Limey-philia

Mark Steyn's  movie review of Four Wedding's and a Funeral,  has us reminiscing about that film, that time, and how we became an Anglophile.

Four Weddings and a Funeral was part of that evolution.

You see, Four Weddings came after our first trip to London in 1992 and just before our second in 1994.

By the end of the second London trip we decided we liked the city and the Brits in general. If the reader(s) have never been there, Britain is nothing like the United States. We know what your thinking. I'm from California or Tennessee and I've been to Chicago or New York or say Toronto* and they're totally....

Let me stop you right there. Britain is not a little different. It's totally different. Everything in Britain is really old, older than anything in the Northeast**. The streets are narrow. Nothing - towns, cars people- is American sized. The bouncers at night clubs were tall, long armed guys, not human fridges like over here. It's an exotic land, but at least the Brits savvy the lingo, but not according to them.***

In 1992 they couldn't cook either, inspiring this letter from us:

To Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith,

Honored Madam, you are Queen of an island, why can't you people make seafood?!

Sincerely

To which the Palace replied:

To Mr. William Stroock, esq. of Her Majesties' late Dominion, The American Colonies:

Sir, Her Majesty commands I inform you that correspondence such as yours makes herself grateful that the Americas are, 'No longer her problem'.

Sincerely,

PS, I have enclosed your letter, so as to not defile the Royal Archives.

By the time we came back from the land of Guinness and blood pudding we were hooked on the place and decorated our dorm with posters we got from the Cabinet War Rooms, we still have one we got on the 1992 sojourn.

But the taproot of Anglophile reaches back much earlier. As noted in this space before, one of our first war films was A Bridge Two Far. Lots of Brits in Richard Attenborough's film, so much so that Robert Redford and Ryan O'Neal seem exotic.

Let us dig down even further from the tap root to the very seed. Among our first toy soldiers were these guys:

and these guys:

Pretty cool, huh?

*Our moose-eating cousins to the north are a hell of lot more like us than the Limeys.
**We grew up around 300 year old rock walls so....
***More than once a college student asked what language they speak over there, which was always funny if there happened to be a Brit in the class, wankers.
****As P.J. O'Rourke (PBUH) once said, 'You should treat an Englishman the same way you would an American with a severe speech impediment.' Or mental retardation, anyway.