Pondering the Poms...

I was thinking of a couple of little things which I have noticed while living in the UK, which might not register or count enough to write about anywhere, but I thought I would write anyway!

Gravy is much thinner in the UK! Seriously! When I was living at Pear Tree Farm I would often make gravy to go with sausages or roast or some other dish, and the kids would complain that the gravy was too thick! I just thought they were funny about liking thin gravy, but I have since realised that almost anywhere I have had a meal with gravy it's been very thin by comparisson to the gravy's my grandmother & mother always made! I have a theory... During the war years, & for about a decade afterwards, rationing was very strict & so little flour was available that it would have been foolish to use much of it on an 'extra' like gravy, even if you had meat to cook & dripping to make into gravy! I honestly don't know if that's the reason, but it would make sense to me if it was!

You cannot get Tim Tams, Cherry Ripe's, Twisties or Mint Slice biscuits in the UK... now how can that be right? On the other hand, you can get pork crackling as a bar snack, roast beef & horseradish flavoured crisps & when cooking a roast, one usually uses goose fat for optimum flavour!

You cannot get Mountain Dew in a regular shop here in the UK... just specialty shops like those who import 'candy' from the USA & I have discovered an Asian market which imports it in cans from China!

Fanta is the wrong colour & totally the wrong flavour! Sure, it might be more 'natural' than the colour we have in Australia, but it tastes horrible! Blech!

I really, really miss the Australian rock music I grew up with, not to mention local bands who were popular in the 1980s, which I would hear on the radio from time to time... AC/DC gets played, sometimes, but you never hear The Angels, Dragon, The Models, The Machinations, The Church, The Hoodoo Guru's, Kids in the Kitchen, I'm Talking or Kate Ceberano, Psuedo Echo or (one of my very favourite bands) Real Life!

I really love that I can walk down the street & see snippets of history around me... a row of horrible brown brick houses in the middle of a beautiful Victorian Terrace, courtesy of the Blitz & the quick replacement of buildings during WWII. Also due to WWII are the tarmac platforms at the end of my street, which were the placements for anti-aircraft guns!

I am loving the access to family history resources which are available over here! I have made so many new breakthroughs, not just on the 'net, but in the libraries & repositories of London & Stoke-on-Trent, & I hope to travel more in the near future to cover more sites of family history significance!