This is precisely what happens when you don't have the buffer of Halloween and Thanksgiving to stop the madness: Christmas in mid-October. It wouldn't surprise me if in five years it was Christmas in July for poor London. Honestly.

Well it seems we are making some progress in finding American groceries in London! A new office mate introduced me to this site. Apparently his twin brother's girlfriend had just returned from a trip to Canada bearing Reese's Pieces. Ah... heaven help the foreigner who discovers these for the first time!

American Sweets

Of course, the seasoned ex-pat knows that these can be obtained (abet very very expensively) at Cyber Candy in Covent Garden. One pound for a tiny bag is the price you pay for following your heart overseas.

This is encouraging to see Kraft Macaroni & Cheese make an appearance, although four dollars a box is mildly horrifying. I haven't bought anything from these sites yet, but I will if I don't get my connections from back in American to send me some Mac & Cheese soon!!

In recent memory, has there ever been a more beautiful autumn weekend than this past one? I snuck away to St. Katharine Docks, one of my favorite places in the city. It's right behind Tower Bridge but feels a million miles away; so quiet compared to the noisy areas around it. Something about the enclosed neighborhood, the million pound yachts, the Starbucks peninsula.... Lovely. I also recently discovered a Waitrose there, my new guilty pleasure, so I fortunately will be spending a lot more time here!

#50: Whilst

The joy of being a PhD student in the midst of writing is that I have several people correcting my work. Several British people. Northern to be specific. They'll give me quite a hard time when I lapse into American spelling ("what is this characteriZation? What's the zed doing there? What is this word?"). What I find is that they love to change my "while"s into "whilst"s!

We have this word, whilst, in America, I'm sure we do. I just don't think I've come across it in anything written since the turn of the century. It's so old-school sounding. People here use it all the time, in place of "while." Dictionary.com lists them both as conjuctions but with "while" as the Archaic one!

So who knows? I hear arguments all the time about which English is more correct, I tend to think it must be the British English, but I hear compelling reasoning American English too. I'm not a linguist or whomever would know this, do you?

And whilst we are at it, what's up with "Zed"? (#51) No one ever says, "zee." How did that come about?