Defying American customs that say you will be struck down from on high if you even think about having an alcoholic drink outdoors, this weekend I managed to enjoy my first margarita of the year while sitting outside listening to an old fashioned country rock band. Contrary to New York thinking, no ill befell me, and I didn’t become an unbearable lout incapable of controlling himself. Just for your information, that only comes after four margaritas, and has nothing to do with whether I’m outside or not.
The Special One and I were easily the youngest adults at the event, with the band cracking out covers of venerable classics such as Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover”, Roy Orbison’s “Only The Lonely” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl”* to meet the musical tastes of the gathered throngs. To be honest, half way through the second margarita, they could have knocked out some snuff metal and I’d have been perfectly happy.
Half way through probably the second number that we saw, a man and a woman got up and started dancing in that vaguely self conscious way that you generally see from the people who take to the dancefloor at a wedding reception after becoming tired of waiting for the newly married couple to take their first dance. Their bravery inevitably encouraged others to get up, and before long there were plenty of people, erm, getting their groove on.
At first I thought it was the tequila, but after a while, I began to notice that at least 75% of the aforementioned groovers were actually line dancing – performing exactly the same routine alongside each other, including complicated skips, shoulder drops and head sways in time to the music. And not just one or two people in their own routine, either – more like a dozen or more silver haired dancers racing through an elaborate routine. It was like watching the video for Achy Breaky Heart, back when Billy Ray Cyrus was just a man with an embarrassing mullet, rather than Hannah Montana’s dad.
Line dancing is one of those traditions (on both sides of the Atlantic) that I think should only be performed in an extremely controlled environment. Namely ‘in your own imagination’, rather than ‘in public where people you might know could possibly see you.’ Nonetheless, there is something faintly mesmerising about watching it, and not just because you’re laughing at Norah, the latecomer with two left feet who can’t work out the routine and ends up tripping poor Ernie half way through an unlikely linedancing version of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
The strange thing is that these people had no caller yelling out the steps, but danced a perfectly choreographed routine for every song. They weren’t an organised ‘troupe’, as people came and went over the course of an hour or so, but even so, each person knew exactly which move went where and when. I kept hoping that every change of song by the band would cause each indvidual member to burst out into a different routine, but somehow they all knew inherently that if “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” starts playing, you take two steps to the right and click your heels together.
Such was the level of knowledge that I am now of the opinion that linedancing is part of the initiation procedure into the cult of America. Given that I am now going through protracted immigration proceedings, I am convinced that I am going to be tested by immigration officers not on my knowledge of the American constitution, but which steps should be performed to “Chantilly Lace”.
I’m packing my bags to go back to the UK already.
* Of course I was joking, and ‘Barbie Girl’ wasn’t sung by the band. It was ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’.
Though my first visit to the United States wasn’t until I’d reached my 20s, I think it’s fair to say that I thought I knew a fair amount about the country through the years of watching American TV. From Newhart to Chips, US telly played an unquestionable (although on some level, highly questionable) role in my cultural upbringing.
More than anything, it was US sitcoms that I loved. Whether it was Willis in Diff’rent Strokes, Balki in Perfect Strangers, or Becky in Roseanne, I took deep into my life the characters that appeared on my screen every week. And to be fair, I think that they – and many others – taught me some valuable lessons and principles about life in America:
Cheers
If you spend a substantial period of your life in the same bar, there is the distinct likelihood that everybody will know your name (Shelley Long is the exception that now proves this rule). Unfortunately, such heavy drinking may mean that you are no longer capable of remembering your own name.
The Golden Girls
If one of your best friends throws a party, you should not spend time carefully planning what to buy as a present. As long as the host sees that the biggest gift comes from you (and you attach a card with a casual inanity such as “thank you for being a friend”) you should be fine. Oh, and old ladies can be sexually active too, apparently.
Seinfeld
Being a neurotic obsessive who is incapable of commitment doesn’t stop you from pulling women if you are a popular comedian. Being a short lackey in the employ of a baseball team is slightly more limiting.
Friends
Close pals do not need to worry about calling each other to check if it’s OK for them to turn up at an acquaintance’s house. They just roll up and let themselves in. Despite all the frequent comings and goings, and the constant crossing of the corridor between your apartments, you will never once be accused of being free loving swingers by your neighbours. Not to your face, at least.
The Cosby Show
If you’re a successful doctor and you’re married to a successful lawyer, and you live in New York City, you will still not earn enough money to live somewhere where two of your kids don’t have to share a room.
Happy Days
If you can make a jukebox play merely by hitting it, you are guaranteed sex. Even if your real name is Arthur.
Will & Grace
Having an incredibly irritating voice should never be seen as a barrier to success if you’re an actress (cf ‘The Nanny’).
Frasier
Fathers can be the most down-to-earth, honest-to-goodness people, and their sons can still turn out like unconscionable pricks. If Fraiser had been my son, I’d have known exactly what to do with that tossed salad and scrambled eggs, and I can absolutely promise you that it would have taken at least ten years of extensive psychotherapy for him to erase the memory.
The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
If you were born and raised on the streets of West Philadelphia, and a couple of guys (who were up to no good) started making trouble in your neighbourhood, your mother’s idea of punishment will be to send you to live in one of the most expensive areas of the United States. Not only that, despite Los Angeles being 2,712 miles away, she’ll send you from the ghetto in a taxi. Approximate cost – $7,250.
Mork & Mindy
Moving to New York from London is broadly similar to landing on Earth in an egg-shaped spacecraft from the planet Ork. Sadly, greeting staff in New York delis with the words “Na-Nu Na-Nu” does not go down well. And I should know. Shazbot.
The problem with cuts of meat in America is that they’re so damn large, you have to invite around thirteen people around in order to get through everything. And with The Special One’s family all being caught up with other things this weekend, that left just the four of us to consume an entire pork shoulder. Which is particularly difficult when one of you is a vegetarian.
Of course, I say that I was cooking a pork shoulder, but here in the States, I am forced to say that I had got my hands on some Boston butt. Just to be clear for the purposes of those in the UK, I had not been indulging in appropriate posterior fondling with Barbara Walters, contrary to what you might read in the National Enquirer this week. Instead I was cooking with a cut of meat that usually gets used for barbecue in the US – slow cooked with plenty of smoke, to give you the tenderest bit of pork that you can imagine.
As it was, I don’t possess a smoker, so I had to settle for roasting the meat at a low temperature for seven hours. And it was pretty damn good even if I do say so myself. I even made my own barbecue sauce. Sadly I used enough vinegar to flood a small village in Wales, and my attempts to present the sauce as ‘tangy’ were greeted with sneers. And pursed lips and squinted eyes, if I’m honest.
The cooking extravaganza hadn’t begun well, after I showed The Special One the naked butt. Again, I’m still talking about the pork, folks, so please try to stay with me. Like all good bits of pork, the skin still showed a few pieces of hair, as I believe that getting out the Gillette Mach 3 was probably the last thing on the pig’s mind when he woke up and read “Monday – fieldtrip to abbatoir, Tuesday – no plans” in his schedule for that week. But while the occasional chicken feather seems OK to her, The Special One apparently draws the line at stubble in her meat products.
The fact is that Americans like meat, and many of them can deal with fat, but the vast majority of them would scatter to the four winds if asked to eat any of the more challenging parts of your average animal. The Special One still rails in horror at the idea of black pudding (or blood pudding as she still insists on calling it, just to ensure that she can never give in to its magical ways), and I’m guessing that haggis is off the menu after we saw a programme detailing its manufacture. I’ve seen the occasional mention of tripe in the US, but am yet to meet anyone who has tried it, while liver and kidney is much less prevalent over here than in the UK.
But what drives me most beserk is the unwillingness to eat pig skin. To me, crackling pork skin – heavily salted, and crisped up to bubbly perfection – is probably the best reason to eat pork in the first place. Back in my bachelor days, I was known to roast the occasional joint of pork just because I knew that I would be able to have crackling. And don’t even get me started on my love for pork scratchings, or the look of horror when I told The Special One that the tiny foil packets contained just salty pig skin and fat.
Pork skin is conspicuous by its absence in America. Most bacon comes rindless, and pork chops are trimmed to within an inch of their (former) lives. ‘Suckling pig’ in a restaurant I recently ate at had all of the porky goodness, but none of the porcine epidermis. I went home happy, but marginally disappointed about the opportunity that had been denied to me.
As it was, yesterday’s slow roasting meant that the skin wasn’t suitable for eating anyway, and besides, the sight of three people vomiting at the table as I ate might have been too much for me. The search for crackling continues.
Despite the protestations of The Special One, I’ve never quite been able to understand the point of a holidayvacation on board a cruise ship. The idea of being surrounded with 2000 people whose idea of a good time is spending their evening watching some underworked and slightly camp ‘entertainers’ perform The Birdie Song is enough to send me racing into the arms of a passing Somali pirate. I have a recurring nightmare about pulling out of port and realising that I have no escape from Nigel and Doris (and their hilarious stories of the time that Nigel accidentally washed his hair with mayonnaise).
No, the cruise is simply not for me.
Of course, like all the best over-the-top generalisations, my loathing of cruise liners has absolutely no basis in knowledge. I’ve never stepped on a boat of that size – indeed, I don’t think that I’d even seen one particularly close up until this weekend when we saw the Queen Mary 2 blocking out the sun in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Sadly, all that has now changed. I am now a cruise veteran.
To be fair, there seems to be a lot going in a cruise’s favour. I was admittedly working pretty much round-the-clock at a business conference, the swimming pools had been drained, and I barely went outside for three days. But nonetheless, I can see why some people would possibly get quite into the idea. The ship was enormous, with numerous restaurants, nightclubs, bars and even a casino – as well as a basketball court, a golf range and an art gallery among many other attractions. I’m sure that kids – if any had been allowed on the boat – would have been thoroughly entertained by a crack squad of children’s entertainers. And who can argue with a team of maids who turn your towels into elaborate sculptures of frogs, rabbits or dogs?
All in all then, pretty bearable. Apart from the music, that is.
Never before has such a collection of terrible tunesmithery been gathered together in one place. From the piano player on night one, to the ill-advised Chinese trio on day two, to the over-the-hill male and female combo on the final night, the entertainment was enough to have half of the conference delegates running for the lifeboats, and the rest desperately hoping that the boat was actually called the Titanic.
The first song I heard being played as I walked out on to the deck was – no word of a lie – Lady In Red. And it was downhill from there. Seasons In The Sun, Hello, Chiquitita, Everything I Do (I Do It For You), Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You – rarely can there have been a less enticing set of songs played for a group’s ‘listening’ ‘pleasure’.
The entertainers did have the good grace to look embarrassed, occasionally casting their eyes around the stunned onlookers to make sure that they didn’t know anybody.
At least I think they did. I’d jumped into the Atlantic by the time they played Wind Beneath My Wings.
After a five month period in which my wedding tackle has been stored somewhere near my pancreas to avoid the bitter cold, somebody finally got around to paying New York’s heating bill, and glorious warmth returned with a vengeance this weekend.
In the UK, the changes of the seasons are generally imperceptible, with spring sleepily emerging from the depths of winter, before lazily giving way to the occasional haziness of summer, Sure, there will be the odd hotspot or cold spell, but on the whole there’s a very steady linear approach to the way that climate moves on during the course of the year. In New York, it all seems a little different. While there will still be occasional rainy spells in summer, or unseasonably hot days in spring, there is much more of a sense of a switch being flicked when seasons begin and end.
One of the benefits of this is that there is a substantially longer period in which you can play the culinary equivalent of Russian roulette by throwing random pieces of meat onto hot metal. Whether you call it barbecuing, grilling, or (as in Britain) salmonella distribution, you can’t beat the smell of charring pieces of flesh and bone in your garden or back yard.
It’s the law here in New York that you have to start grilling alfresco within 24 hours of the sun emerging, unless you want to fall foul of the 1884 Charred Meats Act. Getting thrown out of the country by immigration officials for falling foul (fowl?) of the rules insisting that you throw a spatchcocked chicken on the grill would be a terrible way to go, and as a result, this weekend we indulged in two such events.
Frankly, if you ever needed reassurance that the experiences of life are universal, you could do worse than look at these two occasions.
Fiddling with hot coals on a roof
In the UK, the grilling of meat outdoors takes place pretty much exclusively over charcoal. Sure, some fancy dandys have gas powered grills, but for the majority of Brits, a barbecue (as we call it) means gathering around a pile of black briquettes that you bought at the local petrolgas station, telling each other that you see a flame. Usually with rain pouring down above you, as you attempt to set up a temporary canopy to prevent your pork chops from getting soaked through.
What is absolutely compulsory though is that at least four men gather round to tell each other that their friend’s method of creating fire is never going to work. Men may well form eternal friendships over sport, but all bets are off when it comes to making fire. This weekend, our first barbecue began with me taking over the stacking of coals, and screwing up bits of paper, after rejecting our host’s method of getting the flame going. Don’t get me wrong, his method of spraying lighter fluid from a safe distance of fifteen yards made me pine for the UK, but in the end it’s not going to help me get a ribeye steak when I need it.
Lazy like Sunday evening
It’s much better, of course, when you’re master of your own domain. And on Sunday afternoon, I decided to clean last year’s debris off the grill, and readied some pastured pork chops for their cremation. Cleaning six months of grime off stainless steel isn’t as easy as it sounds though, and I battled with a heavy steel brush and enough chemicals to sink a small nation if applied to their water supply, in order to get the bars in a fit state to carry bits of Miss Piggy’s less-alive family.
After around an hour of cleaning, I’d just got the grill to the point where it might be used for cooking, and we got a call reminding us that we were supposed to be at dinner an hour away, And that we were already fifteen minutes late. It was like getting the sausages out for a British barbecue, only for the heavens to open and for everybody be forced inside for a lukewarm glass of Pimms.
So, two barbecues, and precious little meat to speak of. Still, at least it means I will have managed to get as far as May without a mosquito bite.
It’s butterflied leg of lamb next weekend though, so let the itching begin.
If your idea of fun is listening in to private conversations about Ethel’s ingrowing toenail operation, or the borderline sexual harrassment of Eric’s younger boss, New York is truly the city for you. As I’ve mentioned before, this city’s residents have faulty volume control (they really should have bought the extended warranty), and as a result, eavesdropping is less accidental and more an accidental necessity caused by commuting daily.
What makes the whole thing so profoundly satisfying though is the fact that you get a better class of crazy in New York. In London, overhearing a conversation means listening to sappy Sacha drivelling on endlessly to drippy Dorothea about how Tristan is being frightfully awful at the moment. In New York, you’re just as likely to hear about one man’s plot to dramatically shorten the lifespan of his neighbour’s pet chihuahua.
This morning as I walked to a subway, the middle aged woman walking immediately behind me was having a very dramatic phone conversation with a person who – from the sound of the story – was one of her daughters. She related how the person they were talking about – her other daughter, I suspected – was going for an emergency appointment, and that while nobody was happy with the situation, at least it would be resolved relatively quickly. The exchange went on in some considerable detail, with the conversation getting increasingly heated and personal.
It was only when I stopped to get my wallet out of my pocket that the woman walked past me, and I noticed that she didn’t have a phone in her hand.
Huh, I thought to myself, you don’t see many women of her age with hands free sets.
And then I saw both her ears, and realised she wasn’t even on the phone. And that we were now underground, safely shielded from mobilecellphone reception.
The conversation continued for a good twenty minutes while we were on the train though. I think her daughter hung up on her in the end. You can’t blame her, can you?
One thing that you have to say about New Yorkers is that they don’t lack self-confidence. I have never met a phalanx of people that are so certain of their right to existence. Or indeed, so convinced that the city in which they live is the greatest on Earth. Suggest to a New Yorker that you might consider living somewhere else at some point in your life, and you’ll see them snort derisively before surreptitiously adding you to the list that they always carry with them entitled ‘People To Cross The Road Away From When You Spot Them On The Street’. (Newcomers to this site will be interested to know that New Yorkers aren’t legally allowed onto the streets of the city until they have at least 87 names on their personal list.)
There is not a single argument you could use with probably 90% of born-and-raised New Yorkers that will convince them that there could possibly be anywhere else that is more worth living than here. And plenty of the people who have made New York their adopted home would agree, their systems finally conquered by a city which steamrollers all before it.
Of course, one of the problems with such swaggering self-belief is that some New Yorkers can have an occasional tendency to take themselves too seriously. Beware the person who tries to make an (admittedly weak) joke at the expense of New York, or criticises anything from the weather to the transport system. Responses can vary from the blank look that says “I don’t like this, but for your sake I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is the legendary ‘British wit’ we hear so much about” to the thirty minute diatribe about exactly which of your orifices the offended person will use to ensure your opinions never see sunlight again.
The other issue is that there are some New Yorkers who seem to believe that rules or common courtesies do not apply to them, and that they are an optional part of life or merely apply to tourists/foreigners/anyone but them. Whether it’s parking in places they’re not supposed to or, you know, not saying thank you when somebody holds the door open for them, some New Yorkers simply don’t like doing what they’re told to or what’s expected of them.
Take, for instance, my Saturday afternoon. Heading towards Battery Park City, we walked through a walled-off pedestrian path created by a construction company to allow people to pass through their site unheeded. Repeated giant neon orange signs told cyclists that they could NOT ride their bikes through the path, and that they had to DISMOUNT. In the three minutes it took us to walk the length of the path, we must have been passed by at least eight cyclists who were firmly in the saddle. One of whom had the temerity to “beep beep” us out of the way.
Not with a horn or bell, I hasten to add. No no, he just used the words “beep beep”.
As the fifth cyclist went past, I’d had enough, and using my best passive-aggressive posture, pondered aloud to The Youngest about the inability of New Yorkers to read. The Special One rolled her eyes, I remembered that some Americans carry guns, and The Youngest rued the day her mum had ever met that strange man from Britain.
Meanwhile the cyclist rode off into the sunset. I’d like to think he had a sheepish look on his face, but he’d probably just realiszed that he’d left the iron on when he left the house that morning.
PS If I don’t get a comment from a New Yorker saying “yeah, but why should you have to get off your bike in that situation” I am going to be sorely disappointed.
You’d have to speak to She Who Was Born To Worry to get confirmation, but I think I was probably a right little pain in the arseass when I was a kid. ‘What’s changed?’ I hear you cry in a kind of unison that’s both cruel and a little unnecessary. But as a child, I had an uncanny knack for being particularly irritating if I wasn’t making use of my grey matter in some other way.
With that in mind, it’s probably not surprising that I quickly got into puzzles. Let’s face it, it was either that or the safe knowledge that my mum would be currently nearing the end of a twenty five year stretch at her Majesty’s pleasurein the slammer.
I couldn’t get enough of puzzles though. I particularly loved logic problems, the weird grid of boxes that allowed you to discover (eventually, after torturous process of elimination) that Jack and Miles were best friends who used to play squash (not badminton) on Wednesdays. You don’t seem to be able to buy logic problem books in the US (you can take a look at one here), so I can only assume that Americans couldn’t care less about Jack and Miles, let alone their midweek workouts.
Then there was the Rubik’s Cube, the greatest money spinner ever created from a bit of plastic and thirty six coloured stickers. The stickers were very important to me, as no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t complete the cube by legitimate means and had to resort to removing and replacing the stickers surreptitiously in order to give the illusion of genius. And to be fair, replacing the stickers exactly straight so that nobody knew what you’d done required a certain level of extra-worldly ability.
The Rubik’s Magic was rubbish though. Having eagerly lapped up the pre-release hype, I was bitterly disappointed to have completed it in a matter of hours. It was probably a good thing though – there was no way I’d have been able to break into that bastard to switch around the panels without the use of a chisel and a pair of glass cutters.
Since those heady days, I’ve been a puzzle freak, lapping up the latest obsession from cryptic crosswords to sudoku or kakuro. I know that The Special One is particularly enamoured of my predilection for a quick game of solitaire on my phone just before turning the lights out at night. I think she’s just relieved that she doesn’t have to wheel out the ‘I’ve got a headache’ excuse, to be honest.
But today I am putting Hasbro, Mattel, Waddingtons (and any other games manufacturers from my youth whose names haven’t been obliterated from my memory by more than fifteen years of late night binge drinking) on notice that I have discovered a puzzle that will beat all others. A convoluted brain teaser that will make the Rubik’s Cube look like, well, a bit of plastic with thirty six coloured stickers on it. And the joy of it is that all you need is a wife (or live in girlfriend, if you prefer)!
Basically, all you do is take a large quantity of brassieres (beginners should start with no more than six, although I am now capable of anything up to thirteen), and stick them in the washing machine. Set the cycle to gentle (experts can opt for hot wash, but that does introduce an element of violence to the puzzle, when your partner realises what you’ve done to her expensive La Senza over the shoulder boulder holders), sit back and in twenty minutes you’ll have the toughest puzzle yet invented.
Marvel as you wonder how the bras can have become so intertwined! Gaze in awe at the creation of knots more effective than anything seen in The Big Book of Particularly Effective Knots For Sailors! And cry real tears of frustration as you realise that your early days of attempting to undo a bra without the user’s knowledge in no way prepared you for this unbelievable challenge of logic and physical dexterity!
Playing the game yesterday, there was such carnage that I believed the laws of physics and matter had somehow been broken during the course of their time in the washing machine. At one point I believed I was going to need to resort to snipping the straps to pull them apart, before sewing them back together; the Bra Puzzle equivalent of taking the stickers off the Rubik’s Cube. Sadly I’m useless with a needle and thread, so instead I spent half an hour painstakingly prising the puzzle apart, one bra at a time. The joy you feel at completing the puzzle – the moment the final two bras fall apart – is indescribable though.
Sadly women are not able to take part, given that one touch on the pile of aforementioned lingerie is seemingly enough to break the connective bonds and turn it into a useable collection once more. It’s enough to send this useless man back to the sudoku, I can tell you.
I get asked whether I feel homesick quite a lot, and I think people tend to be surprised when I say that on the whole I don’t. The fact is that – love the UK though I do – it’s my family and friends that I miss more than anything, and if they were all transported over here, I’d probably asking ‘where’s Britain?’ within a matter of months.
That said, it’s probably only natural that our thoughts gravitate to the place where we’re from. Whether it’s Elk River in Minnesota or Craiova in Romania, there’s an invisible thread that inextricably attaches our hearts to the places from which we hail. That’s admittedly unfortunate if you’re from Liverpool, but it simply can’t be helped.
As a result there are always times when expats feel a little more homesick than usual. And usually for the most inexplicable reasons. Realise that you’re doing any two of these things and you’re probably missing home a bit.
Find yourself doing all eight, and it’s time to switch on BBC America, crack open a can of London Pride and sit with a knotted Union Jack hanky on your head for an evening.
1. You spend thirty minutes in bed one night trying to explain the joys of curling to your nearest and dearest. And protest loudly when she says “that’s not a sport, that’s just a spoof that somebody has made up to make fun of the Scottish.”
2. You find yourself daydreaming about eating pork pies, and go as far as to look up local stockists via Google. You don’t even like pork pies.
3. You realise that you’ve been away from home so long that you don’t recognise any of the presenters of Blue Peter. Worse still, you can’t even remember the theme tune.
4. You hear somebody saying that something is “on the DL”, and you automatically assume that they’re talking about the District Line.
5. You spend the whole of Wednesday afternoon avoiding Twitter and Facebook, so that you can sit at home that evening watching the UK version of The Apprentice without knowing who Sirallun has fired.
6. You’re reminded of British summers, by heavy rain in April. And you smile as a result.
7. You see a New York subway map, and pine for an Underground map that makes no sense whatsoever if you’re walking above ground. After all, tourists are meant to get lost.
8. You use up an hour of your precious weekend surfing Amazon’s UK site to make sure that you’re not missing anything new. And end up buying three DVDs. Of American TV shows.
Still when I’m at my most homesick, Britain goes and starts making a fuss about someone like Susan Boyle, and I start to feel better. Yes, I know she’s got a great voice, but having the appearance of someone who has been dragged through a hedge backwards doth not 12 million hits on YouTube make. Now she’s on all the morning shows in America, and you can’t open a newspaper without reading about her.
Britain, you’ve got a lot to answer for.
Some of the traditions that America has are completely different than those in the UK. Like stopping an important sports game two thirds of the way through for the singing of the national anthem. Or, indeed, knowing all the words to the national anthem in the first place. Some things are exactly the same; ‘a willingness to invade countries without succumbing to a burden of proof’ springs immediately to mind. But then – and I say this with due deference to my adopted homeland, and from a true position of love – some things America does exactly like Britain, only a bit worse.
There’s bacon, obviously – a meat product in the UK, but a saturated fat transportation device in the United States. Then there’s the rail system, which for all its British faults, at least calls at practically all towns that contain more than two men and a dog. And of course there’s the language which England invented, and which some Americans continue to devalue on an almost daily basis.
Not to say that America doesn’t do plenty of things better than Britain. I don’t think I’ll ever eat a burger anywhere else on earth again, having tasted the kind of heaven-in-a-bun that even the most average restaurant churns out. American festivals and celebrations make Britain’s look like something that was put together with money found down the back of the sofa. I still shudder with fear whenever I think about the fact that London has to put on an opening ceremony for the Olympics in 2012. And of course, the United States does bank collapses like no other country on earth; everywhere’s given it a go, but America truly has it down to a fine art.
Most of the time, you come to live with the differences between one place and the other. But at other times, it’s almost more than you can bear.
Still smarting from the lack of a four day weekend, I decided to buy some hot cross buns to cheer myself up. After all, what could be better than a spicy hot toasted bun packed full of raisins, slathered with butter that oozes into every inch of its doughy goodness? My mouth is watering at the mere thought of it.
Sadly, thinking about it is all I can do. Because America has gone and arsed up one of the best things about Easter*. For a start, the bun has the consistency of a heavy pannetone, rather than the kind of weighty denseness necessary to guarantee that it sticks to the roof of your mouth. Rather than boasting a reassuring flatness, the American hot cross bun seems to be approximately four inches high, contains candied lemon peel rather than raisins, and has all the moisture of an overworn flip-flop. And to be honest, I’d probably rather eat the flip-flop.
Most importantly though, where the cross on top of the bun (the very thing that gives the baked good its theoretical religious significance) is made of pastry in the UK, it’s made of icing in the US. Thick sticky and sickly white icing that removes the enamel from your teeth, and which leaves you gasping for water. As if you’d eaten a flip-flop, to be honest. With icing on top.
The fact is that if Americans get a chance to add sugar to something, they’ll take it. Whether it’s cereal or hair product, they’ll find some way to get the stuff in there somehow. By 2019, the average 35 year old American body will be made of 63% sugar. Please note that any remarks about licking each other like lollipops will be expunged from the comments.
* The others are Creme Eggs, and ‘moaning about Brits having a four day weekend’.
