England never fails to amuse me. Two recent news items have caught my eye. The first is the news that the Office of Government Commerce, or OGC, commissioned a new logo, and came up with this:



Which is fine, until you turn it ninety degrees clockwise and end up with:



I'm not sure this was the image the office wanted to convey. :)

Secondly, best BBC headline ever:

Great tits cope well with warming.

Reminds me of the brilliant sign I saw in Regents Park. I even took a photo, to Izz's great embarrassment:



I miss England, land of the double entrendre. :)

Spamalot was a hoot and a holler. Especially as we'd bought the cheapest balcony seats we could get (15 quid), but because the house wasn't fully booked, they closed the balcony and moved us into the stalls, so we ended up nine rows from the front with a totally unimpeded view of the stage. Awesome!

We laughed. We sung. We laughed some more. We bought the t-shirt. Fun!

The one disappointment is that Tim Curry was no longer playing Arthur, instead it was played by Simon Russell Beale, who was very good, but I was hankerin' for a bit of Curry, y'know?

In further news, thanks for the heads-up, zarabee, I opened the blinds this morning and saw London covered in snow! The first time since we've been here!

( EDIT - photos taken from our window below the cut! )

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted. I've been keeping myself bloody busy, supposedly consistantising (????) Skinsongs (only managed six chapters, and still have to do some more on those as well in terms of character, but luckily I changed to the new concept at chapter 10, so I only have three to go before I go back to the start and roughly rewrite bits to fit in with the new characterisation), but actually researching and booking holidays. At this stage, our overview itinerary is rather, uh, interesting for the next few months. To whit:

( Under the cut, for those who aren't remotely interested in where we're gonna be for the next three months! )

This is, of course, costing a ridiculous amount of money, but this is what we came here to do. We saved for a year for this holiday, and by God we're gonna see everything we possibly can before climbing onto a plane and heading back to Perth on the 30th of January.

I can't wait to get back home, to be honest. I miss it. But we're doing everything we can to distract ourselves between now and then!

I love the free newspapers in London. The Camden Gazette is as close to a rubbishy rag you can get for free, as far as I can tell, all it's missing are the page three girls. But the clipping shown to the left (click for the full version) is from their "What's Your Problem?" section (never a more apt title was there!).

Enjoy this glimpse into the terrible problems of the English male football fan. My heart bleeds. ;)

This week's Alien Loves Predator comic is highly appropriate for us here in the UK. You wouldn't think there would be that many differences from Australia, with only 200-odd years of slight separation, but they keep hitting me in the face.

Is this the same English language? Sometimes I wonder...

Some examples:

• PANTS - in Australia, this refers to trousers or slacks. In the UK, pants are underpants. Very confusing.
  
• VEST - Izz hit this one the other day. Here, a "vest" is what we'd call a tank top or a singlet, at least in women's fashion.
  
• THONGS - everyone knows this one. Back in Oz, I wore thongs all the time. Here, they'd be called flipflops, and thongs are g-strings.
  
• DADDY LONGLEGS - now this one confounded me. I heard UK people talking about all the daddy longlegs this year, and I was very confused, because I hadn't seen a single one. Then I saw something on the BBC about them, and realised that in Australia a daddy longlegs is a spider, but here it's a freakin' fly! And not just any fly. It looks like a mutant mosquito, with long legs (well duh!). Here is what the British call a daddy longlegs, and here is what we sensible Australians call one!

There's heaps more, but they'll do for the moment. Does anyone else have examples to suggest? splanky? speshal_k?