Posted in Britain, Culture, Drink, Family, Food, Holidays, Patriotism, Poetry, tagged Burns' Night, Robert Burns, William Topaz McGonagall on January 30, 2008 | 2 Comments »
You are not in the least Scottish.
This has always been a source of faint irritation because you are able to conjure up in almost equal amounts a Welsh background, an Irish one, a Northern English past, a Southern English birthplace and a strong connection to the Channel Islands out of France. So to miss out on being [...]
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Posted in Architecture, Books, Britain, Culture Shock, Drink, Music, Public Transport, Russia, Sergei Lukyanenko, Sightseeing, The Rest of the World on April 23, 2007 | 7 Comments »
Having discovered that you had slightly misinterpreted the setting of the book by a Spanish author - with large chunks of it set in Spain simply because Spain is the centre of the universe, as opposed to somewhere suitably Continentally decedent for odd Art to take place - it got you thinking about the other series [...]
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Last weekend you bought a samovar. There it is, sitting on top of the fridge, looking shiny and brassily cheerful.
Actually, that one’s not yours. Yours isn’t quite that shiny. You found this picture here, along with a lot of other samovars. Nice, aren’t they?
Anyway, the total number of samovars you own is now six, if you include the one [...]
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Yesterday you indulged your cultural heritage as a middle class British woman from the Home Counties by standing in a drafty village hall surrounded by thatched cottages, 17th Centrury pubs and rolling farmland, serving polystyrene cup after polystyrene cup of stewed tea for seven and a half hours.
Even better was the fact that the tea pot was [...]
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Posted in Drink, Food on March 11, 2007 | 5 Comments »
You have just finished a marathon cooking session.
So far today you have made a banana and walnut cake with added sultanas so B would eat it. You burnt it, but it’s quite nice now you’ve cut the edges off. Still, it is rather superfluous to need since you have 1001 chocolates in the house if you [...]
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You used to be awful at New Year’s. You’d like to be sniffy and say it was because you aren’t very good at having fun to order, but actually it was probably more because you had a tendancy to be bad at ordering the fun and would rather wait and see if it would turn up of [...]
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Once upon a time you asked a Russian if he’d enjoyed his recent business trip to Great Britain.
“Yes,” he said, “London was great. But,” he added, a look of slightly shocked disgust sliding over his face, “the British really drink far too much.”
This isn’t an isolated opinion either but pretty much the the first comment on the [...]
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AB’s Christmas meme:
This quiz makes some assumptions about the way that various mid-winter festivals are celebrated in the modern world. Feel free to change it to suit your circumstances.
Which mid-winter festival(s) did your family celebrate when you were a child?
Christmas and New Year.
Which mid-winter festival(s) do you celebrate as an adult?
British Christmas.
New Year in the Russian style, which is the [...]
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The last time you went to the actual Bolshoi happened to be for an opera:
You don’t go to the Bolshoi for the performances. Well, I know you don’t. You opera/ballet appreciation skills are about as well developed as your ability to speak Russian.
But what I mean, with all apologies to the artists involved, is [...]
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Incidentally, while we are on the topic of Russian TV, it was also nice to see evidence that the Cola Wars are still alive and fighting tooth and nail.
British viewers will doubtless be familiar with the ads that accompanied the launch of Coke Zero recently. The ones with a personable young man striding through a [...]
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