English Lessons
Hi kids,
I am writing this from the past. Or rather, more past than usual. All being well, by the time you receive this I will be in New York, hungover as shit and still asleep because it’ll be 5am there. Since I have no desire to do anything while I’m there other than drink wine, walk around pointing at cute apartments, and catch up with my pals, let alone spend time writing 1000 words about the deteriorating human condition, I am instead putting below a piece I wrote for a magazine that got rejected. I wrote it ‘on spec’ which basically means the publication kind of liked your pitch but didn’t want to commit, so they have you write it and then they decide if they want to pay you for it. Which this one did not. Kind of like the fuckboy of the journalism world. Anyway, I could have made £75 for this, and you lucky ducks are getting it for free. If you want to pay me for it you have only to ask for my bank details and I will gladly oblige.
The piece is basically a series of anecdotes about occasions when I failed to make myself understood with my garbled British-American vernacular, which feels timely as I’m sure at the time of print I have already been mocked for saying ‘aubergine’ several times already.
English Lessons
I am standing in line (49 US states) / on line (New York) / in a queue (UK) (so it begins) at a takeaway Greek restaurant in midtown with my brand spanking new American colleagues. They have forged on ahead, filling their paws with cutlery and enormous piles of napkins – surely no human alive has enough fingers to plough through all of those? – not stopping to peruse the menu, leaving me to fend for myself. I scrutinize the plastic screens hanging over the heads of three food industry workers who all look on the brink of suicide. I ascertain there are two options for the base of my Greek lunch: rice or pitta bread. Confident that the rest of the meal will become clear as I come closer, like the Statue of Liberty emerging from the mists of the Hudson, I approach the counter.
‘Base?’ asks food industry worker number one.
‘Pitta,’ I respond, confidently, my eyes already raking the menu of assorted toppings, not wanting to be caught out at the next step. Why are there four different types of olives?
‘What?’ she asks.
‘Pitta?’ I ask, confidence evaporating. Clearly it was never there in the first place.
‘What?’ she asks.
‘Oh,’ I say, three days into my New York experience and already a dab hand at adapting. ‘Peeta.’
I mean, sure. Perhaps it didn’t sound like ‘peeta’. But did it sound like ‘rice’?
*
I am in line at the Starbucks near my office. After four months of having to resort to pointing at the menu in order for anyone to understand what I’m ordering, I’ve been practicing.
‘Following guest?’ says the Starbucks employee in a turn of phrase wielded by all American service workers in the absence of it making any grammatical sense. I approach the counter.
‘Can I get a car-mel lah-day,’ I say.
‘You want a who with a what now?’ he responds, fear in his eyes.
Americans’ first reaction to things they don’t recognize is abject terror.
*
‘It’s a great apartment,’ I say. ‘The only thing is, it’s on the ground floor… I mean I know it’s a nice neighbourhood, but still, it freaks me out a bit.’
‘It’s on the what?’ says my friend.
‘The ground floor.’
‘What is that?’
‘Fuck, sorry. The first floor.’
‘Why do you call it the ground floor?’
‘Because it’s on the ground. Why do you call it the first floor?’
‘Because it’s the first floor.’
Silence.
‘Can’t we just agree we’re both right?’ I venture.
She thinks for a moment. ‘No.’
America is only a melting pot to people who studied abroad.
*
I am sitting on the stoop of my ~first floor~ apartment next to a cardboard box of crap that one of my neighbours is trying to get rid of. In America you can dump boxes of your old, usually terrifying belongings on the street and other people will treasure hunt for them on the way home from brunch. Alternatively, they will post pictures of said belongings on an Instagram account called @stoopingnyc whereupon hundreds of rich Brooklyn residents will descend upon the named cross streets and fight each other to the death for a Cesca-style chair they could buy from a shop using their actual income. The victor will then post a picture of their prize in their living room and have it re-posted by @stoopingnyc and everyone will hate them.
A girl pauses in front of the box of crap. ‘Is this yours?’
‘No, but you can take it. It’s free,’ I say, proud to educate a fellow foreigner on the cherished American tradition of pillaging. ‘Hey, where are you from?’
‘Australia!’ she says, smiling.
‘People always think I’m from Australia,’ I say, unsmiling.
‘Ha!’ she says. ‘So stupid. When you’re clearly Irish.’
The only thing you aren’t allowed to be in New York is British. And a smoker.
*
‘Wait, you call it what?’ asks my roommate.
‘Horse-riding,’ I say, again.
She laughs. ‘So weird.’
‘Don’t you think calling it horseback-riding is a little redundant?’ I ask.
Apparently not. In case you ever wondered if you were supposed to hang from a horse’s undercarriage as you canter along, American vocabulary is here to direct you. Other such infantilizing vocabulary includes ‘sidewalk’ (it’s the side where you walk), drugstore (technically confusing, although I suppose if it was, in the UK sense of the word, a store that sells actual drugs, in the US they would call it an opioidstore) and ‘fall’ (because leaves fall in autumn, and then people slip in the piles of leaves and also fall).
*
I am on the phone to my British friend.
‘I think British men are funny but ugly and American men are hot but boring,’ I say.
‘I can’t believe you say British now,’ she says. ‘That’s so American.’
I used to say English when talking about anyone who lives in the UK, but in fact British is correct. This upsets British people because they hate when Americans are right about anything.
*
I post a story to my Instagram account. It is of some bread rolls I made with a spring onion and coriander filling. I do not call them that in the story. I call them scallion and cilantro bread rolls, because I live in America. Here is a selection of replies I received.
Coriander! Enough with this American shit!
Scallion? Cilantro? Where the fuck are you from?
Cilantro pffft
This is what it must feel like to get cancelled. I do not remove the story because that is the opposite of accountability.
*
I am in a bodega buying cigarettes. In certain bodegas you can buy cigarettes for less than $18, but only if they import them illegally from out of state. If you find one of these bodegas then they will haul a black bin bag onto the counter and rifle through it before telling you they don’t have any Marlborough Lights. They will always have American Spirit though. This pantomime will save you $8 a pack.
‘Two packs of Marlborough Light, please,’ I say.
‘Where are you from?’ the bodega owner asks.
‘England,’ I say, trying and failing not to sound apologetic.
‘Oh yeah? Where in England?’
‘Do you know England? Or should I just say London?’
He laughs and wags his finger at me in a fatherly manner. ‘I know England.’
‘Oh right. Bournemouth, then.’
He looks confused.
‘Is that near London?’
*
The night before I fly back to the UK for a visit, not wanting to be likened to someone who did their year abroad in Bar-the-lona, I try to beat the Americanisms out of my vocabulary by watching a couple of episodes of Downton Abbey. It strikes me halfway through that that is what an American would do.
*
In London, I am at my friend’s house helping her cook dinner. It has been almost 20 days without an Americanism incident.
‘Can you pass the basil?’ I ask.
‘BAY-SIL,’ she screeches. ‘BAY-SIL! Oh my God.’
I laugh, but there is murder in my heart.
*
On the plane back to New York I listen to P!nk’s Misunderstood album. I hope the aircraft will eject me somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where I belong.
One good thing:
I saw this on Twitter and obviously didn’t read the article because who actually clicks on links on Twitter but as a recently diagnosed psoria-Sis I feel like being compared to Stalin means I have the freedom to completely overreact to my new skin condition.
Also since psoriasis is actually just your skin reproducing itself too fast it’s basically the disease of overachievers so I’m not even mad about it.
One bad thing:
I don’t know? I just told you I’m writing from the past. Probably lots of bad things have happened this week.
No con-texts:
I’ll give you two next week. Jeez, leave me alone.
I really laughed out loud many times. <3