That is the title of a book I want to read. It is on my Amazon wish list which is now ENORMOUS. Have you people got a wish list?
There are only seven of us in the office today. This means that you can hear a pin drop or in my case when I knocked over heavy files the noise was something else. Whoops. Think everyone was pleased with the momentary distraction.
I'm reading 'The Final Diagnosis' by Arthur Hailey. I am now obsessed and after writing down a list of his books, I have 8 out of 11.
It's coming up to one year since I started this blog and I shall be doing a review once I hit 31. I'm looking forward to seeing what I've done did in the last 12 months.
This weekend my plans are to finish 'The Final Diagnosis'. If you like Sidney Sheldon you'll like Arthur Hailey. I really want to be American.
Bartlam - What's it like being an American?
If I was American I would be the size of a house and most definitely not vegetarian although I believe vegetarianism is quite good over there unless you live in the south where they eat their young. Apparently.
I'm going to see 'Follow' which is some kind of interpretive dance and have to write a review for View magazine. I have also cancelled my driving lesson, again, losing interest thick and fast. I intend to get rich and have a chauffeur.
So...being American......
*waits for Bartlam's reply*
There are only seven of us in the office today. This means that you can hear a pin drop or in my case when I knocked over heavy files the noise was something else. Whoops. Think everyone was pleased with the momentary distraction.
I'm reading 'The Final Diagnosis' by Arthur Hailey. I am now obsessed and after writing down a list of his books, I have 8 out of 11.
It's coming up to one year since I started this blog and I shall be doing a review once I hit 31. I'm looking forward to seeing what I've done did in the last 12 months.
This weekend my plans are to finish 'The Final Diagnosis'. If you like Sidney Sheldon you'll like Arthur Hailey. I really want to be American.
Bartlam - What's it like being an American?
If I was American I would be the size of a house and most definitely not vegetarian although I believe vegetarianism is quite good over there unless you live in the south where they eat their young. Apparently.
I'm going to see 'Follow' which is some kind of interpretive dance and have to write a review for View magazine. I have also cancelled my driving lesson, again, losing interest thick and fast. I intend to get rich and have a chauffeur.
So...being American......
*waits for Bartlam's reply*
One thing we have to get staight about my role as a trans-Atlantic correspondent for Life Begins at 30...I am a Southerner. I am not an American in any meaningful sense of the word. America means about as much to my identity as North America.
ReplyDeleteI'm not yer loud, rude, rootless, culturless, rapacious, loud mouthed, bore..."brash" I think they call it. My people aren't the Ellis Island type immagrants from Italy and Poland.
My family has been in Georgia for a couple hudred years. They're all from the same area in the North and West of England.* From the underbelly of Britian they brought with them a specific culutre that was further shaped, and separated from the rest of the country by geography and an economy that was different than the "rest of the country" (a favored phrase among our critics). Then there was the War...here our history sharply and permanently diverges from the rest of U.S.
A telling anecdote from the end of the War...Presiden Zachary Taylor's son was one of the last Confederate generals to surrender east of the Mississippi River. He was approached by a yankee general that spoke in a heavy German accent and told, "Now you will learn what it means to be an American."
Taylor responded that he was very sorry "his grandfather, a general in the American War of Independence, and his father President of the U.S...hadn't taught him anything about being an American."
The German yankee general was just one shinning example of the many Europeans that had come to the northeast U.S. after being run out of their countries after the revolutions of 1840's.
We should never have left the British Empire in the first place...and were not keen to do so, until British forces turned ugly in South Carolina. Where as the New England patriots were smugglers who hated the Church of England, we were Anglicans and our economy fitted in with the Empire.
We backed the wrong horse and have paid for our relationship with the New Englanders every since.
What's it like to be a Southerner in America...well you get to see your literature, you music, your booze, etc appropriated and labeled "American". While being blamed for every unseemly aspect of American life.
Ahhh. I've done it again...rambling.
*Demographically, The South is overwhelmingly from T'North, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and West Africa (decendants of slaves)....that's who shaped our culture. It should be no wonder that we have produced William Faulkner and Honey Boo Boo.