Miscellanea

It's time for a bit of the trivia and unclassifiable stuff that Mom likes to share with us on occasion:

1. "Boiled Sweets" = hard candy, like life-savers, or those little candies you get in a tin at Christmas

2. Instead of passing someone on the freeway (motorway or M-road) you "overtake" them.

3. When they lay somebody off here, they say that workers have become "redundant". So you'd say that GM has had 2500 redundancies this month.

4. When we went to Ann Hathaway's cottage we were told that the little curved parts of the thatched roof were call "eyebrows."

5. Outside old churches is something called a "litchgate" where the recently dead are left for a few days. They look like a little wooden shelter with a roof and no walls. They wanted to make sure the person was really dead and so they didn't bury them for a few days after the funeral.

6. Dad and I took the Shulers to Young Victoria the other day at Whiteley's. It's a great movie that doesn't open until June in the US. It stars Emily Blunt (Meryl Streep's assistant in the Devil Wears Prada,) and Rupert Friend (who played Wickham in P&P.)

7. We do feel like the girl's are "learning" something while we are here but it's a bit disheartening when we tell them we are taking a trip to Greenwich and we explain that we'll be taking a boat down the Thames and somebody says "what's that?" and we've been here for 2 and half months.

8. I went to Portobello Road the other day and saw several unusual things - one of which was a guy carrying a bass fiddle on his shoulder like a rifle.

9. There is this great Oscar Wilde sculpture/bench behind St. Martin's. It says "A Conversation with Oscar Wilde." See attached photo of Dad and Oscar chatting.

10. Friday is Red Nose Day. It's a Comic Relief thing and they've been promoting it for weeks. Red Nose refers to clowns. We had two on our tube train yesterday asking for money. I put some in and they put a sticker on my coat.

11. At a church in Greenwich the little kids made a giant cross out of egg cartons.

12. Last but not least, there was a really warm day last week and Dad and I decided to go to the Borough Market. As we were leaving we "caught" the girls taking a mattress to Hyde Park.