Mind the gap, and the drunk people

Sadly, as of tonight at midnight you will be no longer able to drink on the tube. For most of the Canadians in the crowd I am sure they are saying ‘what? you could drink on the tube?’ Drinking in Canada is something you can only do from the safety of a pub or confines of your home (and by home I mean possibly your backyard but certainly not in your front yard, what would the neighbours think??). Alcoholic beverages are not meant to be consumed in open spaces, parks, beaches, forests, ice skating rinks, igloos, zoos, movie theaters or any form of public transit (and we thought the Brits were uptight).

Here in Britain however you can drink in any open space, sidewalk, beach, park bench or method of public transit (bus, train, tube, thames clipper) – I am not saying this is right or wrong but I can tell you that it is pretty nice to be able to have a nice cold bottle of wine on a sunny day sitting in a park or on a beach. Anyway the new mayor of London Boris-something-or-other (I really just picture that Boris dude from Rocky and Bullwinkle when I hear his name), in an effort to cut down on anti social behaviour (one of my favourite ways to describe ’shit disturbers’) is banning drinking on the tube. Fair enough, there is really no good argument for keeping it as I am pretty sure ‘but its cheaper to get drunk on my way to the bar than pay for drinks when i get there’ doesn’t stand a chance against trying to prevent drunk people from falling on the tracks.

Anyway as expected some very ingenious Londonders have created a facebook event called LONDON UNDERGROUND’S LAST EVER PARTY to commemorate the end of a drinknig era. Everyone is meant to meet at 9pm at Liverpool station with drinks in hand, board the circle line tube and continue riding/drinking until you get kicked off. It started off as small group but as of Friday night there were more than 10,000 people signed up! hmm…. I feel there will be some some serious anti social behaviour going on! I’ll keep you posted!

My new lunch spot

 

Nothing better than getting a free cookie on your way to work (I might have to agree with Kirstin, it must be international cookie day!)….oh but wait there is something better….finding out that the cookie is advertising the new Waitrose that has just opened up around the corner from my office!  The store used to be a Budgens (think IGA for the Canadians) which definitely catered to a different audience but now it has been made in to something beautiful.  It’s the equivalent of taking the frumpy school girl and turned her into the prom queen.

 

Anyway there is just something so lovely about shopping in Waitrose as it is merchandised so nicely with big wide aisles and perfect looking (marginally overpriced) produce.   Their store brand products are beautifully packaged and given cutesy names and descriptions that make your mouth water just reading it. 

 

The grand opening seemed like quite a big deal as every suit from head office was wandering around to make sure it was running properly.  They were handing out maps to help you navigate through the store (seriously, it’s a grocery store how hard can it be), handing you a basket and even had a bike service set up to take you home (unfortunately I didn’t buy anything so couldn’t get the ride to work but can you imagine rocking up to work behind one of these??  Ha! – coincidentally the drivers were wearing these terrible hats that looked like they were designed by Anne of Green Gables which made it even better)

 

 

Due to the over abundance of head office dudes I could’t get great pictures but I think you can get the idea of its lovlieness by the shot of the dessert and crisp aisle (two of my fave).

 

 

 

They even had the famous milk which I was on about earlier and a beautifully presented herb section (remember to pronounce the ‘H’ in herbs). 

 

 

 

 

I am heading over shortly for lunch and can hardly wait to see what loveliness I will find for lunch (most likely from the dessert or crisp aisle….mmmm)

May bank holiday – toll booths and frozen fish

We just spent the (second) May bank holiday weekend driving around Normandy, France (which was lovely, more on that later). In preparation for the trip we did what every generation x-er would do and, (the night before the trip) went straight to Google maps, entered our start and end point and voila Google planned our trip! We quickly scanned the directions agreeing they looked legit transporting us from point A to point B on some fancy French highways, toll roads and around quite a few of those ingenious roundabouts (still not sure why we waste electricity on intersections with stop lights when whizzing through roundabouts is so much more fun).

Anyhoo we got our hire car once we arrived in France, followed the directions out the parking lot and straight on to a roundabout that shot us out on this nicely paved empty highway. We were excited to see that the speed limit was 130km per hour -except of course in rain when you have to slow down to 110….seriously? 110 in rain? can’t imagine what the French think when they come to Canada and are advised to go 100km/h on flat dry non treacherous pavement, (mon dieu, I can allée faster). Anyway we took off on this lovely highway and were greeted by our first toll booth (guess this is what google meant by a toll road), we slowed down slightly to grab the ticket and were off again (hubbie comparing it to a Formula 1 pit stop – clearly he was enjoying this increased speed limit).

After about 100km we hit the toll collection booth, hubbie handed in our ticket while I dug through my bag of euro cents left over from previous trips. We were both equally surprised when the toll lady said €6.95…WHAT? I was expecting €2 -3. I reluctantly handed over a 10 Euro note and we sped on. ….until the next pit stop. Ticket in hand we arrived at the next booth, another €6.50 for the privilege of traveling on this next stretch of road. We carried on past yet another toll booth which wasn’t even a booth it was a bucket you were to throw €0.50 for some unknown reason. We did, and carried on.

Finally, we approached this amazing looking (very high, very steep) bridge. As we marveled at the very high, very steep slope we were driving up, we arrived at the top to see the dreaded toll booth at the bottom…I knew there had to be a catch – these fancy bridges don’t just build themselves. Anyway this was another €5.00 which brought our toll road total to €18.95!! We considered picking up a hitch hiker to help subsidize the costs (coincidentally we did see about 3…do people really travel like that? Haven’t they heard the stories of the murderers who pick you up and don’t have inside door handles so you are stuck in there forever?? or was that just what my mom told me?…)

Anyway on our way back I was much better prepared, I had my Euro cash in hand as we approached the first booth only there wasn’t a toll guy (or girl) there. The booth had been taken over by a bunch of people with a big white bed sheets spray painted with some big French words (that I am pretty sure weren’t taught in my grade 10 French class) jumping up and down screaming and waving us through the gate. We smiled, waved and carried on through, hubby already happy at our €6.95 savings. Sadly the next booth hadn’t been overtaken by bed sheet toting pyromaniacs but we figured we couldn’t complain. Little did we know the best bit was yet to come…

As we approached the amazing bridge we got to the top and saw a pile of burning tires…could our favourite protesters be there?? As we got closer we noticed they had also somehow made these toll guards disappear and not only were they waving us through (hubby already smiling and calculating a savings of €11.95) but they handed us two bags of frozen fish…after consulting my French English dictionary I found that the fish was cod meaning not only had we saved over €11 today but we were up 24 fillets of frozen cod. Vive la France as they say!

Home sweet flatpack home

I have mentioned my fondness for Ikea and my nostalgia for Argos the catalogue store so you wont be surprised that I am excited about this new product which combines the flatpack-ness of Ikea and the fun of catalogue shopping at Argos.

Check it out! It’s a flat pack house and is available for sale at Argos!

Finally a place in London we might be able to afford. With the average house prices in our area well over £300,000 this 5 bedroom place (32 x 17 feet) for £13,000 with laminate flooring, in-floor heating, double glazed french doors and an attic for storage sounds positively fantastic.

From a construction point of view it apparently only takes 2 people to put together in one to two days with some cutting required…perfect! I’ve got me, my hubby, a pair of scissors, a free weekend coming up and an Argos around the corner. Hmm carrying the box home might be an issue however.

Source

OMG WTF are you saying?

On top of the many new words I have added to my vocabulary I have had to add a few acronyms.  Acronyms can be harder to figure out when someone says them in a sentence as with words you can usually get the gist of what they mean by the rest of the words they have said, with acronyms they could be talking about just about anything ie “Did you hear about that OAP that got an ASBO?”

OAP- old age pensioner (ie senior citizen) – generally used more in the news ie OAP’s play Wii games to get exercise, OAP sells heroin from his back garden, that sort of thing.

ASBO – anti social behaviour order – a warning given out (most often to minors and obscenely drunk people) for behaviour deemed ‘obstructive to society’ however it has more recently been adopted as a title for someone.  ‘Have you met Mary’s son?  He is terrible, such a little ASBO’ (sorry to any Mary’s reading this, I am sure your son is lovely)

WAG  – Wives and Girlfriends – used to describe a famous footballer’s “other half” ie Victoria Beckham is a WAG.  Often times the gossip mags prefer to follow around the WAGs versus the football players as they tend to lead quite glamours lifestyles.  There is also a lovely budding demographic of girls growing up as wannabe wags – forget university, I’m going to be a WAG! (Again for any educated WAGS out there reading this I am sorry to insult you, glad to hear you are beautiful, smart and involved with an athletic rich man  - b*tch)

A&E – accident and emergency – same as the emergency room or ER  - does not refer to the television channel in the US as I had originally thought.

EOP/COP – End of play or Close of play – one of those fab business speak words, you know like “thinking outside of the box”, I hate this acronym. It just looks dumb – type out the entire sentence you lazy a**es.

RSI- repetitive strain injury – you wouldn’t think you would use this one a lot but  you do find it comes up every once and a while.  They do not however use the American equivalent phrase of ’carpel tunnel syndrome’ as I asked a colleague if she had it as her wrist was sore and she looked at me in horror like I just asked her if she had an STD (which  for the record are called STI’s here (the I is for infections vs a D for disease – infection sounds much nicer dontcha think?)

Pretty sure I just filled up that section of your brain reserved for completely useless information….hey its partially your fault too, you could have stopped reading at anytime.  At least now if they have a British version of Jeopardy you can rock the acronym category….you can thank me later.

Got my ’sporin!

Thank you to the lovely Patrick for sending me some Polysporin….look at it in all its medicinal glory.  You can’t read it but that banner on the is drawing attention to it’s Heal Fast technology, great stuff, why let nature take its course when you can take advantage of Heal Fast technology!  I put it on last night and my hand is already much better (it was the polysporin or the fact the ‘accident’ happened over a week ago, my money is on the polysporin)

 

Anyway back to more of my rambles….I saw a sign on my way to work and thought it was kind of funny as it reminded me of something that would be on Jay Leno’s headlines on Tuesday nights.  That was my absolute favourite segment to watch on late night TV. For those of you not familiar Jay Leno is like Johnathan Ross but he has a headlines segment where viewers send in newspaper or magazine clippings that are either wrong, spelled incorrectly or are actually correct but really funny.   Video below shows some good ones…and below that, my kinda funny sign.

 

I don’t know much about law but I do know a little about marketing and if your name is Shaidy and your law firm is looking for a name, yours might not be the one I pick to represent the ‘& Co’.   I might just ask around to see if there were anyone else that was part of the & Co. that would volunteer.   Unless of course their aim is to actually provide Solicitors who don’t exactly work above the line -  in that case their name is brilliant!

The wheels on the bus

I did one of my favourite things this weekend and rode the bus around London in what I call the ‘tourist seats’.  These are the top front seats on the London double decker buses (no neither of those people in the picture are me). I highly recommend grabbing one of these seats (and hanging on tight) should you be visiting London anytime soon.  The seats give you the best view of London and are great fun.  Mainly because most of the bus drivers drive like Otto Mann (from the Simpsons) on speed but for some reason you have this (false) sense of secuirty being in this big red tank zooming through the streets.  Before you know it, you will be letting out a little ‘wheee’ when taking a corner at mock 10, on 2 wheels, aiming for an old lady/pram/tourist.

The other neat thing is that because the bus doesn’t have a proper front like a car or school bus you get this really strange sense that you are going to drive right into things in front of you. Its hard to get used to the fact that there is no engine in front so you can pull up within 3 inches of cars or other buses (sometimes 1 inch).  Its even better when you have a ‘late on the brakes’ driver that seems to be accelerating until they hit the 6 inch distance then slam on the brakes just in time…good times (and the faces of the true tourists in the tourist seats when this happens for the first time probably makes for amazing CCTV footage).

Besides feeling like you are on an inner city amusement park ride it can also prove to be a fairly useful journey as if you grab bus number 23 you can pass some of the key sites including St Pauls, Regent Street, Oxford Circus and Trafalger Square….all for £2 (or 90p if you get an oyster but that’s a tourist tip for another day).  Anyway even if you aren’t a tourist I highly recommend nabbing these seats to not only for the fun of clinging on for dear life but to remind you what a great city London really is.  I think sometimes after riding the tube at 2 layers above hell you can forget what a pretty spectacular places London really is (and before you all write, yes it can be dirty, stinky and crowded at times but you are immune to that when you sit in the tourist seats…try it if you don’t believe me).

Advertising works – especially for crap TV

I am fairly observant when it comes to marketing and am always intrigued by things that are advertised that I can’t immediately figure out what they are advertising.  When we first moved here, I was trying to figure out why there were huge eye shaped icons on billboards, clips on TV and in newspapers but no other copy, logos or decipherable images with the eye. I finally asked a colleague and they rolled their eyes saying oh that’s just an advertisement for Big Brother, it starts in a week. I hadn’t watched the American version but did know the gist but wasn’t too interested…that was until it started.

Big Brother isn’t just a TV show on over here, its almost a religion and like it or not, by the end pretty much everyone knows which contestants have hooked up, which person has said or done something controversial and which one is expected to win….the reason for this is that Big Brother somehow infects your brain. Probably because it is on TV every SINGLE night of the week for an hour and on one channel 24 hours a day for the entire 4 week season (although on a side note on the 24 hour channel you can’t always hear what they are saying as  whenever the contestants are talking about their family or a company brand name, the producers annoyingly play a tape of birds chirping and airplanes noises so you can’t hear what they are saying…took me ages to figure out that this was intentional and not that they had super crap microphones that kept picking up the noises around them). On top of the TV coverage, all the trashy papers and free papers seem to dedicate full sections to interview friends, ex lovers and parents of the contestants so you can get a true picture of these goons who choose to live their lives in front of the entire UK population.
Anyway it is quite an institution but I have to hand it to the marking dudes for the show as after seeing the image below flash on the tv screen for less than one second during a commercial break I am now aware that a new season is starting and have blogged about it, whether or not I watch it is yet to be seen but I can safely say I won’t be able to avoid it (who am I kidding, I’ll probably be watching the 24 hour channel trying desperately to lip read whilst they broadcast bird and airplane noises).

The walk of shame…

Before I get in to my ramble wanted to give you a quick update on my hand (cause I know you must be dying to know) anyway the silver plasters seem to be working really well, my hand is 10 times better today and actually looks like its healing. Apparently when I was a kid, i tripped and fell walking to school and skinned the side of my face (apparently it didnt’ occur to me to put my hands out to break the fall – brilliant).  The Dr was pretty sure this would scar but gave me some fancy dancy cream that was supposed to help heal and minimise scarring  – coincidentally the cream had silver in it and turned the scrape on my face a million different colours but it healed it all up with no visible scar. 

Just think, it only took them 13 years to figure out how to put this cream on the inside of a plaster whew…good thing these same guys weren’t responsible for computer technology or we would all still be clacking away at our Commodore 64’s hooked up to black and white TV’s

Anyway back to your regularly scheduled blah blah….

I can’t resist, I think this AMP energy drink commercial is hilarious as it revolves around the walk of shame phenomenon.  I have to say that being in this city full of 30 somethings whom regularly indulge in a few beverages, I have seen a few winkled suits and questionable outfits ‘the morning after’ on the tube in to work.  It is also hilarious on weekends as fancy dress parties (costume parties) are common here so we have seen a few Supermans, cats and nuns on the tube on a Sunday morning looking a bit rough (okay it may not be that strange to see a nun on a train on a Sunday morning but this one was a man)

Enjoy  – and if you have to ask what the walk of shame is you are either too young or too old for this particular post (but wikipedia can help you out should you need clarification)

 

 

I need some ’sporin

Okay so my running injury is looking a bit infected and goopy so I made a trip to Boots this morning to get some polysporin (or neosporin for your US readers or ‘triple antibiotic ointment’ for you store brand shoppers and for you UK readers ointment with antibiotics in it that you put on cuts and scrapes) . I was disappointed to find out however that UK pharmacies don’t carry antibiotic creams – they are only available by prescription….

Sorry? you want me to waste my time sitting in a GP office to show him my scraped hand so he can give me a prescription for something you can buy in thousands of pharmacies across Canada and the US? Forgive me as I am not a doctor but the majority of injuries antibiotic creams are used for would be little cuts and grazes from random MINOR household injuries, falling off a bike or being a sh*t runner. Don’t you think the NHS could benefit from having this cream available at pharmacies and keep the average-Joe-clumbsies our of their waiting rooms??

What I will do without my poly/neo sporin as I am missing out on triple infection protection against bacteria and 4x faster healing (who says marketing doesn’t work)? I did have a search through Boots’ ‘first aid’ aisle and found some super-fancy Elastoplast plasters (band-aids) with SILVER in them! The silver apparently kills harmful germs reducing the risk of infection….its no polysporin but they looked pretty so I bought it and will keep you posted.

If however I do contract some eczema-blue-goofus-of-the-honkus-tonkus infection from the London underground and have to have my hand amputated, I blame the NHS as I am sure a little antibiotic ointment on a plaster would have prevented it…in that case, I would be glad that they will have to pick up my surgery bill, serves them right!