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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Sergiyev Posad is one of the Golden Ring towns. That is, it’s one of twelve towns floating around Moscow which are historically significant and are recommended as worth a visit if to anyone who is going to be in the region for any length of time.
You’ve actually been to two. The other one was Suzdal.
But you tended to [...]
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Today, ladies, it is International Women’s Day, a phrase with all the semantic meaning of the Americans’ World Baseball Series. It’s big in the Former Soviet Union though.
You are rather fond of it as it means flowers and a card without either having to get up early and make pancakes or go to the effort of producing [...]
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Posted in Food, Holidays, Marriage on February 14, 2007 | 22 Comments »
So this morning in a fit of Valentine’s Day madness you went all out and made pancakes for your beloved husband.
In fact, they weren’t just pancakes but blini, which are clearly superior (with added yeast). You’d give the recipe, but the last time you went at it from scratch it took no less than [...]
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Posted in Education, Food, Holidays, Work on January 10, 2007 | No Comments »
“Could you just take one of these,” you found yourself saying on Sunday in the somewhat impersonal, majestically firm and wholly blighting tone of voice you reserve for Giving Instructions to Students, “and pass the rest along?”
The ‘please’ which followed was, as ever, a bit of an afterthought.
And then reality came rushing back in and you realised 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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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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