Isn't Britain brilliant?
Anyone born on these ancient, Sceptred Isles will no doubt get all proud and misty-eyed when thinking about good old Blighty.
You're probably listening to 'God Save the Queen' in your head right now as you read this, aren't you? Or that rousing tune from the Hovis advert?
We invented the English language, we had an Empire on which the sun never set and we gave the world the steam engine, the lawnmower and the chocolate bar. And our football is the only true football.
We like cups of tea, crosswords, bacon sandwiches, darts, Ant and Dec, cricket, talking about the weather and, of course, we like our beer by the pints...and there's absolutely nothing quaint, weird or quirky about us.
Or so we thought.
One American woman, who worked in London for 10 months, has written a compendious list of all the bizarre things about British people and British culture for Vogue Magazine. You can read the full list
here, but we thought we'd throw together the best ones.
- British people do not use umbrellas, even though it rains every day.
- Everyone says sorry for everything; it’s often best to start any request or inquiry with "sorry . . ."
- If you’re walking and you have something you maybe want to throw away at any point in the near future (coffee cup, tissue), you should toss it the second you see a bin (garbage can) because there won’t be another one, ever.
- Crisps means potato chips and they have bizarre flavors like Bolognese and roast chicken (yes, roast chicken is an actual potato chip flavor here).
- English people wear winter coats starting on October 1 . . .
Christmas also starts on October 1 . . .
Also, they wouldn’t say October 1; they’d say, 1 October.
- Military time is very popular. If someone says to meet at 18:30, you will have to get out your calculator to deduce that they’d like to meet at 6:30 p.m.
- GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time, but nobody knows what that means.
- British people do not say "cheers" and tap glasses when drinking with friends. It’s apparently embarrassing and "American" to do so. They do, however, say "cheers" many times a day, but it means "thank you and goodbye".
We never had any idea we were so strange and idiosyncratic.
