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:
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:
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:
Don’t you value toads in your hole every day?
Or even leaving such strangeness to your poor aunt:
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:
* mic drop *
Pork….faggots. Even ignoring naughty slang, I’m still coming up blank. Bundles of pigs?
“They can only sell you two of them because UK law prevents non-pharmacies from selling larger quantities of over-the-counter drugs”. This is drug-dependent, and more or less equates to making it impossible to buy an entire overdose in one go. This made sense when there were only a few distantly-scattered pharmacies in one down, but nowadays you can, uh, go to the pharmacy next door and buy the exact same thing again in about five minutes, so it’s a fairly ineffective law.
But you can see the point of it.
(The specific limit there means that if you weigh more than about 65kg you cannot overdose from that packet alone. It seems like a reasonable enough limit, even though overdoses from ibuprofen are fairly harmless compared to the hideous agonizing protracted death you get from paracetamol overdose…)
Meh, you can buy giant tubs of both pills all over the US and those aren’t directly correlated with increased overdoses.