Written by Michael Claxton
For the third installment in this series based on my recent adventures in Britain, let me share my Top Ten Tips for Survival in the UK (Part One).
In no particular order:
Don’t mess with English Mustard. While shopping at Sainsbury’s, a popular English grocery chain, I made a fatal mistake in the condiment aisle. Even though I should have learned by this point in my life to pay attention to what I put in my shopping cart — especially after the taste-bud shock from those Vinegar and Salt potato chips I bought by mistake in 2003 — I blithely grabbed a jar of English mustard.
Later that week I was making a sandwich and slathered the mustard on in cracking American style (Would you like some turkey with your mustard, sir?). Then I took a huge bite.
“Crikey!” Or as Foghorn Leghorn would say, “Whoa, Nelly!”
I had always wondered what it would be like to be a fire-eater at the circus, and now I knew, since it turns out that the active ingredient in English mustard is butane. One of my friends prides himself on being impervious to any hot sauce that Mi Publito can offer, but I doubt that even this cheeky chap could handle the yellow kerosene that is spicy English mustard.
Be patient in the loo. It takes six to eight weeks to properly flush an English toilet, as the handles are a bit dodgy. Just so you know.
Be prepared for sink shrink. While I’m on the subject of English washrooms, you should be aware that the average British sink is about the size of those old porcelain spit-and-rinse basins that dentists used to use. When washing hands, expect that there will only be space to wash one finger at a time. But be grateful, as this thumb-to-pinky method ensures for a more thorough cleaning and may save you from swine flu. Just don’t count on being able to rinse out your long johns in there.
Embrace the scaffolding. Even though England is an extremely old country, they haven’t quite finished it yet. Everywhere tourists go, they can expect to see buildings covered with those familiar metal poles, wooden planks, and white tarps. Everything is currently under renovation, including the condiment aisle at Sainsbury’s. At York Minster, for example, we had hoped to see its famous Great East window, one of the finest works of stained glass from the 15th century. But it has been removed for a ten-year restoration project and has been replaced by—get this—a full-size color photocopy that took fourteen days to print. Eat your heart out, Kinko’s.
The job took so long because the window is the size of a Wimbledon court. That’s why it had to be repaired—several choir boys were playing tennis on it, and a Hail Mary smashed right through the panes. At any rate, because everything in Britain is so old, scaffolding is a fact of life there, much to the irritation of all the tourists whose cameras are not currently resting at the bottom of the Thames. I’m told that such work is going on constantly all over Europe. One of my students reported that the entire country of Belgium was closed for remodeling, which should be good news for the Waffle House.
Become a stair master. Though the British lead the world in so many areas—such as the number of famous writers who died of TB—there is one important discovery that has yet to catch on in Albion. The concept of the elevator (or, the “lift”) has so far eluded British engineers. As a result, there are stairs everywhere. In a crowded city like London, the only place to build is up, so most of the places you will need to go will be on the 9th floor of somewhere, and to make matters worse, the English don’t count the first floor as a floor. The second floor is the first floor, and the first floor is the ground floor. This fact adds insult to injury for those wheezing on level 16. Even the buses in England have two floors. Climbing stairs isn’t really my scene, but I actually lost 15 pounds doing it in London, though at least half of them may have been burned away by that one beastly pinch of mustard.
For more UK survival tips, old boy, look for my tuppence worth in a fortnight.
