<Rolling up sleeves and handing his jacket to a bystander> RIGHT...
Secondly, we like fresh eggs: a bit of poo and feather on the shell reassures us of their recent production. As someone else already said, we don't obsess about washing food containers.
Thirdly: I do admit we find it hard to end a conversation. If I happen to meet my next door neighbour on the track down to the road, we will start by asking after each other's health, then our family's, then having exhausted the subject of the long-range weather forecast and how our crops are doing, after half an hour we're bitching about how the County Council and/or the government is wasting our tax money, and what ought to be done about the war in Ukraine, whether Greg Wallace is misunderstood, (etc).
Fourthly: Apologizing (see what I did there?) for being bumped into or whatever, is a thing you mostly find in the southern counties of England, and especially among the genteel middle class. It's a regional/cultural/class thing. What they are thinking will be something quite different. Further north, we tend to speak as we find. Southerners think us boorish: we might consider them two-faced, and ourselves as forthright and honest.
Fifthly: I also admit British building specifications are shit: modern partition walls seem to be made of hardboard with a thin plaster skim. This is why I have never willingly lived anywhere that was built after the First World War. Older walls are much thicker - but try hammering a nail into the wall of a much older property and you never know whether you're going to hit an engineering brick, a random concrete patch, or go right through a section of mouldy chestnut lath and tired lime plaster. Unlike you, we let our old buildings stand until they fall down. Well, mostly.
But to be fair, I'm minded of what a friend from Kansas City said when she came to stay with us: she described the UK as like being in a parallel reality - which, in a way, it is. Now, it's my turn to generalise (did you see that?) about our Cousins Across The Water (and yes, I have several, between MI and FL):
1. Your tea is a disaster. I think the deficient method of infusion in lukewarm water is hardwired into your DNA ever since that episode in Boston Harbour in 1773 revolutionised (did you see that?) tea-making as a national tradition.
2. You do not understand bacon. It should be cut thick, cooked slowly, and not cremated into charred brittleness.
3. You follow that dyslexic Daniel Webster, when you had Samuel Johnson to guide you in spelling.
4. Your car indicator lights are the same colour as your brake lights. That's not only stupid, it's downright dangerous. As wel
<Rolling up sleeves and handing his jacket to a bystander> RIGHT...
