For all your wedding-guest transportation from church to reception veunue needs. A red London bus wedding special. As you can imagine, this was the highlight of the wedding for me.
The reception venue in a cricket pavilion, while a match was in progress, was also so wonderfully English that soppiness abounded.
”’bring”’ ””’bring””: Hello… …Wendy House speaking, how can I help you?
American friend: Wendy? Is that you?
Wendy: Yes
American friend: OH MY GOD, Wendy, your accent has gotten so English that I didn’t even recognise you! So, how are you liking being back in England
Wendy: It’s the little things that you didn’t realise that you missed or thought were over romantised like the sound of leather on willow during a cricket game in a park, followed by a brief silence then clapping as the players on both sides applaud a good shot, the smell of freshly mown, damp, grass in the morning, the diversity of nose shapes, the plethera of watery blue eyes and men wearing shoulderbags.
American friend: are you reading one of your blog posts?
Wendy: I’m not sure, I’ll check and get back to you on that one
“37 ways to leave your Yak“* is the title of a poem by AF Harrold who might have been called “Reading’s answer to John Hegley“. You may have considered Paul Simon’s “50 ways to leave your lover” an ingenious comment on the breakdown of contemporary potential-parent units. It was. This poem may well be more significant than the design, implementation and distribution of prefrabricated concrete coal bunkers. Enough hedging, here are two unprefabicated concrete points:
* explanatory notes for people unfamiliar with contemporary (2000) Britishness:
- Lord’s = Cricket ground in London generally considered by the British to be the ‘home’ of cricket.
- Wicket =bowling cricketer aims the ball at the wicket.
- Rent-o-Kill = UK based pest control company.
- mod = Life-style “based around fashion and music that developed in London, England in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the early to mid 1960s. People who followed this lifestyle were known as Mods, and were mainly found in Southern England”
- press-ganged = getting forcibly taken into military service, a ‘gang’ of ‘press’ men would kidnap people on behalf of the military. This was a favoured recruitment method of the British Navy, before successful advertsing campaings, who have a large base in Portsmouth.
- Crufts = British national Dog show.
- Sarnie = slang for ‘Sandwich’
