One of the weird things about living in the UK is discovering all those musicians you sort of vaguely assumed were American are actually British.
For example, it kinda blew my tiny mind that The Beta Band hailed from Edinburgh. If High Fidelity had been set in the UK like the book was, maybe I’d have figured it out sooner.
Not to mention that Brits pronounce it ‘BEE-ta.’ When you’re not prepared to hear something pronounced like that, it adds a comical element to conversations. Although you have to be careful not to point it out, because some people won’t necessarily see the funny side.
My first NaBloPoMo, and it’s gone a million times better than any of my NaNoWriMo years! Thanks to you (yes, YOU) for reading. It’s great to feel like my words aren’t just getting sucked into a void of indifference.
Once November is over, I’m going to cut back on my posting quantity in favour (heh, extra ‘u’s never lose their novelty) of writing longer pieces. In December, I’m going to be doing a series on British Christmas traditions (mostly food, it seems like you guys really like to read about food).
If you have any questions about British culture from an American perspective or there’s anything else you’d like to see, drop me a line in the comments.
You might think that because they’re a nation given to naturally forming lines (a practice known as ‘queuing’) in all circumstances, the English are always polite. They’re certainly stereotyped that way in the States. One thing they aren’t, though, is immune to bargains:
Even on #BlackFriday shoving people to the floor so you can get £20 off a Coffee Maker is still an assault.
Now that our decadent capitalist practice of dedicating an entire day to shopping has made it to British shores, there is indeed anarchy in the UK. A television fell on someone.
The interesting thing is, there’s no Thanksgiving but there is Black Friday. It’s not a holiday; people still went to work. But there are huge sales anyway.
Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated in England, so we expats can honor our silly American holiday any way we choose. For me, Thanksgiving is pumpkin ravioli, sweet rolls, and MST3K.
But, while MST3K may be streaming a Thanksgiving marathon, the site displays the eleven most heartbreaking words in the English language, a phrase with which we on this side of the Atlantic are intimately familiar: ‘The uploader has not made this video available in your country.’
But I’m not one to let a little thing like region locking stop years of tradition, so for me it’s Night of the Blood Beast and a few family favorites, like What to Do on a Date:
And Body Care and Grooming:
However and wherever you celebrate, Happy Turkey Day!
There’s a captive audience for Christmastime telly. All your family, together in one place? Better switch on the TV and diffuse those tensions! There’s always a bumper crop of movies, but the staple of seasonal British TV viewing is the Christmas special.
Christmas specials are new episodes of TV shows that are aired during Christmas and as such aren’t part of the show’s regular season. Hence, specials. They aren’t necessarily fuzzy, feel-good stories either. Doctor Who in particular often takes joy in killing (sorry, exterminating) lots of characters in its Christmas specials, but this year might be a little different, judging by the synopsis released today:
The Doctor and Clara face their Last Christmas. Trapped on an Arctic base, under attack from terrifying creatures, who are you going to call? Santa Claus!
And if you’re part of the minuscule percentage of the population that aren’t Sherlock fans, you might’ve missed the furore yesterday over the release of a new promo picture. Aside from the temporarily missing body part, the picture is purportedly from the Sherlock Christmas special.
In 2015.
It’s hard enough anticipating something as big as Christmas. How hard must it be for you to want it to be over with so you can move on to the next one? But, as they love to remind us, Sherlock fans are used to waiting, so I’m sure they won’t mind waiting a little longer.
England has the best shopping in the world. Not for nothing did Napoleon call the English “a nation of shopkeepers.” Some people might put in a word for Galeries Lafayette or Macy’s but for luxury, diversity of choice, and rampant consumerism all in one immaculate package, London’s department stores are the place to be. There are evenTVshows about them.
Christmas, as I’ve mentioned before, is the biggest shopping event of the year. British department stores, especially the flagship stores in London, push to extremes to have the best window displays each Christmas.
British food is ridiculous. It usually involves some combination of beef, sausage, batter, and frying. This also makes it pretty easy to replicate at home.
A good place to start? Toad in the hole. It’s an actual dish that also has the benefit of you being able to tell people that you are eating toad in the hole for dinner.
It’s just sausages and batter. You fry the sausages in the oven, pour batter over them, and cook. This recipe is pretty much foolproof.
Toad in the hole is so easy they even made it on Drunk Kitchen.
The artist Stik has painted the tallest mural in the UK. Big Mother might seem simple, but that’s what makes the image so immediately arresting: a mother and child, painted on the side of a condemned block of council apartments.
Council housing is what British people call projects. They’re properties owned by the local government (called councils) that can be rented at affordable rates. Under laws passed by Thatcher’s government, council housing took a hit and has been on the decline ever since.
Like a lot of things in the UK, public perception of council housing is tied to class issues. Council estates (especially apartment blocks) are generally thought to be crime-ridden and full of stabbings (remember, it’s very tough to get guns here!), drug deals, low-class people, and whatever other horrors one can think up. The reality is different, and there are good and bad council properties just like there are good and bad areas everywhere.
A really excellent movie that’s set on a council estate is Attack the Block. Obviously it focuses on an alien invasion and not normal day-to-day life, but you should watch it anyway. Plus it takes place on Bonfire Night, so that’s buy one get one free for your British culture quotient. And it’s deeply hilarious.
The genius that is Radi-Aid is also starting to get more recognition. There’s not a Brit alive who doesn’t appreciate a good piss-take, and Africa for Norway takes the wind out of Band Aid’s sails beautifully:
Brits are realizing that it’s a cold, harsh world without Adele. Until she’s finished raising a child, the best the British people can do right now is Sam Smith, and he’s adequate only if you’ve forgotten what Adele sounds like.
I’m not from a NASCAR family, I don’t really care about baseball or basketball, and my team is the Eagles, but I won’t fight you if you trash talk ’em (although inside my head might be a different story). So I was pretty surprised to discover that after a few years in the UK, I do enjoy Formula One.
Formula One is all about the strategy. A lot of it’s not even on the track, although there’s plenty of good driving to watch. The teams have to build their own cars’ chassis (each team must have two cars in each race) and comply with a very specific set of rules when they do so, which is hugely expensive (hundreds of millions of dollars, not even counting the fifty million to register your team). On the track, a lot of it is about deciding which tires to change when (you only get a certain number to use over the course of the season, and are penalized for going over).
Oh, and there’s also a fair amount of racing.
But I will admit that Formula One is ridiculous. Just to give you an example, it’s the last race of the season and the stakes are super high: we know that one of two drivers is going to win the Drivers Championship, and they’re both from the same team. Each race gets a driver points as long as they place in the top ten (with more points depending on how high they finish), but for this final race the powers that be decided to award double points (there’s a lot of money tied up in this), so it could go either way.
If you want to know more, Discovery Channel has a good documentary about F1:
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