The Ultimate

I’m still noticing differences in our cultures on a regular basis, I’m just not making as big a deal out of them lately. They are so ubiquitous that, to make note of them all would be tedious.

However, a few notables have cropped up recently:

They don’t use return address here in the UK. I used to think it was just a quirk of this family, but now that I’m getting cards and letters from other UK residents and businesses, I see that the return address is habitually omitted.

This has caused some difficulties. One letter I received had such poor penmanship (worse, even, than mine) that I could not read it, nor could I make out the signature. I had no idea who it was from until I managed to decipher a few key phrases which lead me to suspect a specific individual.

But aside from personal inconvenience, what does the Royal Mail do when they can’t deliver a message? I envision a huge bin of undeliverable mail with no return addresses and a growing group of people sitting around wondering why uncle Harry never thanked them for the birthday card with the £50 note in it.

One thing that the Brits do that we in the US do not do is use the plastic bars designed to separate your groceries from the groceries of the people in front of and behind you at the supermarket check-out. We have them in the US, we just, in general, don't use them.

Here in the UK, they are always used--it’s like a religion. I hadn’t noticed this until we were in the US together and my wife continually placed the separator on the check-out counter while most everyone else simply left a little space between the piles of groceries.

It also seems that the Brits do more than drive on the left side of the road--they also zip up jackets from the left. I recently bought a nice waterproof jacket (you need one here, really) and noticed it was a bit awkward trying to zip it up.

I compared it to my American jacket and, sure enough, the zipper mechanism (I’m sure there’s a name for it--it’s the little metal do-dad with the tab on it that you pull to zip your jacket up) was on the left side, not the right. I checked other UK jackets and they also zipped on the left. Just how many things can be backwards in this county?

The ultimate, however, did not involve any specific item, but still highlighted the gulf between our cultures. Last night, the family watched a show which took place in the North Country. After enduring 10 minutes of me asking “What did he say? What did he say?” they turned on the Subtitles option.

I actually watched an entire TV show, supposedly in English, relying on the subtitles to let me know what was going on.

And they claim we speak the same language.

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