

That’s why Corran drove from Cambridge to Milton Keynes so we could go to IKEA and get some much-needed furniture and home items. See, he grew up and learned to drive in Australia, which drives on the same side of the road as the UK and also has plenty of roundabouts. So he figured he’d be just fine.

Yeah.

He was fatigued too so the first few roundabouts on the route were kind of hairy, especially since the GPS on his phone kept snarking at him to take the nth exit but it wasn’t always clear where it started the counting, so more than once we took the wrong exit.

(Sidenote: it’s funny that my car’s GPS back in the US was default set to an irate British lady who constantly gives me passive-aggressive scolding in the form of “ROUTE RECALCULATION” whereas the default voice on Corran’s phone here in the UK is a mildly snarky American lady who wreaks her vengeance upon us by firing out her commands and road numbers so fast that it’d take someone with a PhD in math to figure out what she’s saying except Corran has a PhD in math and still kept going off on the wrong exits.)

Anyway, we were plodding along well enough until we came to this piece of work:

triple roundabout sign

No, that’s not an alien reproductive diagram, it’s a traffic sign. Now imagine you’re passing this sign for the first time in your life at highway speed after having flown across the ocean the day before. O.o

Corran and I actually screamed. As in, a real, “AAAUUGGGHHHH!” type scream. In unison. Nothing brings a marriage together like shared terror.

Here’s what this torture device looks like on a map:

triple roundabout map

Corran is particularly furious that one of those only goes to a short offshoot road. I see the whole thing as a war on people who have to drive tiered cakes anywhere.

Worse, none of the folks who live around here even knew what Corran and I were talking about when we referred to the horrific triple roundabout near Milton Keynes. It was hard to Google because we couldn’t remember the names from the sign (again, we were screaming in aghast dismay when we should have been reading the sign, which is probably kind of like what happens to people who see signs from gods and probably why all of those people are too loopy to fit into polite society ever again, and now I’m thinking that “loopy like a triple roundabout” should be a new vaguely insulting descriptor for people who have lost their minds due to divine interference and/or British roads). And when I Googled various terms about scary roundabouts, this monstrosity is what kept coming up:

Swindon magic roundabout

Someone built this shit. On purpose. (Image via BBC)

That’s the so-called Magic Roundabout of Swindon and the very name gives the game away: this was clearly designed to fuck with foreigners and despite it having been built in 1972, they knew one day it’d be part of the general British brochure that children here go to schools to learn magic and you need a god-damned flying car to survive both the Whomping Willow and this swirling miasma of The Traffic Engineer Who Shall Not Be Named.

O.o