There's No Taste Like Home

All my life I have grown up knowing that the perfect and most natural word association for the word whinging is... pom. And it is definately true. Hang out with any brit for more than five minutes and you are bound to hear at least four clear and separate complaints about food, weather, clothes or television programming. Believe me, spend a few hours with Rick and you'll begin to whinge about Australia yourself. I always thought that the Brits carried some genetic predispostion to whingability; one that probably stemmed from the shallow gene pool and generations of interbreeding. Yet, on arriving here I have found that there is another natural and just as perfect word association for whinging... AUSSIE!

On noticing this, I pulled on my over-alls, knawed on my strand of straw and got to thinkin'. I've always assumed that at the heart of this whinging is a desire to take aim at the cultural products and practices of the "foreign" country, but that isn't actually the case. It seems now that this whinging is just an expression of dislocation. It is not that the Brits don't like Australian television programming per se, it is just that it lacks the comfort, the predictability and the essential "Britishness" of British television programming. It is just unfortunate that the constant expression of this becomes whinging. It is easier to say that Weetabix is shit than it is to say that you miss Weet-Bix and to look at Weetabix as an entirely new and exciting world of ceral goodness waiting to be explored. We get far to caught up in the comparison of goods without realising that what we are really doing is trying to replace what we can no longer readily access.

I think that the Brits amplify their whinging abroad because at its heart there is an element of "oh my God you are so backward here" but ultimately it is not a matter of cultural progression; it is a a matter of culture. We are all simply used to different things. Different countries have developed different tastes. Salad cream never took off in one country and cream cheese didn't take off in another. It is when these tastes become second nature and we assume that we can find them anywhere that we get that indignation when they are not on the supermarket shelf.

On that note, here are some of the things I am already indignant about not finding at my local Morrisons (which up until recently was a Safeway, apparently):

Weet-Bix (though I do love Weetabix in their own right)
Sirena tuna (because Tuna Surprise will never be the same without it)
Thai curry paste (still on the lookout for some)
Continental Chicken Noodle Soup (not that I ever ate it that much but now I can't get it, I want some)
Those noodles with 5 flavour sachets

UPDATE: After writing all that we decided to order take-away Chinese/Thai. Oh, my Lordy.



I had to take a photo of it to show that you can actually make a "Thai Green Curry of Chicken" without actually using any coconut milk. I hope this is the exception rather than the rule, otherwise, I am going to be whinging my warm little Ugg boots off!