Spring ahead fall behind

Today we set our clocks back an hour and when discussing it with some Brits on Saturday night I recited the ’spring ahead fall behind’ rhyme to them as they were saying they could never remember which way the clocks went…I was met with blank stares as they dont call this season Fall here so falling behind didnt seem to make much sense.

Fall is something that leaves do off of trees or drunk people do to the tracks on the tube every so often (often enough that they have posters in the tube warning you of the dangers of falling on the tracks)   The season here is called Autumn which sounds more posh than fall – the more I think about it, fall is a bit of a weird word to use to describe a season. ‘Its a nice fall day’  – to those used to using the word autumn sound more like a pleasant day to hurt yourself versus a day to jump in a pile of leaves.

Above and beyond the use of Autumn for the season I have also heard the word autumnal (ah-tom-null) used more than I ever thought I would hear a word which means autumn like or has characteristics of autumn. This dish is made of autumnal vegetables  or the weather feels very autumnal.  When I needed something to explain fall characteristics I would just say fall-like ie ‘its a fall like day out there today’.  Which admittedly sounds like I am a teenager who over uses the word ‘like’ um like its cold and like fall-like outside.

Regardless, I successfully changed my clocks back and enjoyed a very autumnal day – although it was gorgeous and sunny here and warm enough to be out without a coat which felt more spring-like or springtumnal.

How do you draw with a pin?

Was at a comedy show the other day and the guy was talking about a drawing pin….wont even let you know what I thought he was talking about but it might have included a dual function pencil and pin which I thought was a great idea until I realised that if the pencil  bit got dull it probably wouldn’t hold much up…anyway I googled it and the internet saved me again.

Just to clarify, it means thumbtack, not 'Chiefly British'

Just when I thought I was getting a hang of the English vocabulary….

I am beginning to think that on job applications, when I say I am fluent in English that I should actually point out that it is Canadian English and put quotation marks around it so they don’t have their expectations up too high when they meet me.

Fluent in ‘Canadian English’.

WTF? Friday

So I was sitting here reading the morning gossip news and I heard some really loud ‘coo-ing’ and a rustling noise coming from our spare room. I walked in to see this guy standing on the window sill (it usually isn’t littered with paint pots and screwdrivers I promise).

I was a bit nervous that he would start flying around the room but he just casually walked in and out of the window a few times not phased by me at all.

This illustrates another thing that the Brits don’t use…window screens! We have been in many of our friends flats and not one of them has screens…nor do they seem to want them. Now, the North American in me assumed that if you didn’t have screens giant mutant bugs would invade your house and eat you in your sleep.  So far, that hasnt’ happened and besides a giant pigeon, we haven’t had anything bigger than a house fly buzzing around so I am okay with that.  Although, I have to wonder that if the pigeon did dive bomb at my head this morning, I would be singing a different tune on the screen issue.

What’s for pudding?

One of the ‘delicacies’ I often smuggle back to the UK with me after a is chocolate pudding (Jell-O brand, has to be Jell-O brand). The lost in translation moment came when I told a friend here that I made one of these puddings. The conversation went like this:

Me: I made pudding the other night
UK Friend: what did you make for pudding?
Me: for pudding?
UK Friend: Yes, what kind of pudding?
Me: Chocolate
UK Friend: Chocolate what?
Me: Pudding
UK Friend: hunh?

I finally remembered that someone had told me that pudding over here actually means ‘dessert’ (of course it does, why wouldn’t it?)

When you go to a restaurant there is often a ‘pudding’ section and the waiter will ask ‘can I get you something for pudding’ which sounds just ridiculous. Even better still,  I was watching a cooking show and they shortened it and said “…and for ‘pud’ we are making apple crumble”…as if pudding wasn’t a stupid enough word they had to shorten it to pud.

Amazing…I went to find an example online of a menu that used the word ‘Pudding’ and found one that uses ‘fortnightly‘ and ‘pudding’, too bad they couldn’t have thrown in penultimate somewhere and it would have been a perfectly English sentence.

Fish and chips and pillows?

Why don’t they have plain white vinegar here….well they have vinegar here, malt vinegar, white wine vinegar, rice vinegar but not plain white vinegar.

I need it for two reasons…

1. It goes in both of my favourite summer salads (pasta and broccoli) and the only reason I haven’t made them in 3.5 years is because I can’t find the right vinegar (and has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I haven’t really made anything in the past 3.5 years that wasn’t pre packaged, cooked, seasoned etc)
2. Its good at cleaning and disinfecting stuff and is cheap…I think at home you could get 5 gallons for 25 cents or something like that.  The reason this has come up is because I bought these pillows that you can wash in your washing machine and they suggested putting a bit of vinegar in the wash to kill the dust mites …now I am terrified of dust mites and want them all dead so need vinegar (but am happy to resort to bleach if I have to)

The wrong vinegar...for both my salad and my pillows

I have checked everywhere for my familiar white vinegar….well everywhere being our three major grocery chains and they don’t have it so that leads me to believe that white vinegar is something of a North American phenomenon. I did read that some people use malt vinegar and newspaper to clean their windows in the UK so is malt the equivalent to white vinegar? Could I really wash my pillows in malt vinegar?  I fear the hubby will wake up craving fish and chips if I do that….

How fancy…

Over here they have this fantastic phenomenon called ‘fancy dress parties’.  When I first heard of these parties, I assumed you would dress up as you would do for a black tie event…ie your fancy clothes, hence the name fancy dress. Good thing I wasn’t invited to one of these before confirming as this is not the case…  Fancy dress here essentially is a ‘costume’ therefore a fancy dress party is a costume party – of which they seem to be big fans of.

Themes range from dressing as a particular decade, dressing in something that starts with a particular letter of the alphabet,  dressing up as dead authors to dressing up as your favourite London tube station.  We have been to a few since we got here with the most recent being  last night with a  ‘beach ball’ theme meaning you could go beachy or go as if you were going to a ball (or both)…I went for the tacky retired Floridian (sorry Mom and Dad) with a big hat, beach wrap with parrots all over it and butterfly jewellery.  The hubby went for a Bermuda look with shorts with a blazer, shorts, leather loafers and socks to the knees.

The best bit about the prevalence of said parties is that you will often be on the tube when on walks someone dressed as a nun, school girl, punk rocker and no one really flinches…however to be fair, in London I guess they could be real nuns, school girls or a dude with a real mohawk.  I am keen to throw a Canadian themed party this year and see how may people come dressed as hockey players or mounties….you won’t find too many of those on the tube.

Happy Mother’s Day

Happy Mothers Day Mom!

(As I mentioned, Canada and the UK do not share the same Mothers Day nor do they share the same spelling as my UK spell check has nicely suggested I change every instance of Mom to Mum….)

Since I am not sure my card will have arrived in time (oops) I thought I would peruse my favourite e-card site to see what they had for the occasion.  This site is fantastic if you have a snarky sarcastic sense of humour (like me) and is called someecards.com.  Mom, I thought you would like these two cause they are both very very true…(have a good day and I will skype you later )

Eating your words

I figured out fairly quickly after moving here that I don’t sound like everyone else. We were at the tower of London getting a group tour by a real live Beefeater. At one point he looked at me and said ‘Where are you from” to which I replied, “Toronno”, he said “Where?”, I repeated “Toronno, Canada”. At which point he said (very loudly in front of the group in his bellow-y English accent) “…oooooh you mean ToronTOE”…okay point taken I don’t enunciate, we, as a nation, fail to enunciate (ever been to Wadderloo?)

Since then I have been of the opinion that since the English invented the language, I don’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to pronunciation. As such, I have adopted a terrible Eng-adian accent combining the two languages. There is one word however that drives me nuts and I want to drag that Beefeater around London with me and personally ridicule people who say this word….

The word is ‘et’ pronounced like bet without the ‘B’…and this word is used by the English when they mean to say ate (pronounced like the number eight) – the past tense of ‘to eat’. I was watching television last night and the announcer actually said ‘When you ‘et’ that, how did it taste?

Seriously….I can understand me being lazy and thus receiving an English lesson from a Beefeater but what is the excuse for bastardising one perfectly fine word, ate, and turning it into a short cough sounding word that certainly shouldn’t be regarded as being part of the English language..Come on people, can you please stop, I have taken the D’s out of Toronto, can you put the ‘eh’ back into ‘ate’?

Happy St Patrick’s Day

So it’s St Patrick’s day…a day to head to the pub for a pint of green beer. If you are Canadian/American you are nodding your head thinking back to previous St Patrick’s Days when you were in the bar watching the bartender drop a few drops of green food colouring into your pint or at the fancier pubs when they actually had a thing-a-ma-jig that dispensed green food colouring automatically as the pint was being pulled.

If you aren’t Canadian you probably think I am nuts as I recently found out that in fact they don’t drink green beer here or in Ireland.

We were chatting with some friends…one whom is actually Irish, and the topic of St Patrick’s day came up to which I exclaimed oooh we will have to go out for some green beer this year as I haven’t been out on a St Patrick’s day in London yet…at which point the conversation stopped and I was met with the same silence as I did when I made my milk comment a few weeks back.  I then explained that in Canada we make the beer turns green on St Patrick’s day and that I assumed we stole said tradition from the Irish…evidently not as neither the English or Irish constituents in the group had consumed green beer.
Based on the looks I got on the tube this morning I don’t think they dress up like leprechauns and say ‘top of the mornin’ to ya’ either… (just kidding about that last bit I really didn’t’ dress up as a leprechaun but I am really not sure if it will feel like St Patrick’s day if I am at the pub drinking regular coloured beer!)

Pancake Day

Today is pancake day…or as I pointed out..it should be called lemony crepe day as their pancakes aren’t what Aunt Jemima used to make.  They are thin and generally served as a dessert, and somehow lemon is included in the mix as per the display below.

Also  in this display are eggs (the box on the right marked Woodland) …and the weird bit about this is that this display is in the middle of the grocery store…not refridgerated.

Yes, they don’t refrigerate eggs here…which did confuse me when I first looked for eggs in a grocery store as I hadn’t thought to look on the shelf near the flour!  Evidently eggs actually do not need to be refridgerated (evidence of that is that we haven’t died yet and have consumed quite a few eggs here).  Although it does still seem wrong to me as I assumed eggs needed to be refridgerated or they would go bad or something . At home I probably would have thrown out a carton of eggs if I had forgotten to refridgerate them.  It’s a hard habit to break (pardon the pun) as when I buy eggs I do still stick them in the fridge just in case…