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!

long time... no blog.

From looking at the post I last wrote I can tell it's been a very long time since I last wrote in here... I knew I had just returned from Boston, & I knew I was positively giddy with love. I just haven't wanted to come in here since then...

3 weeks after I returned to London from visiting Frank, he told me he was seeing someone else. I was shattered. It has taken a long time to want to come in here & change what I wrote - I haven't even read what I wrote back then, but I think it is fair to admit that I believed I was in a relationship which had honesty, love & committment... I was wrong. Well, I guess it did have those things, but apparently it was one-sided.

Enough said - six months on, I am ready to consider dating again, if I find someone I feel I might trust again. The worst thing about all this is that it's not the first time a relationship has ended with a 3rd party involved... it's not even the 2nd, and if you want the honest truth, I suspect there have been 3 previous occasions... I just never thought that after 2 years Frank would be so cruel as to end things the way he did. I do not hate him, nor even feel anger towards him. He is 'broken', damaged by his previous relationships, but that doesn't excuse his behaviour towards me. I just feel sad for him.

Anyway - enough - that's all! On to other things...