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 [...]
Are there dollars in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?
When you’re a Brit exiled in America, it’s difficult to avoid the fact that the dollar has about as much value as the Zambian kwacha. For a start, whenever your friends come to visit, you have to endure the tales of how they spent sixteen straight hours shopping, and bought two pairs of jeans for [...]
London, England
Travelling to the airport on Monday, my taxi driver asked me whether I was from London. Distracted momentarily from a state of perpetual nausea caused by the constant stop-start motion of driving down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, I replied that although I was actually on my way to London, I actually originated from the North-West [...]
A very British sense of humo(u)r
Crime isn’t funny, I know. But a New York Police Department sign which I saw in a yellow cab on my way home this evening made me laugh out loud. The sign read:
“Reward up to $500.00 for the arrest and conviction of anyone who commits GRAFFITI VANDALISM”
And scrawled underneath that in neat ballpoint penned handwriting?
“Bite [...]
When the chips hit the fan
It’s always strange to find out how other people view your nation. For example, every single day, somebody talks to me in a faux British accent that suggests they’ve come straight off the set of Mary Poppins or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. To the majority of Americans, the British are posh and haughty. Even the [...]
The Carroll Gardens cleaning curse
As any readers from the UK will probably know, there’s something known as ‘The Curse of OK!’ under which a remarkably large number of celebrity couples that open their homes to the cameras of the glossy magazine OK! suddenly find their marriage falling apart. Personally I reckon it’s more due to the fact that most [...]
Cushioning the blow
It’s days like this when you realise just how sodding big the United States is. This time yesterday, I was in Los Angeles soaking up the sun ahead of my long trip east back to The Special One and co. The temperature was in the 80s, and t-shirts and shorts were the only attire necessary.
Twenty [...]
Short not sweet
As I’ve said before, sometimes it’s easy for me to forget that I’m in America. Aside from the fact that I moved here from London and one city is generally pretty much like another, it’s difficult to avoid the fact that wherever you are in the world, you slowly get used to things. As another [...]
Signed, sealed, delivered
When I was growing up in North Wales, fish and chips on a Friday night used to be a big treat. I say ‘fish and chips’, but generally I preferred fishcake - the little fried cakepatty that has almost certainly never been in the same room as a fish, let alone been made of it. [...]
