Things you love about England/UK

[Nibble]

it's raining cats and dogs .............

Which comes from a time when Brits lived in basic thatch ring houses supported by beams. Cats would use these beams to rest upon but when it started raining the water would seep through the rudimentary thatch and the cats would leap down to escape the wet. As the cats leapt down the dogs lying by the hearth would jump up, half out of fright, half out of canine playfulness and a cascade of cats and dogs would hit the floor - hence - It's raining cats and dogs! Fascinating!

 

[rospants]

cadburys chocolate

 

[Starry]

Marmite crisps.

 

[Barrel of Fun]

Jordan and Peter Andre.

 

[poke]

The stuff i miss and love:

English Pubs
24 hour drinking
Football
Chocolate
Strongbow
Crumpets
Sausage
Bacon
Jaffa Cakes
Skips

 

[Lady Bracknell]

It's the only place that has a timezone called "teatime".

Which, regardless of when people actually have their tea (if indeed they do) makes absolute sense when it features in news reports of the "robbery took place just before teatime " variety.

 

[Buzzer]

The ten thankyous between bus driver and passenger from getting on to getting off.

 

[Napper]

Binge drinking + brits abroad

 

[The Large One]

The ten thankyous between bus driver and passenger from getting on to getting off.

Not in London you don't.

 

[Braders]

West Sussex

SUSSEX as a whole

 

[dougdeep]

Marmite.

 

[Buzzer]

hobnobs and earl grey tea.

Still haven't got my arse in gear yet.....................................

 

[Lord Bracknell]

Chocolate. No one anywhere else in the world makes chocolate like the english.

Indeed. The rest of the world makes chocolate. We take lard and turn it brown and sweet.

 

[NMH]

Indeed. The rest of the world makes chocolate. We take lard and turn it brown and sweet.

Cadbury's is rather good though, for milk chocolate.
The absolute best I ever tried was Chilean dark chocolate. excuisite.

 

[BUTTERBALL]

Fry up and mug of tea

 

[NMH]

In the pubs in Hove last night there were grown men covered in tats testing their closet queenery on their mates, gyrating for the entertainment of each other with some intentful effort, groping for meaning to be found in it, other than evidence of previous, or hope for future, prison sex.

Disconsolate women, safe in the knowledge that there will be no knight in shining armour, no fulfilment of dreams, just case-hardened reality that reflects steely in their eyes, no sorrow for the loss of hope, no whispers of wherefores, no care for the be's or not to be's.
Alas, they know it well.

Better to just open a bag of marmite crisps, and forget about it.

 

[mona]

Falmer Parish Council
Selma Montford's Brighton Society
TV Programmes about Estate Agents selling properties
Convenience Food
Fatmen Singing Homophobic Songs about Brighton
A Legal System that involves Cross Dressing
Journalists who think the World consists of London
Lewes Lib Dems

 

[Yorkie]

It's the only place that has a timezone called "teatime".

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
-- Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . .
Du lieber Gott!'

Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; -- - and there the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten's not verboten.
Uítu gunoímen . . . would I were

In Grantchester, in Grantchester! -- -
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of that district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There's peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I'm told) . . .
Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

Rupert Chawner Brooke (1887-1915)

 

[ali jenkins]

The fact that when i hear the national anthem the hairs on my neck stand up!

 

[pasty]

Pomp and circumstance. No other country in the World can touch us for pageantry.