Executive Lunch at BAE

While on one of my first trips to BAE (British Aerospace) with a fellow McDonnell Douglas employee (Terry) we were invited to the Executive dining room for lunch.  Neither of us were seasoned international travelers so we were duly impressed that we were invited this fine dining experience by BAE.   The dining room tables had white tablecloths and white cloth napkins with proper English waitresses that spoke with an elegant accent.  We both tried to act like this was normal for us so we were careful to use the utensils properly and try not to make fools out of ourselves. 

     Everything was going along swimmingly (notice the use of English slang) and after having a nice lunch and coffee in these extremely small cups (the English use brown sugar in their coffee) the waitress came around to ask us about dessert.  What’s important to know is that the English have an interesting use of words which differ from the US English version plus they have a different dry quirky sense of humor (Monty Python).  Speaking to us first since we were guest she announce the first dessert choice, I believe she said “Today we have spotted dick”.  At that time if you looked close you could have seen both of our eyes bulge out.  Now, what goes through your mind when you here about this dessert choice.  I know what I thought, (I don’t think I want that, No that’s not right, I’m sure I don’t want that).  I hesitate to ask but what other choices do I have and don’t tell me about your personal problems.  But without asking maybe because of our hesitation she offered us the 2^nd choice, which, was ice cream and at that point without any prompting Terry and I glanced at each other and immediately exclaimed “Ice Cream”.    What we should be asking at this point is there anything we should know about the ingredients in this ice cream?  Were our British friends pranking us?

    As it turns out the dessert “spotted dick” is a pudding, but why in the (bloody) hell would you choose that name for any type of food.  Well, that’s what’s interesting about traveling, words have different meanings, some words offensive in one culture are not in another in fact they may have a totally different meaning.

So sit back and enjoy your pudding while visiting TwistedCorkscrew to check out all the cool wine accessories.

Popsicles in the alley

When I was just a young boy, maybe 7 or 8, we played outside all day long and never really paid much attention to the time unless our stomachs told us it was time to eat.  After eating I would immediately go back outside to play with my buddies.  Well one evening after supper I met up with Jim and Frank, we hung out didn’t do anything particularly interesting or exciting just goofed off.  We checked to see how much money we had and decided if we pooled it together there was enough to buy some popsicles so of course we did. 

We lived in the city (Walnut Park), which was a blue collar neighborhood where kids roamed free without concern and many neighbors became friends.  There were streets and alleys behind the houses which is where you would find us most of the time.  We would walk all over town using the alleys instead of streets even when we were alone, sometimes the alleys were scary but we did it anyway, it is just the way it was.  Anyway I got sidetracked, after we bought the popsicles we sat in the alley to eat them (where else would we go) and sat around telling stories.  As I previously said we frequently lost track of time as we did that night.  Little did we know that our parents had been looking all over for us and were just about ready to call the police, because it was 10:00 pm and we should have been home long ago.  

Our parents weren’t as familiar with the alleys as we were so that was not the first place they looked, if at all.  In fact as I remember it we were discovered as we walked out of the alley on our way back home to a bit of hysterical screaming and hollering, but our explanation that we were just eating popsicles did not satisfy our parents.  Obviously, our parents were scared and nervous and they told us what we did was dangerous but popsicles aren’t dangerous, unless you eat a couple dozen, I guess they were talking about something else, adults were hard to figure out.