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Everything’s so fucking small

  
 
gornorft
14:41 / 21.02.03
This is my first post here in a while. Last time I spoke up I was asking for help finding employment for my impending move from Australia to the UK. I’ve moved. I’m here and I’m still looking for a single positive response to any of the 30odd job applications I’ve sent off but that’s another story. Thank you again to those of you who sent information for my job quest btw, if not for you I wouldn’t have managed to find 30odd jobs to apply for in the first place.

I’ve been here for 3 weeks and 1 day so far and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed it’s how bloody small everything is! I’ve been here on holidays before and never really noticed this, it seems to be something that only becomes obvious when one has a British passport and the Queen on one’s side demanding that one be allowed past without let or hindrance, or something like that.

I’ll tell you what brought this so vividly to mind today. I was asked by my girlfriend to chop some wood for a fire tonight. Fine, I thought, no problem. I’ve lived in many houses with open fireplaces and chopped a good deal of wood for them in the past. A single glance at the resulting pile of logs resulted in me being informed that I’d have to make it all smaller because it wasn’t going to fit in the grate. The logs, that is, not the pile. Rubbish, I thought, but I was wrong. The fireplace is tiny! EVERYTHING’S tiny I realised suddenly.

Your roads are small, I’ve had to learn a whole new set of rules about who gives way to whom when two vehicles are heading towards each other through a narrow strip of tarmac wide enough for only one. Something to do with the cars being parked in an indented bit designed for the purpose or not being parked thus. This problem is made a bit easier because your cars are small too. If good sized Australian family cars were parked the same way on the same width road there would barely be enough room left for pedestrians to wander between them. Bridges are even smaller. Houses are small, rooms are tiny, fireplaces are miniscule. There is a room in this house called, apparently, the lobby. This ‘room’ is the length and width of a door frame and has 3 such devices positioned accordingly. It’s a complete waste of space! As if to compensate for a feeling of guilt at having normal sized kitchen sinks, you deliberately MAKE them small by placing a plastic tub inside it! WHY??? I asked my girlfriend and in response she scoffed at my ignorance and muttered something about hygiene. Why a plastic bucket should be more hygienic than a stainless steel sink is utterly beyond me. It just makes life awkward while serving absolutely no useful purpose whatsoever. Fridges are too small. Pubs are small, some of them require ducking in order to walk to the bar and I’m short. Beers are either small or huge with nothing in between. Car parks are small. Imported vehicles hang out at the end and there’s barely enough room to open the car door and get out once positioned between two others. Local shops are small, back gardens are very small, pavements are narrow, boats that people live on are extremely small. Buses, excepting those in London (which is small), are small. Burgers at MacDonalds or Burger King are definitely smaller than I’m used to, and horrible (I shan’t be having a Bacon Double Cheeseburger Deluxe ever again, yuk, and no salad or tomato in them either, it’s a bloody crime!).

At present I’m suffering from an “I just don’t FIT in this country” syndrome. It will, I assume, pass. None of this means that I don’t like the place, please understand. I do. I love this place. I like it a whole lot more than I liked Australia. I sincerely hope the job offers come flooding in shortly which will enable me to be able to stay here for good. Hopefully then, when I have an income, I will be able to afford a few BIG things in my life to compensate for all the tinyness around me. I’m just pissed off at having to do twice as much wood chopping as I’d anticipated and felt in need of a rant at someone other than my girlfriend, because it’s not her fault after all. So you lot copped it instead.

There! I feel better now. Thank you for your time.
 
 
Punji Steak
14:47 / 21.02.03
London is small? Sure you're in the right place? Nice to see you're trying the local cuisine though... ;-)
 
 
angel
14:58 / 21.02.03
Mu Mu - don't despair. When I first arrived here from Oz the culture shock was incrediable. Everything was the same, but completely different. It took a good six months at least for me to feel, not so much like I belonged, but not quite so like a fish out of water. (BTW - I've asked the basin in the sink question too and never received a suitable answer!)

Sometimes I think it has something to do with not being able to see the horizon in London. In most parts of Australian cities, if you are in the suburbs (even the inner suburbs) there would be at regular intervals an opportunity to look across the city/suburb/whatever and see the skyline. Not in London. From time to time it drives me completely mad. Ah well!

Mind you I've been here for nearly five years now and I'm not looking to move back to Oz yet, so there must be something going for it. (Ok, not withstanding the friends, the work contacts, and the history surrounding me at every turn - man how I love that history)

Yep, everything is so familliar and yet so completely not. It'll do your head in for a while, and then one day without even noticing it you will stop questioning and it will also seem so normal. (Is it just me or did that last sentence sound really creepy - shudder)
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:00 / 21.02.03
you have been the victim of a cruel jape. You should have been offered a small sip from a bottle labelled "Drink Me" at customs. This would have resized you to fit in with our more sophisticated, detailed scale. Storm back to Heathrow now and demand that you be given the magic shrinking draft. All will be well.
 
 
w1rebaby
15:43 / 21.02.03
Either that or someone has stolen your glasses and replaced them with a comedy pair.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
23:22 / 21.02.03
Question: are your eyes on springs? Wrong glasses time.

Real advice: it gets better, eventually. You'll get used to it.
 
 
w1rebaby
23:33 / 21.02.03
I have the opposite problem. I'm used to London with its nice comforting claustrophobia. Now I'm in the fucking suburbs, everything's miles away from everything else. Roads are several hundred metres wide. My apartment has four rooms, not including the closet, and it's the smallest I could find. Food is enormous. Cars are just stupidly sized. Freaks me out.

Beers, however, are smaller, except for the 40oz. The English pint is self-evidently the ideal size to serve beer in.
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
08:52 / 22.02.03
My Mum's cousin came to visit last year, he moved to Australia in the 60s and was a policeman. So he was describing how his beat in London had been so small, and his beat in Queensland or somewhere was so vast. The mind boggles.

And Angel? Not seeing the horizon? Having buildings in the way will do that. What kind of strange cities did you have over there with buildings that don't block the view of the horizon?
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
10:10 / 22.02.03
Yep, everything is a lot smaller. It's the only way we can fit everything in.

We reccomend that you save yourself the agony of further culture shock by inducing amnesia and thusly forgetting that everything used to be big.

The airlines have tried to use this as a way to explain DVT but to be honest they just do that for a forthcoming program, The Worlds Funniest DVT Fits.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:24 / 22.02.03
You have been the victim of a cruel jape. When you arrived, through sleight of hand you were shuffled into the queue for tiny Britain, a perfect but scaled-down representation of the landmass of Great Britain. Many of the sets have been constructed from job lots of the film "Willow". Return to Heathrow and demand to be relocated to the full-sized version.
 
 
Mourne Kransky
10:34 / 22.02.03
Don't worry about the Legolandiness. Now you're here permanently, you'll soon start shrinking to fit, like the rest of us. Apart from Tanngelus and Mr Illmatic who started out twelve feet tall.

You might try Scotland, it's BIG and empty and not that far away. Or maybe it just seems that way because the people are much smaller.
 
 
that
10:45 / 22.02.03
I got the reverse syndrome when I went to Canada for a couple of weeks. Everything is so fucking big and clean, the roads are wide and look like they're never driven on, and even Toronto was clean (though it might have appeared that way because big glass skyscrapers draw the eye upwards).

But lobby? I don't think that is in common British usage? I call it a hall, if it's what I think you mean. And not all houses have them, but I think most modern ones do so as you're not walking straight into the living room or something. And without it you'd get one big room on the ground floor, which is not everyone's cup of tea.
 
 
that
10:48 / 22.02.03
And by modern I mean like from the 1940's. My nan's house is a listed building from like the 1800's or something, and with that you just walk straight into the living room when you open the front door.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
20:49 / 23.02.03
The plastic washing-up bowl is an energy-saving thang. It cuts down on the use of hot water by reducing the volume of the sink, and also by insulating against heat loss. See also: knitted scouring pads, Ajax.
 
 
Loomis
08:31 / 24.02.03
MuMu, I advise you never to mention the plastic tub. It is so so wrong, but no one will believe you, no matter how patiently you explain it to them. I'm finally learning to accept it, partly from being in this country for almost two years, and partly because if I don't stop complaining Ariadne will beat a tune on my skull with that silly tub of hers.

Change your sink lining and adapt.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:01 / 24.02.03
You have been the victimn of a cruel jape. While passing through customs, you were infected by an intelligent virus that eats organic matter and excretes plastic. Molecule by molecule, layer by layer, the virus is diminishing everything and everybody around you, consuming their molecules and excreting the waste into your sink, where it accretes to take the form of a plastic bowl.

Regrettably, much as the saliva of the chupacabra is coagulant, the virus has the side-effect of making its victims unaware of their own prgressive reduction in size. at best, they will look at you funny, at worst they will place a limpid hand against your forehead and inquire after your health. Meanwhile, the opaque plastic in your washbasin will become thicker and thicker, and when you pull it out the water will spiral down the plughole in the wrong direction anyway.

You have two options. The first, and perhaps the simplest, is to return to Heathrow and demand to be hosed down with Dettol. The second is to melt the plastic bowl into a large crucible. Then pour it back over the furniture of your home. As it cools, the liquid plastic will resume the formn of its original source, and if you have dripped the right plastic onto the right furniture all will be returned to normal.

Best to experiment a little before you try this on people.
 
 
gornorft
09:04 / 24.02.03
Thank God I’m not the only one with the plastic tub problem. I thought that perhaps it was something peculiar only to my girlfriend until I saw the Kitchen Starter Pack for £9.99 in Tescos that included one of the damn things. From your responses it sounds like I’m stuck with it and that I’ll never be able to win this one small argument where so many others have failed. Bum.

This ‘lobby’ is, in fact, in an old place built around 1910ish I think. One of those Coronation Street looking places. There is a hall at the front of the house (very small but that’s largely due to there being a motorbike parked in it) but that’s not the bit I mean. Go through the rear kitchen door towards either the back garden or the bathroom and there it is. A small tardis sized ‘room’ with a cat bowl and rubbish bin on one side, doors on all others but, unlike the tardis, this is SMALL inside and rather less useful. It’s not like I’m about to be allowed to knock down any walls though so this problem, I know, I’ll simply have to live with.

By London, incidentally, I meant the actual central square mile bit, not the bigger also-London-but-not-as-interesting-to-tourists bits around it. Mind you, even if London IS large (in certain directions), it’s definitely short and claustrophobic. All that notwithstanding, it’s an absolutely brilliant city and I wouldn’t really want it to be any different.

So, now I either have to wait for my brain to shift or I have to go to Heathrow and ask for the "magic shrinking drink"… Um, I think I’ll go for the former rather than the latter, which might instead lead to me being flown home under the mental health act!
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
09:11 / 24.02.03
A small tardis sized ‘room’ with a cat bowl and rubbish bin on one side, doors on all others but, unlike the tardis, this is SMALL inside and rather less useful.

Oh, you mean the utility room.
 
 
Saveloy
09:28 / 24.02.03
angel:

"BTW - I've asked the basin in the sink question too and never received a suitable answer!)"

An excellent reason for having a basin is that it keeps the sink hole free for draining dregs from unfinished cups of tea etc. It doesn't matter how prepared you are, there's always some wanker who'll hand you a half-finished cuppa just when you think you've finished. Also - and this is crucial - any splashes or waves caused by vigorous scrubbing go over the side of the placcy bowl into the sink and not onto the floor.
 
 
gornorft
11:31 / 24.02.03
I have just been informed via telephonic communications device that there is a law stating that there must be two closing doors between a kitchen and a bathroom and that is why this space, which I am further informed is definately not a utility room due to it's size and lack of power supply, exists in this particular house layout.

Also I've just had lunch in Tescos and discovered that their sausages are very small indeed.
 
 
aus
14:55 / 24.02.03
I think the plastic tub might have no remembered reason at all. It became trendy many years ago for some forgotten reason thought up by people now long departed. My guess is that houses didn't have hot water systems back then, so the water for dish-washing had to be heated on the stove. Therefore a plastic (perhaps originally it was made of some other substance) bowl might be used to reduce the quantity of hot water needed. More recent generations have continued this behavior only because their parents did it, but a mythology has developed. This mythology provides false but (barely) believable reasons for the practise.

How's that for a hypothesis?
 
 
lentil
15:33 / 24.02.03
no, it's the tea thing. Also if you're washing, say, a lot of glasses and are not planning to dry them straight away and don't want them to get streaky soap marks down them you can run the cold tap to rinse them and the water goes down the sink without interfering with your nice warm washing-up water.
 
 
grant
18:29 / 24.02.03


This is a sink, you freaks.

Hot water on left, cold rinse on right. Slightly inset so the water doesn't splash out.

To tell the truth, though, you actually save water and power by using an automatic dishwasher.

They make 'em small enough to fit under a sink, you know. Or about the size of a countertop microwave.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
18:31 / 24.02.03
Huh.

Americans.
 
 
rakehell
20:26 / 24.02.03
Australians have the double sink too. Though ours is if we happen to have to wash a wallaby and a jumbuck at the same time.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
20:38 / 24.02.03
The variation in water use surprised Stamminger. "There is a really big spread: from 15 litres to 345 litres," he says. Standard consumption for a European dishwasher is only 12-20 litres of water.

Hand-washers consume about 2.4 kWh of energy - twice as much as dishwashers. And less than 15% got their dishes as squeaky-clean as the machine.

Well, mine are always bloody well clean. Perhaps the extra energy use is for hot rinses because we Old European handwashers are too decadent to use tea-towels?

Could you really fit 140 things into one dishwasher wash? I dunno.

Anyone who uses 354l for washing up is just plain incompetent, mind...
 
 
Saveloy
09:54 / 26.02.03
This is a bit like the 'underpants or no underpants' argument, isn't it?

We have double sinks in Britain too, but only in the houses of very posh people who always have a bloody dish-washer anyway. And the sink is never so deep or inset that water doesn't splash over the top and onto your feet. Unless you're one of those appalling people who wash up in the slow, sulky, gutless style of an indolent teenager, so that each plate receives half an hour of limp pawing and the surface of the water is barely disturbed. These tend to be the same people who, although perfectly healthy, eat in a pathetic, half-hearted style that suggests each tiny f***ing mouth-full is an undeserved but bravely suffered punishment from a cruel and powerful overlord. "Look how I suffer, have pity on me." Grargh!
 
  
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