n EnglishWelshman">I smell the blood of an EnglishWelshman
I’ve never liked having things stuck in my arm. When I was a kid at school, I once fainted after having the BCG (anti-tuberculosis) vaccination. To be fair to me, I didn’t faint straight away at the sight of the injection. Instead, I went back to my physics classroom, sat on my high stool and [...]
The universal language of rudeness
I love a good sandwich, and no trip to the UK is complete without a visit to Pret-A-Manger to grab a BLT or posh cheese’n’pickle sarnie. Standing in the queueline to make my purchase earlier this week, I heard the woman two people ahead of me ask for a coffee and a croissant perfectly normally, [...]
Racked with guilt
Sitting at my desk on Friday, a short grey-haired old man popped his head around the door. Now, I work in a relatively young office, and grey-haired old men are about as regular a sighting as Lindsay Lohan at a MENSA meeting. Needless to say, seeing the man’s shadowy figure at the door of my [...]
What’s for lunch
I’m currently in the south of France, basking in the glorious sunshine in the odd moment or two when I’m not working. The few days I’m here are an opportunity to catch up with the latest developments and debates in the industry in which I work, as well as to spend time with colleagues and [...]
A new kind of justice
It’s remarkable how being ‘out of water’ makes you much more sensitive to people’s attitudes and behaviours, regardless of where you are in the world. When I’m in the UK, for example, I’m intensely aware of the sullen questioning of waiters or waitresses who are not so wholly dependent on tips to ensure that they [...]
Like water for friendship
Since I started writing here, I’ve become accustomed to the everyday spotting of differences between the UK and the US, and between London and New York. Whether I’m riding the subway, eating in a restaurant or buying something from a shopstore, there’s always a strange quirk that makes me realisze that I am truly a [...]
Losing control
Outside the USA, it’s an almost universally held notion that Americans are rude. It’s probably a belief prompted by people’s experiences of relatively elderly US tourists who plod their way around cities and landmarks weighed down by impossibly large cameras and an equally sizeable belief that the world would shudder to a halt without Americans [...]
Tears of a town
Whenever I get on the subway these days, all I seem to see is crying women. From full on floods of tears to carefully disguised dabbing at the eyes, rarely does a week go by where I fail to witness a visibly upset commuter. And it can’t just be the grim realiszation that ticket prices [...]
A heated debate
One thing that we British can’t exactly say we’re experts at is expressing emotion. Anybody who saw me celebrating Cristiano Ronaldo’s last-minute winner for Manchester United against Fulham last season would probably beg to differ, but on the whole, we’re not a race that’s particularly comfortable with expressing ourselves in public. The same can’t be [...]
