Taking my talents to South England

Also, they're much cooler with fighting than are we. I was amazed at how quickly disagreements could escalate into getting headbutted or punched. And then just as quickly to having your arm wrapped the person that punched you singing. Fuck, drinking in the UK is fun.

So, which football club will your kids support?

 

I don't get that sense that they mock us because they want to be us. I don't tend to mock somebody I personally want to emulate, do you? I don't mock my dad, good friends, Michael Jordan, Muhammed Ali, etc....

I think they mock us because they honestly find a lot of things we do pretty appalling and alien. I agree with them sometimes, and sometimes I don't.

I don't think London is representative of anything in the UK other than London itself. It's such a huge, weird, bustling, arrogant, fun, crowded, indifferent place. It's like saying New York City somehow represents part of me as an American living in Idaho. Only much moreso, because there's only one London while in the US we've got multiple mega-cities, each with competing egos and dynamics.

London seems like its own weird deal that drags the rest of the country around kind of where it wants.

 

Why are you moving to a small town and why that part of England? Why not a suburb of London? How will you make a living in a small town? Do you, as an American, have to get a work permit? Do your kids have dual-citizenship? They will be able to freely live and work anywhere in the EU right?

 

Man, my kids don't even know how to kick a soccer--er--football. I have no idea who I'll "support". (What a weird term, isn't it? Makes it sound like I'm taking up an office collection to keep David Beckham employed.)

I guess I'll figure out who is the Lakers version of football and pick a rival. Because fuck those assholes, whomever they are.

 

Your kids will most likely lead exponentially better lives because of this.

 

I like the small town lifestyle. It's a 40 minute commute to London by train, so it's not bad. Kids are already dual citizens just by being born from a UK citizen, and can work anywhere in the EU when they get old enough. Unless they fuck euros or their progeny are born on UK soil, their kids can't be English though.

I'll be able to work in the UK after 30 days, which is very nice. My goal is to do marketing consulting, so if you know anybody who needs ecommerce/logos/websites/etc built, PM me and I'll forward my (evolving) LinkedIn page. I'll probably build a site at some point to market my services.

Everything at CookbookPeople.com I built, so it's a nice example of my ability from a conceptualizing/writing/design/development etc standpoint.

 

Thanks for saying that. I'm not sure it's true, but it's nice for you to say that.

That's the thing about life, you don't get to do things twice to see how it might have turned out if you don't do that Big Thing.

 

I have cousins and extended family south of Edinburgh (Great Grandpa emigrated to the States in 1910) and I got to stay with them for about 3 months when I was twenty years old ... you aint lying.

 

Enjoy your warm beers and cold pies. I'm jealous! Make sure you take advantage of lots of weekend trips. Try these guys for cheap flights, http://www.ryanair.com/en I used them in 2006 when I was last there. Saved tons.

 

Thanks for posting that. I kind of dig Simmons' choice of Tottenham Hotspur. Just the name sounds ridiculously anti-bandwagon. When some greasy chav sticks a saucy chip in my face and says, "Wahh, wankah, wot team do yew suppor'?!?"
if I can come back with "Tottenham Hotspur" in a cool, James Earl Jones kind of bad ass delivery, I will feel right proper. That little tosser will know I'm not just some dumb American throwing out "Arsenal" weakly.

Or maybe Sam L Jackson: TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR, MUTHAFUCKA. DO YOU DIG IT?

Yeah.

Thanks for helping me get that off the checklist. Now on to which ethnic group I will choose to hate. Pakistanis have taken a backseat to Polish lately....but Americans never go wrong by hating Americans. Hmm. Maybe pikeys. That's always a solid one.

 

Yeah, we flew Ryan Air to Pisa on our honeymoon to check out the Cinque Tierra. Only time a plane lost my luggage, but damn was it cheap.

I just checked and it's about $500 to fly my whole family round trip next February from London/Stansted. Not bad.

 

The self hating American thing sounds good. They'd probably like that you can laugh at yourself like that and don't act like the patriotic stereotype.

 

That is a weird thing to say. You must really hate Boise, Idaho.

 

pikeys are an ethnic group?

The American hating American's thing is a bit too hipster. Now if you were moving from Brooklyn or Portland, yeah, go with the herd I guess.

How about going old school and having a fierce dig at the Irish. What good have those toads done anyway?

 

Pikey's are Irish gypsies similar to the Romani, and it's considered a slur. So yes, an ethnic group.

 

Pikey is a pejorative slang term used mainly in Britain[1][2] to refer to people who are of the Traveller Community. Pikey is also sometimes called a piker in the United States,[3] but a piker in Australia and New Zealand means someone who refuses to do something within a group.[4] It is not well received among Irish Travellers or Romanies, as it is considered an ethnic slur.[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikey

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3100 up, 443 down From the English "turnpike", the place where itinerent travellers and thieves would camp near a settlement.

Pikey is not a racial group, the term is used to describe anyone who lives in a caravan or shares the same values and "culture" of "the travelling community", and whose main sources of income are as follows:

Stealing cars, flogging roses in pubs for "childrens' charities", nicking lead off roofs, burgling garden sheds, blagging entry to old peoples house to rob them, doing dodgy tarmac jobs ("we've got some black stuff left over from a job up the road"), sometimes with mint imperials used as a substitute for white chippings, or, reportedly, using snow to lay slabs on when the sand ran out, stealing your bollocks if they weren't in a bag and anything else that's not nailed down and anything that is nailed down but will fit in the back of an untaxed Transit when nobody's looking.

Characterised by lurchers on a string, a unintelligible language that "isn't English, it isn't Irish, it's just Pikey" (source: Film: Snatch), a penchant for harecoursing, ketamine, lighter fuel, fighting in pubs and shopping at Lidl.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pikey

 

So yeah, I didn't think so. Pikeys can be Irish, can be English, or whatever else. They are designated by their lifestyle, predilection for crime, etc. not limited to one ethnic group, and particularly in the case of the Irish, a Pikey can be Irish and many are, but if you hate Irish, you hate more than just Pikeys. Pikeys are just a small subset of Irish living in England.

 

Actually, it's kind of a pet peeve of mine that Americans are the only nationality in the world where you are literally expected to make some sort of disparaging remark about your country to prove you are "one of the good ones."

You'd never expect an English person to say something bad about England before trying to talk to a Russian. I get that we've pulled a few dick moves over the years, but it still rubs me the wrong way.