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Random occurrences from today:
- The vicar at church, telling us *not* to give something up for Lent. He said we should instead do something for Lent. In his case, he was going to drink Fairtrade coffee (which he doesn't like the taste of) instead of Nescafé.
- Seeing half-a-dozen small sailing boats tacking back and forth in Fareham Creek. The first thing that popped in to my mind when I saw them was Swallow, from Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons.
- Finally managing to find a cache in the Gillies without it being surrounded by muggles, or worse, chavs.
- Receiving the following presumed spam Yahoo Messenger message from automaticsalmon: "Why are you always so wonderful?". No link, no virus, no nothing. No response either when I message them back. Weird. (Edit: apparently it's a bot that sets up IM conversations between random pairs of people. So, harmless but weird.)
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1. Buying coffee just isn't what I imagined a vicor advocating for _Lent_.
3. Can you translate that sentence into American English? It's way too much for my British parser to handle. :-)
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It does make some sense: he's changing the brand of coffee he gets from Nescafé (which he likes the taste of) to Fairtrade. Fairtrade is an organisation that makes sure third-world producers get a fair price for their products, hence the name.
I think the only true Britishism in that is "chav", though that sentence does require some extra knowledge to make sense. A cache in this case is better known as a geocache - a box that's been hidden somewhere, and that you get the GPS co-ordinates for (this one is named Mostly Harmless, ID number GC153P9). The Gillies is a small conservation area near where I live. Muggles here are non-geocachers (and yes, the concept is from Harry Potter). And for chavs, think rednecks with hoodies.
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