Things I love about being in England

OK, so I've been here for two whole days, but already I'm smiling.

The weather is co-operating. (There, just jinxed it.) We've had sunny, cool and windy days. Lovely. Right now it's evening, I have a glass of wine, the Little Guy is in bed, I'm leafing through recipes books looking for a birthday cake that he can easily cook for grandma, and it's pouring, but......

I can hear the rain on the conservatory roof. I love that. Conservatories, although not unknown to other countries, are a trademark of England. It's 9.30pm and still light, so I can sit in the conservatory and pretend I"m actually out in the garden, even though it's like a monsoon outside.

I blend in. Sort of. No one turns round when I talk, although when they hear my kids speaking with American accents I can tell people are dying to know our story. However, I get a little bit of special attention when I hand over a credit card in shops. It doesn't have a chip and pin so we always have to have a conversation about the transaction, which them moves on to being asked where I live, for how long, do I like it, etc. etc.

Having found our cake recipe, I am now lazily leafing though Good Housekeeping summer recipes, writing down the ones that I think I can manage. They will be taken back to Chicago and probably never made, but I'm enjoying myself right now.

All that remains is for me to get on to this time zone and wake up a little earlier than noon and it'll be great!

Civility in the Comment Box

I am quite a fan of the Huffington Post. It feeds in a lot of news and editorials from other sources, and a lot of them are well written. Of course, there are comment boxes at the end of almost every piece and, as I might have mentioned, I'm a sucker for a good debate.

Problem is, they're not always good debates, or even debates for that matter. I often find that as soon as someone has argued themselves into a corner, instead of either conceding the point (ha, in my dreams) or just shutting up, they have to start flinging insults. At this point I usually take great delight in pointing out this chink in their armo(u)r or just bowing out.

This morning I woke up to read a response to a comment from me, which could have gone either way. The written word is a fairly useless communication tool sometimes, being unable to share inflection and emphasis in a sentence. Thus, a question I had posed as a genuine question rather than a hands-on-hips,
"rhetorical" jab, could easily have been mis-interpreted.

Instead however, I read this - 

What I can say is that you have given me a broader view of this subject via your personal perspective and I could not ask for anything more from normally useless conversation on a chat forum.