Today is bright and crisp and sunny … and cold! The BBC weather app tells me it’s 5° but my personal temperature gauge says it’s colder. It could be that when the temperature reaches a certain low level I don’t notice the difference any more. Anyway, the BBC forecast us freezing and just below by early evening.
Facebook’s ‘memory’ suggests it may have been even colder eight years ago.
In our online Italian conversation class yesterday we talked about politeness: what we expect, the different standards in different countries and so on. Our Italian friend tells us that her British husband finds Italian drivers’ inability to express gratitude when, for example, another driver gives way to them when they want to change lanes more than a little annoying. A simple wave or raised hand will suffice, he rants. Instead, what usually happens is that other drivers get angry and pip their horns or make rude gestures! Cultural differences! Mind you, I have had Spanish friends tell me that we British say thank you far too frequently. The same applies to saying excuse me, and I’m sorry!
A recent addition to our British over-politeness is wishing people a nice day. I’m sure we never used to wish everyone a nice day but nowadays as I get off a bus I thank the driver and wish him a nice day, I pay for goods in a shop (cash as often as possible in my personal campaign to keep cash alive and to keep my details off the system as far as possible by bot using my credit card if it can be avoided) I thank the cashier and wish them a good day. And here’s a link to Adrian Chiles describing his experience of the cashier who wished customers not just a nice but a WONDERFUL day. He thinks it may be an American import.
For next week’s Italian class we are asked to do some research into Christmas food in different parts of Italy. Here in the UK we have turkey ( surely an import from the USA!), Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, mince pies, pigs in blankets (I don’t think we had those when I was a child) and inevitably Brussel sprouts (to which I add chestnuts). I suppose traditional food is an important part of every country’s culture but here in the UK we borrow and adopt from other places all the time. And so we add Italian pannetone and Spanish jamón serrano to our Christmas fayre. Even our sprouts must have originated in Brussels!
At the end of the now almost legendary summer of 1976, when the sun shone from the middle of June until early September, the weather broke just as a young Frenchman arrived to spend a year as a foreign language assistant at the secondary school where I was working. It rained so much in the early weeks of his stay that he expressed the belief that we had totally invented the myth of the wonderful summer we had just had. One day I invited him to come and spend an evening with Phil and me in our flat. I was less ambitious in my cooking in those days, and I was still a red meat eater at the time. So I served up steak and chips and peas and was congratulated on making a “very French dinner”. “Steak frites” is still a “very French dinner” and here is a link to an article about the search for the best place to eat ‘steak frites” in Paris. Plus ça change … and all that sort of thing!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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