Another expat Brit recently turned me on to Wikipedia’s List of British words not widely used in the USA. Now, other than perhaps queueing, there’s very little more likely to thrill me on a rainy day than a good, solid list with plenty of references and trivia, and I’ve spent the last couple of days devouring the whole thing.

There’s a handful of words in the list I hardly even recognise, such as “French letter” for a condom, or “jam sandwich” for a police car – although if it was speeding along I would be much more likely to use blues & twos than the USA’s awkward ‘lights & sirens’ or ‘code’. What is more surprising, however, is the sheer volume of words that I use on at least a weekly basis which have made it into this list and which I’ve recently ascertained a good portion of my American friends have no definition for. Perhaps this, rather than my Cardiff-English accent, explains the blank looks and non-sequitirs I get in response from them from time to time.

I’ve educated some closer friends on knackered and jumper (in the US, a sleeveless dress), and whilst other entries such as launderette and [five dollar] note sound a bit off, they’re close enough to be understood, but there are still a few which I had no idea are utterly baffling to folks over here. I found it amazing that strop is nearly unknown and that I would be completely incoherent were I to say that someone mincing around was a bit camp. Let’s examine a few more though:

If, feeling a bit peckish I put some petrol in my motor and popped off for a pukka hot pasty, no-one would think me a plonker, but things might go a bit pear-shaped if I asked for some Spotted Dick – they might think I was a bit of a ponce (not to be confused with a nonce). If I then suggested some toad in the hole, they’d probably think I was just another pisshead out on the razz and chuck me out into the street arse over tit.

The roads, though, can be a curious affair. If, just past the motorway, the flyover, or the dual carriageway you were to be waiting on the pavement under the Belisha beacons at a Zebra crossing, then Americans would think you were talking codswallop when you mentioned cats-eyes, sleeping policemen or suggested that, because of the roundabout, perhaps it would have been better to take the subway to cross the tarmac instead.

The bedroom could be an infinitely embarrassing source of confusion too, given the British predilection for social-awkwardness and the number of sexually-themed words appearing in our fine list. On the plus side (questions of chivalry aside), a Page 3 quality bird probably wouldn’t have the nous be upset if you called her a slag or a bint but, she might think you a bit twee if you asked her for a snog or tried to get her kit off. My mother reads this, so I won’t avail myself of the rest of the sexual entries, but I will just let my American friends know that blower, cack-handed and suck it and see wouldn’t have made it into this paragraph, whereas copping off and topping are indeed precursors to rogering some totty.

Honestly, I find it amazing I’ve ever managed to have a conversation over here.

Xx

After more than a month or so, I finally finished building our living room table. I’m, naturally, very proud of it, and obviously, ridiculously over-protective of what should be a very utilitarian object. I’ve discovered a love for place-mats that never existed in my heart before, and I’m even considering a tablecloth before hosting a house-warming party. The slide to middle age and a keen interest in home furnishings is, it would seem, inexorable.

At a glance, building a table seems like fairly easy work. One gets some wood from Home Depot, attaches some legs, and finds some intelligent way of connecting the two. Turns out though, there’s a few more steps than that involved. First up, the wood has to be sanded, roughly at first, and finely to finish, because no-one wants bits of splintered wood brushing against their arms or mixed into their food as they sit at the table. This, apparently, is an action best performed in the snow.

In addition to lacking resilience to the million dangers faced by a piece of household furniture that now cause me panic attacks when I think of them, a hunk of untreated wood also lacks some aesthetic appeal, and so the next stage is to give it some kind of lacquer. Polyurethane, originally used to coat airplanes in World War II and later the main feature of all-plastic cars that had some brief success in the 60s, is a man-made polymer. It’s robust, abrasion-resistant and lends a rich veneer to any wood it is applied on. Polyurethane suffers badly if overly exposed to UV light, or fire, and therefore is best ‘stored in a vacuum, in darkness, at a low and unvarying temperature‘. Well, quite.

Each coat (four atop, three below) took around 12 hours to dry and had a fantastically pungent smell that has happily dissipated.

This complete, the next job was to find some legs to suit the wood. I wanted a tall table, something at a comfortable height when standing, but which we could also eat off from some high barstools. Table legs over 30-something inches are pretty hard to come by, and stable ones which would support the weight of a table and its users harder again. My first pass was some adjustable desk legs from IKEA but, as you can see below, with some spare wood precariously balanced on a couple to find an ideal height, they were rather ugly and simply wouldn’t do:

So, I scoured the Internet. I failed to find any legs I wanted to buy, but I did come across a shop on Etsy by a craftsman selling custom-built tables with the old Eames-style hairpin legs on them. He fabricated the legs himself so, I asked, could I get some made at the scintillating height of 36″, and could I have them painted just the same shade of orange as my beloved bookcase? Well, he did a few experiments and determined that the legs were likely to be safe, and four weeks later I got a parcel from California within which were my beautiful new legs.

With everything now ready to be finished, I put some girls to work assembling the sweet, adjustable, rotating red barstools I’d gotten for a fraction of their usual cost from the wonderful Overstock.com, and commenced finalising the table.

The body of the table is plywood, which is made of layers (plies) of wood veneer glued together with the grain of adjacent plies at right angles, giving it a high degree of strength and durability. The notion of plywood has been around since Ancient Mesopotamia, but modern plywood was invented by Alfred Nobel’s father in the 19th century. Despite its many benefits, plywood suffers from having fairly ugly edges, where are the separate plies can be easily seen. Fortunately, I discovered a roll of wood veneer which could be wrapped right around the table edges, and with some careful staining, be indistinguishable from the main body of wood.

This had to be fairly painstakingly glued on to the table body, and once stained, had to be trimmed with a straight razor and a trimming knife to remove any remaining impurities and odd edges, but it was worth the work for the final result.

Careful readers will note the legs already attached in the above picture. It was a lot easier to trim those final edges with the table nicely raised off the ground. It took some time, and some fastidious measurements with the legs both off, and in-situ (supported by some canned goods and fruits) before attaching the legs…

…and revelling in the final product.

I’ve kept the straight razors from trimming the edges handy for the first person to spill a drink on my new table.

Xx

New York loves food. Every week I hear about some event with an unlikely combination of ingredients, and I’m on so many mailing lists by now that I think I could eat and drink my way to a heart attack just on samplers and tastings alone without spending a penny.

Now, New York may love food, and I do too, but the true way to my heart lies in coagulated caesin derivatives — cheese. This past Saturday was then, quite a treat, as a cheesemonger friend (the best kind of friend) kindly got me free entry to The Big Cheesy. Any food event in New York is going to be popular, but anything featuring cheese or bacon – and everything features bacon – is going to sell out quickly, and tickets for this event were snapped up within minutes of going online.

7 cheese shops – well, 6 cheese shops and a misguided entry from a sandwich place – were competing to offer NYC’s best grilled cheese sandwich, and the responsibility of judging their artisinal entries fell to myself and my fellow attendees. Some, including my overall favourite, Lucy’s Whey were confident enough to base their entries simply on a quality cheese with minimal trimmings, but others saw fit to go a bit further.

Above, we have an entry from Say Cheese in which the only cheese was Mascarpone, complemented with a Nutella & chocolate sauce served piping hot from a pipette on a brioche roll. Obviously, this was delicious. After everyone had filled up on cheese and cast their votes, there was still a line to get more of these. But it’s really not a grilled cheese sandwich, and so, couldn’t get my vote.

Other entrants also tried to tempt we judges away from considering the quality of the cheese with more bacon, shallot jam, bacon-crusted brioche, shots of tomato soup and other such novelties, but in the end my favourites were those who kept it simple. Some bread, a couple of light condiments, and beautiful, sticky, gooey cheeses that I feel I can still taste today.

I should have felt bad for the chefs who for two days spent 7 hours in that cheesey, smokey room cooking more than 600 sandwiches in a day, but it was hard to do anything but smile when so many people were clamouring to feed me these treats.

Finally, as mentioned, one entry came not from a cheese shop, but from ‘wichcraft, which has sandwich booths in some large tourist areas of New York. Votes were cast by throwing ping-pong balls into a container on one’s favourite stand. Here, at the end of the show, I might have felt a little bad, as they stood in the corner (bottom left), ignored, with a mere two votes, but when it comes to cheese, my heart is not soft.

The moral of this story then; don’t enter a cheese competition if you’re a sandwich chain. I think we can all learn something from that.

Xx

Up until a week ago, I hadn’t really known what Bocce was. A friend invited me to join his Bocce social sports league a few months back, but once I’d ascertained that it was a game played in a bar, I lost interest, as it’s the sports part of social sports leagues I prefer, as opposed to the endless drinking games with cheap American lagers.

Well, as apparently most Americans – and doubtless all Italians – know, Bocce (literally, ‘balls’) is just another name for a game in the Boules family, of which I’m most familiar with Pétanque and the superlatively English recreation of Lawn Bowls. This past Monday, I quickly learned the game and the differences between it and the others in its family with which I was more familiar, as I subbed in for a friend in that same social league, and brought with me two English lads who are visiting New York for the week, and hadn’t yet made it out to Brooklyn. And, after all, if you’re going to visit Brooklyn, it should always be to a dark bar with a showy leather-bound library and a semi-ironic, competitive sport on offer. They loved it.

Bocce is played with balls of a thick, dense plastic. The jack (known as the pallino) is thrown down the court, which is made of soil, asphalt, clay or another similar substance which has some give, but will quickly deaden a ball. Some degree of skill and luck is therefore needed, as every passage of a ball slightly alters the lie of the course, leading to unintended swerves, dips, accelerations and stops. Each team then, with play always to the team without the nearest ball to the pallino, aims to get as close to this as possible, with points at the end awarded for each of the closest team’s balls that is closer to the jack than the closest ball of the other team.

As a player, I’m much more used to Pétanque, the French variant of the game in which striped metal balls are thrown after the wooden cochonnet (literally, ‘piglet’). This is generally played on gravel, dirt or beaches, and has the same aims as Bocce, but quite different dynamics due to the differing surfaces and balls. On venturing out to Bryant Park this past Sunday, the day before my début in Bocce, I discovered some old gentlemen enjoying the beginnings of spring with a game at some previously unnoticed Pétanque courts there. I passed a sedate couple of hours in the leafy, sunny tranquillity watching these gentlemen of leisure effortlessly excelling at the sport and enjoying eachother’s company, and along with my friend, inventing their backstories and player profiles.

People often say that you need a 3-year or 5-year plan. I’m normally not much for plans beyond say, about 7pm on the same day, but I do have one overarching goal in my life that I want to achieve. It is my dream, my resolution, and my firm plan, to become an old man, and I really think it’s an achievable aim. I look forward with all my heart to the day when I can wake up, put on some slippers, have some tea, complain a bit about things (without reproach), eat a spot of lunch, meet some friends for a drink, some fishing or some boules, and then go to bed early whilst listening to some classic music. The elderly have spent all their lives running around, working hard and going out partying. They know all that has to offer, and they instead make an informed choice of a cup of tea and some slippers. Who am I, with my fragment of their life experience, to argue with that conclusion?

For now though, I’ll just practise my tea making skills and my Pétanque, and keep an eye out for some good slippers.

Xx

For the past 9 months, a saccharine war has raged on the billboards, subway adverts, newspapers and televisions in New York. On the one hand stands the office of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and against him stand the temporarily united forces of Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola and Dr. Pepper Snapple, along with various bars, cinemas and other businesses that would stand to lose some profits. Having worked in many such establishments, and seen quite how many pints of cola can be made from a single $50 box of syrup, I can tell you there’s a lot at stake for them.

In the last year, Mike had a dream that no New Yorker would go out and consume any sugary beverage over 16oz. For those of you who don’t measure liquids by the weight they’d have if they were made of pure water (go America), that translates to 473ml, which is exactly one American pint, and is a bit short of a British pint. This doesn’t prevent refills, and still allows for supermarket shoppers to pick up 2L bottles, so it seemed quite bizarre to me that anyone would actually feel a pinch at this rather light legislation. After all, in France, Britain, Japan and Brazil (at least) a ‘large soda’, as defined by McDonalds, is about half the size of their ‘large soda’ in the USA, at around 450ml as opposed to 30oz (887 ml).

This isn’t Bloomberg’s first health kick. NYC was one of the first cities to ban indoor smoking, and in 2011 added most public outdoor spaces to that too. He pushed through the first law requiring fast-food restaurants to display calorie counts, which is now a federal law for any chains, and can be horrifically scary if you venture into say, KFC. He also banned trans-fats in restaurants and is looking at cutting back on sodium too.

Maybe thanks to Bloomberg, maybe thanks to continuous immigration from healthier places, or maybe just because they’re always so busy and don’t have cars, New Yorkers are already a healthy bunch. The average New Yorker, whilst maybe somewhat bigger than an average European or South American, is a generally fit and slim individual by American standards. A walk down the street shows nothing like the ~30% obesity rate that is generally given as the average for an American adult. My Portuguese teacher recently told me that she was surprised people were so thin when she moved here, after growing up seeing American TV and tourists. “Thinner than in Brazil?” I asked. She didn’t stop laughing for a good few minutes.

Bloomberg began with a campaign “Are You Pouring On The Pounds” which showed as graphically as possible just how much sugar is in one bottle of soda, iced tea, or even ‘Vitamin water’ and so on. Some of them were quite sickening, some wonderfully enlightening and none of them really felt too far from the truth. It worked, too, I went from the occasional fizzy drink to drinking nearly nothing but water, tea and fresh fruit juices.

Not generally having access to TV, it was only very recently I saw that campaign at a friend’s house. In the ad I saw, three friends sit at a bar, two ordering a ‘cola’ and the third sitting there eating his way through sixteen packets of sugar. “You wouldn’t do this”, ends the advert, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the IT Crowd’s anti-piracy parody.

One major difference I’ve noticed about American advertising is that it’s very confrontational. Rather than a simple ‘enjoy our product’, advertisers are happy to call out their competitors by name and make hilariously selective point-by-point comparisons in the areas in which they have an advantage. In much the same style, the drinks companies quickly fought back with some very directed adverts of their own, such as the “Don’t let bureaucrats tell you what to drink” campaign. This, unfortunately, didn’t quite have the same impact because, let’s face it, it’s a pretty hard case to argue on the actual health merits being called into question.

That’s not to say it’s only rich companies arguing the point though. The papers today are full of quotes from ‘real New Yorkers’ in favour of choice, and in Mississippi, the state with the highest obesity rate of all, they’re going one step further. Not just content with avoiding having hippies like Mike Bloomberg (who is, lest we forget, number 13 on the Forbes Rich List), they’re actually looking to proactively pass laws protecting gluttonous consumption.

There may not be any need though. Today it was ruled that Bloomberg’s latest soda law will not pass because it is overly arbitrary, given the loopholes needed to prevent NYC stepping outside of its jurisdiction. So, it seems that for now, the great state of Mississippi, the obese activists in New York and soft-drinks companies are – per the American Dream – free.

The ruling “serves as a major blow to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s incessant finger-wagging,” said J. Justin Wilson at the Center for Consumer Freedom, created by restaurants and food companies. “The court confirmed what most New Yorkers already know: They don’t need a government regulator to dictate their diet choices. New Yorkers should celebrate this victory by taking a big gulp of freedom.”
~Associated Press

The large Big Gulp sold by 7-11 was recently reduced in size to a mere 50oz (1.5 litres). America, Freedom, Liberty…Fuck Yeah.

Xx