Nations Divided

Dividing my time as I do between Europe and North America I am constantly reminded of the wisdom of the phrase 'Britain and America, two nations divided by a common language.' I don't know who coined it but he certainly knew his onions. When we first travel to the colonies we are armed with a few well chosen examples, usually of the fast food variety. We know that our chips are French Fries and that their chips are crisps. They don't have a crisps. We know that our sweets are their candy and they don't have a sweets. We have a candy, but it's floss that they call cotton which is interesting because that's what they make floss from. For your teeth. They call biscuits, cookies which we try to clear from our computers, to be on the safe side, when we are getting rid of our search histories before the wife comes home. You've just got that straight when, driving through the Mid-West you will see a sign for biscuits and gravy. Being of an inquisitive nature and trying to get everything sorted, you drop in and order a plate to find out just what these biscuits are. When you've got over the fact that the gravy, far from being a deep brown, red wine jus to adorn a traditional English Roast is in fact a paste with the colour and consistency of phlegm, you discover that a biscuit is in fact a scone which has no business being under sputum, whether it is masquerading as gravy or not.

While talking of food, a word to the wise. When visiting a Canadian cafe be very careful when ordering a 'breakfast crepe', because while there's nothing you could actually do them for under the trades descriptions act, except maybe the lettuce which has no place in any breakfast, they are a little scattergun in their approach. While eggs, dry cured bacon and maple syrup are all technically breakfast food, taken all together they have a taste it needs a certain culinary abandon to acquire.

It's surprising how often these differences can have a certain sexual frisson. While shopping in New York some years ago I asked the cab driver if I could put something in his boot. After a quick glance to his footwear he eyeballed me as if I were a burlesque transvestite. I have made similar errors. Recently while being fitted for a suit in Canada the tailor asked me if I would put on suspenders. Now I'm as racy as the next man but I keep it for the home, not bespoke clothes shops in the suburbs of Toronto. I should have known that one because I once went to a gentleman's outfitters in LA and asked for some braces only to be directed to the Dentist.

Australia can also prove a little treacherous in this department. I was once on a beach in Sydney when I saw a girl searching the sand. Asking if I could help, she told me she'd lost a thong. I enthusiastically joined in the search, this being one of my favourite articles of a woman's attire. I soon discovered she meant a flip flop. Which is not.

In the late seventies when I first went to New York I was still a smoker and finding myself without cigarettes at a posh do on the Upper West Side I asked the host if I could 'bum a fag'. I found myself, minutes later, on the street, in the pouring rain, thinking how brittle these people were. While we are in a homo-erotic vein, I still sometimes take the long way round so I can pass a gay sex shop in West Hollywood that has the glorious neon sign in the window declaring 'Parking in Rear". Childish I know, but I am more to be pitied than censured.

There is a story some years back of a group of young Irishmen on the tear in New York sporting green T-shirts emblazoned with the legend 'Tommy's stag weekend. In New York and looking for crack' they were arrested and thrown in Jail. This is probably apocriphal but I hope not. A problem I have had in New York is perhaps more to do with the US education system than anything else. It has happened that on more than one occasion I have been ordering meats from a Deli and will ask for, amongst other things, a couple of slices of mortadella or pastrami or what have you. When going to the counter to pay, the person serving has said something like... "You said a couple, so I gave you three. Is that alright?" New York friends have tried to persuade me that 'a couple' has a less rigid interpretation on the Eastern Seaboard but does that mean I am missing a certain libertarian undercurrent when at American weddings we toast the happy couple?

Often, of course, American usage is more English than the English, being a vestigial remnant of the Elizabethan tongue they took with them. Fall, for autumn, being the most obvious example. But the line must be drawn somewhere and I suggest it is their appropriation of the word Football. You see my contention is that our game, that they refer to as soccer, is a game... played with a ball... using mainly the feet! Employing the same linguistic standards, their game should be called Chuck-crunch-ball. But I am a lone voice.

Finally a friend of mine from Los Angeles' Compton district called a while back to ask if I would like to come and see his 'Sick whip'. Unsure if his dog was under the weather or he was asking me to see a particularly degenerate new sex toy I drove down. Turns out it was a brand new expensive motor car.

Now that's wicked.