Learning English: The UK

Driving on the left side of the road? I’ve done that, no problem.

Driving on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side of the car? Completely bass-akwards from the way we do it in the U.S.

Still, as my wife, Beverly and I prepared for two weeks in the United Kingdon, I wasn’t worried about driving. My brain was more concerned about two other things: haggis and the language.

Would I be brave enough to try haggis, and could I understand the language?

Before we get into the obvious - don’t they speak English?! - let me get haggis out of the way.

It’s delicious.

Yes, it’s ground up sheep parts. Lungs, hearts and liver, specifically. But I knew a guy in high school who worked for a hot dog manufacturer. He told me if I knew what went into hot dogs, I’d never touch another one, and I still eat hot dogs.

Don’t ask, I say. Just enjoy.

We cheated with haggis. While traditional haggis is stuffed in the sheep’s stomach, boiled and put on your plate, we first tasted it wrapped it in chicken, then wrapped that in bacon.

Oh yeah, it also was smothered in gravy. What’s not to love?

The haggis taste reminded me of a liver pâté, something I don’t eat much but don’t mind.

The second time we ate haggis, it was fried in a dough ball. Again, cheating. Again, tasty.

“Prepare to fry it, mates! The Southerners are coming!”

My concern for understanding the language came from the British show, Clarkson’s Farm, which features an Englishman with such a thick accent, I’m convinced he’s only on the show for his amusing, indiscernible British gibberish.

Understanding the Brits was a silly thing to be thinking about. Who doesn’t understand Mary Poppins?

We thoroughly enjoyed hearing the variations on the British accents all across the UK, especially the way the Highland Scottish roll their ‘r’s. Quite charming.

Certain nuances take some getting used to. We took tea with a lovely couple in Scotland who had just purchased a parcel of land from the juke.

When I made a serious inquiry into who the juke was, it turns out he was saying, ‘the duke.’

Cool back story on meeting this couple. We were trying to buy gas in a tiny Scottish town with only one gas station and no attendant.

This is where we learned UK gas pumps don’t like American credit cards. More on that in a moment.

Fortunately, a local gentleman who patiently waited as we tried to use all six of our credit cards had seen this play before and finally moved in, offering to fill us up. When I told him we had no cash to reimburse him, he said, “Consider it a gift.”

(Pro tip: Getting out into the rural areas of any country, including the U.S. without a little local currency is dumb. Don’t be dumb,)

After filling up our car, he and his wife invited us to tea at their house.

“I promise, we’re not weird,” he said.

The gift of gas, the offer of tea and not weird… how do you say no to that?

It was a lovely visit!

The problem at the pump: Americans don’t use PINs with our credit cards. The only place that was an issue was at the pump. If you’re gassing up at a station with a store, no problem because your card works fine inside. It simply does not work at the pump.

Scotland is lovely. If you have the guts to drive opposite of the way you’re used to, that is absolutely the way to go. It allows you to get off the main highways and see all the sheeps.

Yeah, sheeps is grammatically wrong but fun to say. And Scotland has sheeps everywhere.

A week into our journey, we picked up our friend, Brielle. The week we spent in Scotland, she spent in Ireland. Once we plucked her from a ferry on the coast of Scotland, we began a two-day backroads journey through the countryside of Wales.

The only complaint with our time in Wales is not allocating enough of it. Like Scotland, it’s lovely, I see return trips in our future!

This Welsch village took its 58-letter name to promote tourism. Given that, there is shockingly little merchandise available, but we bought the t-shirt.

Then it was on to London.

There were a lot of driving hours, so we killed time comparing notes on the cute new sayings we were picking up.

Somewhere in her journey, Brielle had picked the term ‘spend a penny,’ a polite British term for hitting the loo.

For the two years she had lived with us, bathroom breaks never really needed discussion, so we didn’t have a clever code. We do now.

‘Spend a penny’ was a great way to indicate it was time to take a break from the road and wee.

Yes, we heard ‘wee’ used in that context. But that word is most frequently used the way we use the phrase, ‘a little.’ And you hear it a lot.

A wee bit of your time, a wee bit more tea. Here a wee, there a wee, everywhere a wee wee.

Brielle uses her hand for comparison after ordering a wee bite of fish and chips.

Driving in London is a treat. In the same way colonoscopies are a treat.

You know you’re in for a good time when you plug a destination into your GPS and it reads:
4 MILES/34 MINUTES.

We arrived in London late at night. Our hotel did not have on-site parking, so we were given the address of a private parking lot to use. Beverly took the luggage to check in and prepare the libations, Brielle and I set out for the parking lot a half mile away.

Navigating a foreign city, about the best you can hope for when your GPS announces, “arrived!” is to look around and at least get a visual on your destination. In our case, the parking lot.

Didn’t happen.

Okay, let’s circle the block and try again.

The situation: There is this thing in London called the River Thames. It cuts right through the heart of the city. We were very near the river, so circling the block was crossing the river, finding a way to turn around, come back across the river and trying again.

I think I’ve read there are 35 bridges that cross the River Thames in London alone. Pretty sure, we hit 30 of them looking for that stupid parking lot.

Tower Bridge. Some internet searches show this as London Bridge. It is not.

Finally, we find it. We think.

There’s a guard station, a gate and a few cars. Problem is, the guard station appears to be empty, so this can’t be it. Let’s circle the block. Again.

I’ll spare you the River Thames repeat, but will say that by now the humor is starting to wear off.

Eventually, we wound up back at the same parking lot but catch a little break. The gate is raised and someone is pulling out.

I stopped in front of them to block their exit, and Brielle hops out to ask how they got in. Reporting back to me, she’s got this huge grin going.

“He said there was a bloke in the box when they came in.” The phrase amused her greatly.

‘The box’ is the guard house, really just a simple attendant shack. Brielle walks over to it and looks in.

“Yep, there’s a bloke in the box, but the bloke’s sound asleep.”

Tapping on the window woke the bloke in the box and he motioned us in without speaking.

Finally! We spent seven hours driving to London, one additional hour finding a parking lot a half mile from the hotel, and now all that was left of the day was a 15-minute walk back to the rooms.

And a really stiff drink!

As you might imagine, ‘bloke in the box’ became the phrase of the trip and got repeated a lot over our three-day stay in London. Bonus: I got to use it one more time in a real-life situation.

Since we walked everywhere we went, the car stayed put for our entire visit. Checking out, the blo… attendant… asked me for my ticket.

“I don’t have one,” I told him. “When we came in, the bloke in the box was asleep.”

It was a great trip. There’s a lot to see and enjoy in London.

Most enjoyable thing we saw? Tina Turner, The Musical.

My thanks to Beverly & Brielle for their help producing this tale.