Travelling by public transport is not compatible with Seeing Everything. Nor is housesitting. To do either successfully, you need to be flexible and not worry about missing out. Despite knowing this in our hearts, we tried to squeeze everything in anyway, resulting in an over-ambitious itinerary.
Our 8 weeks in the UK were split about half-half between housesits and paying our own way for accommodation. The latter was so that we could visit places like the Scottish Highlands, Devon, Cornwall, and the Yorkshire Dales. I don't regret those in the least, yet, if I could do it again, I would do housesits all the way through. They were by far the better experience.
Contrary to what well-meaning relatives will tell you, there is absolutely no need to bring "special" warm clothes. British charity shops are amazing and have all the clothes you could possibly need. Better still, you can simply give your coat, gloves, etc. away again when you no longer need them. Essentially you can rent suitable attire for just a few bob each.
In fact you should try to give away everything you packed because you will want to fill your luggage with books, BBC DVDs, plush toys, crumpets, clotted cream, biscuits, tea, etc.
-
A few words on the British diet. We are used to choosing from a wide variety of cooked hot food for all 3 meals. But the Brit eats only cornflakes or toast for lunch, a cold sandwich and crisps for lunch, with dinner being the only hot meal - even then, only a simple one-dish affair like lasagna or pizza. I admit I found this diet peculiar - why eat cold food when it's so cold outside? But one should leave all one's dietary expectations in Singapore.
London drinks coffee; the rest of Britain drinks tea. Everyone has a specific way they like their tea and would never dream of switching things up just for fun. Also, there is only one type of tea. Do not expect to find lapsang souchong, darjeeling, keemun, oolong, houjicha, or matcha in the typical Brit's cabinet. Loyalties are divided not among tea varieties but among brands such as Yorkshire, Typhoo, PG, Tetley, which sell essentially the same black tea blend. The adventurous Brit might drink earl grey now and then, and enquire if you have ever encountered this exotic blend in Singapore.
Pubs are for drinking and talking or maybe reading. Not for eating (except on Sundays) or using your smartphone.
To eat reasonably cheaply you will need to master the art of the Meal Deal. Go to any supermarket or Boots and picking a Main, a Side, and a Drink from the selections on offer; if you have made the right selections you will be entitled to the British prix fixe lunch. A particularly British accomplishment here is to acquire £8 worth of food for £3.50, but then you will most have to eat a cold meal on a freezing day. Feel free to spend the money you saved on a lotto ticket ("oh, go on then").
-
Do not leave the heating on all night; it will be "boiling" and your skin and throat will be leather when you wake up.
-
Oh, wait, there's more on food. Brits have a phobia of salty food, so you will need to add flavour to anything you order. Condiments - Hellman's mayonnaise, ketchup, and brown (often HP) sauce, salt, pepper, and malt vinegar - are an essential component of most meals.
-
"Fells" are hills and "Dales" are valleys. "Bens" are mountains and "Glens" are valleys. "Moors" are dry-ish wasteland and "Fens" are wet-ish wasteland.
My favourite British bird is the jackdaw followed by the magpie. British corvids come in many more varieties than here - the cutest sounding one is the chough, with its red beak, and the awesomest one is the mega-corvid raven. Ducks, geese, and poultry are also very fun to watch. We saw a pheasant once. Jon's favourite birds are ducks.
If you need to wee while on a walk, choose your toilet paper wisely. Moss good; stinging nettle bad.
Unless otherwise stated, the default vegetable in the UK is green peas. Which are not even a vegetable, but a legume (like beans).
Wear a wristwatch to keep track of time as you will hardly ever glance at your smartphone in the UK. No one does, except in the London-iest of London, and it feels weird to do so.
For that matter, the smartphone is useless in providing directions on nature rambles. You will need to buy an OS (Ordinance Survey) map instead and learn to read it. You can of course ask for directions from a British walker, but I have found them difficult to follow. "Walk up the hill then down again and then up slightly and then you have to go a little to the right and go round the bend and then you go down a slope and up again until you see a dog waste bin. But you're really close; it's only an hour's walk."
The British walk fast and drive slow. In Singapore we have it the wrong way round.
-
Dogs are welcome everywhere. At restaurants, on the train and bus, at B&Bs, at Travelodges. It's truly heartwarming to look at how people treat their dogs. Dogs are simply allowed to be. They are not leashed, are taken on extremely long walks, allowed to frolic in the sea, and always have balls to chase. Consequently almost all the dogs we met were extremely well-adjusted and not crazy from being pent up in an apartment all day, with only 15 minutes a day straining at the end of a leash, as in Singapore. You can tell a lot about a culture from their pets.
Same principles apply to cats and children. British parents treat their kids as wee individuals and actually seem to like hanging out with them. It is much healthier than, say, projecting all your unfulfilled dreams and expectations on your children and expecting them to bear this incredibly heavy psychic burden while you feel morally superior for having "sacrificed so much for your kids".
-
Houses! I could go on for ages about houses. But here is my sketch of the middle-class "2 up 2 down" British house. You open the door and there's a hallway with stairs going upstairs. The ground floor has a kitchen, a living room (w/ TV and trays for dinner), and a garden in the back. Upstairs there are 2 bedrooms (overcrowded with wardrobes and beds) and a toilet. An apartment - lacking the cheer of footsteps thumping up and down the staircase or the chance to sit topless in your backyard with a beer and a radio in the summer, languorous as a well-fed bee - does not feel quite like a home.
There is another type of house - the "second home" - found in picturesque country or seaside villages, driving property prices up and the local population onto the streets. During holidays the rich Tories (presumably) who own these hang out in their holiday homes. Those with less money emulate their betters by renting what's known as a "self-catering cottage" with their friends. But this habit of passing bank holiday weekends together with friends in the countryside strikes me as a very pleasant thing to do, if one has the means. It is a little hard to do this with a clear conscience, however, when you pass by a JobCentrePlus or a food bank in Cornwall and look at the locals in line. Wealth has a habit of stubbornly refusing to trickle down.
Personally, I think insulation makes or breaks a house in the UK. The romance of living in a restored vintage 16th-century farmhouse quickly dissipates when the wind blows; old houses are so drafty. Give me a modern soulless house in an en bloc development anytime, as long as the insulation is good.
Speaking of insulation, we stayed in a house made out of literal rubbish and it was surprisingly quite warm. This was in Brighton. Brighton's fortunes were reversed almost overnight, from a very poor fishing village into a spa town for wealthy Londoners, so it was built up hastily with a composite of "stuff lying around" embedded in lime (kinda like plaster). The material is called, pleasingly to the ear, "bungaroosh".
-
The British art of talking nonsense with strangers is one I greatly admire. It is customary, when you spend more than a minute occupying the same space as someone else, to throw in a few words about this and that (the weather, gossip about neighbours, Brexit).
Depending on how far from London you are, this bit of chit-chat may turn into a full-fledged conversation, and nobody really minds. Complete strangers sitting next to each other on the train to Leeds bare their hearts and talk about childhood memories, family background, and dreams for the future. A casual enquiry about canals in Birmingham turns into a political discussion about the British North-South divide. Of course, this is all outside of London. In London you do not talk to anyone on the Tube; the only acceptable place for bants is the pub.
In general I think the Brits do very well at creating their own entertainment. This is because, I imagine, they do not depend on the government or other institutions to spoon-feed them with organised outings or conducted tours or upskilling classes. All that's needed for a good day out is some sunshine, a park*, and some booze. And friends. There doesn't seem to be a need for an agenda or the People's Association or some Instagram cafe as a pretext for socialising.
(*it is worth noting that British parks, unlike ours, do not have fake meandering paths. Park users know how to meander all on their own!)
-
People living in the country really do see the world differently. Example: it's been raining heavily every day in Kent. Child of the air-conditioned nation that I am, I whinge about the rain ruining our plans. Our country-dwelling host counters that the rain has made all the flowers bloom, and the bluebell forests are spectacular this year. Such a small and unremarkable exchange to change my perception entirely!
I could not live in the countryside, however, because one is so dependent on cars there. In Jane Austen's day, I suppose you would walk or ride to the closest town to your village and shop and people-watch on the high street there. But today you'd simply drive to one of those "retail parks" that live just off major highways: clusters of Argos/Tesco/B&M Bargains/Aldi/etc. Each store is sprawling. It is overwhelming and exhausting, not to mention a waste of fuel. I would prefer to live in a village with 1 or 2 shops - like that minimart par excellence,
Tintagel Premier Stores.
-
Famous British Foods we tried: black pudding, bubble & squeak, kippers, cream tea, porridge, brown bread, mushy peas, treacle pudding, spotted dick, fish & chips in haddock/cod/plaice varieties, potato scallop (not to be confused w/ scalloped potatoes), roast beef sandwich, egg & cress sandwich, Cornish pasty, clotted cream, blackberry preserves, toad in the hole, Yorkshire pudding, scallywag, potato scone, Lorne sausage, haggis, neeps & tatties, hot-smoked salmon, sausage rolls, pickled eggs, pork pies, Sunday roast, and of course many many ales and ciders.
-
Millwall v. Luton Town remains one of the highlights of our trip. I have never voluntarily watched a football match - but the football isn't the point - the huge mass of yobs doing the international symbol for "wanker" in synchronised fashion and the unsportsmanlike songs were.
This is Millwall's theme song:
No one likes us
No one likes us
No one likes us
We don't care
Luton Town's song when a Millwall player was rolling around with an injury:
Time wasting at home
Time wasting at home
How fucking stupid
Time wasting at home
Why can't the Kallang Roar be more like this!?
-
It is nice to get old in Britain. The whole point of retiring is to spend your free time on hobbies and meeting up with friends and going on long country walks. Not to waste all your time at the polyclinic or watching MediaCorp or waiting for your children to call (they never do). Getting old in Singapore is pathetic because we have not spent our younger years doing anything but work work work and sacrificing everything for family. So when you get old it feels like your entire world has moved on without you - you are left behind with hardly any interests to pursue or friends to travel with.
When they reach retirement age, Brits, apart from receiving their pensions, also get a travel card so they can take buses around the country for free. London residents get something even better: a free Oyster card. To me this is not just a wonderful perk but also highly symbolic. You're retired - now go on and get out there! In Singapore our idea of "staying active in retirement" is simply to avoid retiring - just look at all the seniors doing pointless jobs like clearing tables or becoming a warm body for Certis Cisco.
By the way, there are pretty good part-time work options in Britain. We have met retired and semi-retired hosts with work arrangements like 2 mornings a week baking bread at Waitrose, 16 hours a week at the Royal Mail sorting office, paid gardening work once a week, running a B&B, etc.
Most people we met have a healthy attitude towards work though. They expect to find their jobs and colleagues reasonably enjoyable - not a torment to endure. You can tell people are generally relaxed at work; the police at the football match and security guards at 10 Downing Street are constantly chit-chatting and laughing among themselves. In Singapore the "security specialists" can only laugh during unpaid break-times.
-
I wish I had a neat and internet-friendly summary about our trip; unfortunately that is not how the mind works - the mind,
per Montaigne, "is like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to".
So I will end now with a small list of British things I miss:
1. Wetherspoon's - Britain's communal living room
2. BBC - why is the national media platform so much better than ours?
3. Groceries - washed, trimmed & prepared fruit and veg; ready-to-eat food - and all super cheap
4. Regional accents - "hullo my love" in a Northern lilt
5. Communal bookshelves at train stations and village centres
6. Very long walks with a pub at the end
7. Charity shops
For a travelogue of our 2-month UK trip, see:
Comments
Post a Comment