A little tea, a little chat

Things this book doesn't explain about England.


(1) Fishfingers in a white bread roll. Not so much that they exist as they pass for nutrition.

(2) First class on trains being quite often cheaper than economy.

(3) The help I get in the Underground with my bag. And yet my niece with her baby in a pram gets not a finger lifted to her. Stephen says it is because my bag is bigger than I am. Luton, which is full of sweet men who take charge. Not once have I asked for help, it is just given.

(4) Why Birmingham Big Macs are killers.

(5) How food can be so bad in the UK that Wagamama looks good. So when they ask what you think of it, it is difficult to come up with a good answer. In Australia we think it is complete rubbish, no different from eating at MacDonalds. And yet I can see in the UK it might be haute cuisine. The people you are with think it is mmmmmm good. That good.

(6) Why are the chips SO fantastic?

(7) Why are there so many fabulous local cheeses? Right now I'm just addicted to Yarg.

(8) Why are people so badly dressed? On average. Even in nice bits of London.

(9) Why do people want to stay in odd hotels where nothing works?

(10) I take my bowl of breakfast outside to walk around the garden in naked feet - I know I should say 'bare' but I have sex on the brain just now - and after a while I realise my feet are freezing and upon further thought I realise the GROUND is frozen. Literally. That's never happened to me before. I think this book could have explained that too.

(11) Cluedo. I've just had my brains beaten in at Cluedo. It's HARD. About to start play against a world class bridge team online and that feels like it is going to be so easy in comparison. And I have a tip: never play Cluedo with computational algorithmists.

(12) I'm sitting on the bus tonight and this girl across the aisle, lambasting what I imagine to be a stranger opposite her: 'They say we aren't normal just because we aren't normal. Ha. It's the ones who aren't normal who are normal.' And, swept along with the momentum of her argument 'It's the ones who are normal who aren't normal. They're the abnormal ones.' Her logic was beginning to sound impeccable to me, though it was making my head hurt. She somehow segued into how she was fine-tuning her medication at the moment and I reminded myself not to ask her what I should be taking for my headache.

A little while later a woman comes up to me and asks me anxiously if I'm a doctor and when I say 'no' she sits down like she was specifically looking for somebody who wasn't. She starts telling me about how she's been in hospital all day and she hasn't had any water for 10 hours and did I know what that does to you? Well, she was talking to the wrong doctor. I don't believe in water. Her idea that her insanity revolved around having had slightly less water than the other people in the bus just didn't do it for me.

It was time to get off.

Manchester. Full of insane people, maybe? I'm starting to wonder.

(13) Now that Manny has mentioned the Australian connection. I'm walking down Wilmslow Road and an Englishman stops me. 'Where is the Victoria Hotel?' he wanted to know. So I say I'm from Australia, which as explanations of ignorance go, didn't get me very far at all. 'If you are from Australia,' he said, 'You should know where all the pubs are, shouldn't you.' It was an accusation, not a question. As it happens, while (12) was happening to me and I was staring out the window trying to be somewhere else, I did discover the very pub. Next time I'll be prepared.



(14)I was very little when I read 1066. I wish I could have known this. That much later we would sit one dark evening on a bench just outside the Tower of London, cold and dark, so nobody is about and your arm is around me and it is like magic. 'Just imagine', I whisper to you, 'that you are up there, trapped in that tower, unable to get out, unable to see me.' We look and picture this. 'And outside, so near by, looking up towards you right here I would be, full of despair at our predicament but hopeful still that some plan will get you out of there.' I rather think the Tower of London should be seen how we saw it. Alone and dark, evoking the danger and sadness and heroes and betrayal that are its past.




(15) I’m somewhere between gutted and laughing my head off. All illusions about 1066 are now completely shattered as I’ve been here:



It’s Slade Hall and I’ve never been to a Hall before and Mandy was thinking of buying it, so I went along to pick out my bedroom and bathroom of which it has 14 and 7 respectively, and I’m gutted. You think it looks good there, don’t you? And it has this fabulous history going all the way back to 1160 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slade_Hall

But honestly, it’s this dreadful dive. It must have been truly horrible being poor if this is how the rich people lived, that’s all I can say. I thought there’d be grand rooms for banquets and balls and – but all the rooms are small squalid little things. The fireplaces are 1970s copper. Do you have Copper Art here in the UK? If so, yep, exactly.

And that picture, talk about photoshopping. To the right of the main door quite a lot of that black and white façade is rotting and falling off. It’s redwood and it’s only been there 5 years. Or so Mike, the caretaker said. And look further to the right and some of it is painted cement!! I had no idea cement was such an old invention in England. Honestly.

Mike is the caretaker and I have now met somebody who actually uses ‘Y’know wot I mean?’ instead of punctuation. Brilliant. We are standing looking at that view in the photo and he invites us to look at the stumps of trees to each side of the front door – which you can see in the picture above. They were a glorious feature. But when the councilmen came a while ago to deal with a tree that was messing big time with the gutters – ie a tree that shed leaves – what they did was cut down these two beautiful conifers. “’We know our job’ (– Mike quotes them –) y’know wot I mean?” I’m wondering why the real estate agent’s picture didn’t photoshop the trees back in.

So we’re standing there and truly you have seen by far and away the best of this building, the crumbling façade and the ruined trees and I thought we’d be making the grand entrance through that front door but ‘We’ll use the side entrance. The students stopped using the front entrance because the key’s about 2 foot long. Y’know…’

Yes, ladies and gentleman. We are in student heaven. The reason the trees are all covered in dramatic cobwebs I realise is not because the Queensland Maneating spider has been imported to this neck of Manchester but because of Halloween. There was a bit of a party that night. Just 500 or so.

Fourteen rooms of students (as Mike always calls them, y’know wot I mean?) and, well, it is quite an interesting situation. The students have no intention of showing us any of the bedrooms since they love the place. And I really mean love it. This is an ad for rooms that is current: http://manchester.gumtree.com/manchester/93/67629193.html

Four nice rooms available in Slade Hall, the oldest house in Manchester. The rooms are in the Annexe, which is a more recent addition, though both the houses mix together and all communal areas are shared between everyone. The Annexe has just been refurbished, so all walls are freshly painted, new flooring, etc.

House is an eclectic mix of artists, musicians, djs, students, hippies, and general laid back people who enjoy everything from reggae to football. We are looking for four new housemates to be our friends rather than just housemates. We enjoy camping, adventures, sitting round the fire in the garden, brewing beer, music and other fun stuff :) Everyone is usually busy in the week with work, but we enjoy the weekends. Must love music :)

Slade Hall is a big old Tudor mansion, bit wonky and creaky but full of life and character. It's separated into two houses with ten people in the main house and five in the annexe when full up. Both houses have got communal living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, showers, piano, etc.

We have an Ultra super massive garden with space to grow vegetables and secret wooded area/secret garden, swings, hammocks, football/frisbee pitch, BBQ, shelter/outdoor living area, lots of trees, birds, butterflies.

We are in south Manchester , not far from fallowfield, rusholme, longsight, levenshulme, gorton. You can get to town, universities, and stockport really easily in 15/20 mins on the busses, which come every 5 - 10 minutes. Chorlton in about 20mins by bus.

Rooms cost 270 a month, and bills are split, 40 per month for everything included. Rooms vary in size, and all come furnished with beds, wardrobes, desks, drawers, etc...the usual stuff.

We're looking for someone who likes good music, hates drama, has a good sense of humour, likes to be outside, and isn't an idiot :)

no d*ckheads, no -ists, no -philes, plenty of -isms

If you'd like to come for a look round and meet everyone, give Pete a ring - :)

So, they are not cooperating with viewings, the for sale sign hasn’t a chance. But they don’t seem to understand that only one sort of person could possibly think of buying the place: somebody who wants to let it out to bunches of students. They are in fact, completely safe. We hate it as much as they love it.

But much as I hate it, you read that Gumtree ad for the rooms for rent and, well, doesn’t it tug at you somewhere? A whole community really does revolve around this extraordinary building. Not just the people who live there, it reaches much further than that. I had started off wondering if somebody might buy it and spend a million or two doing it up as a bed and breakfast. Luckily it is for now in quite the wrong part of town for that to be a sensible proposition.

The people who built this place between about the 12th and 17th centuries must surely have been so proud, so full of loyalty to what they had made. It is the most splendid thing that, hundreds of years later it is still loved with a passion by people who feel it is part of their being. I hope they win the day.

Oh. And if you want to know about the ghosts, go here: http://www.budman.u-net.com/sgsweb/Sladehall.html


I could go on, but you get the drift. I read this when I was very little and I kind of thought I knew all about England, but it turns out there is a lot left unanswered in the book.



Perhaps a revised edition?