Vive La Différence

“So,” I asked the visiting Brit. “What’s your schedule for the rest of the week?”

He hooted in derision.

Photo by omid armin on Unsplash

“You’ve been living here too long,” he told me. “You’ve gone to the dark side. It isn’t skedule, it’s shedule. Shedule.”

“They say skedule here,” I said.

“Well, they’re wrong,” he said.

He paused to ponder.

“Wrong,” he explained, then, helpfully. “That’s one of the troubles with Americans. They don’t know how to speak the King’s English.”

“I think they want to speak American English,” I said. “I think that might have been a reason why they became Americans in the first place.”

“Well, they were idiots,” he clarified. “And talking of idiots, why the bloody hell is everyone here so bloody friendly all the time? They don’t have to be, and it’s really irritating.”

“They don’t mean anything bad by it,” I suggested. “It’s just the way they are. Probably something about the California sunshine.”

“Sunshine!” he snorted, angling his pallid British complexion to a more favorable position to catch a dollop of Vitamin D. “I went into a shop this morning and a chap popped up behind the counter, grinning all over his face, and said, ‘Hi! How are you today?’ Today! He didn’t know me from Adam, I nearly clocked him.”

“Well, different cultures have different ways of expressing themselves,” I said. “And this is the way they do it here.”

“But it’s so hypocritical!” he said. “That chap didn’t give a damn how I am today any more than he cared how I was yesterday. I could have been dying of pneumonic plague for all he was interested.”

“I think he’d have cared if you had pneumonic plague,” I said. “I understand it’s quite contagious.”

“And there you go again!” he said. “Being literal, just like an American. I was making a joke, didn’t you get it?”

He took a gulp of his tea, and shook his head in despair.

“Pigswill,” he identified. “I’ve been here four days and not been able to find a decent cup of tea yet.”

“They don’t drink much tea in Los Angeles,” I said. “The coffee in this place is very nice though.”

“If I’d wanted coffee,” he said, “I’d have gone somewhere sensible like Italy. I’d have thought in somewhere as silly as Los Angeles, at least I could get a proper cup of tea.”

“If you really want a cup of English tea,” I said, “there’s an English pub in Santa Monica. They might be just a touch friendly for your taste, but you could certainly get a good cup of tea, and I’m pretty sure they’d say shedule instead of skedule, too, and maybe even throw in a snarl if you asked them nicely.”

He snorted in disgust.

“Why would I want to go to an English pub here?” he said. “I didn’t come here to sit in a fake English pub when I can go to a real pub back at home. I came here to learn about Los Angeles, but it’s such a silly place, isn’t it? All this sun shining in the middle of winter, and people walking around grinning like fools and saying hello to you when they don’t even know you, and talking about the sidewalk when they mean the pavement and the trunk of the car when they mean the bonnet and on and on.”

He stirred at his spurned tea, and shook his head again.

“And do you know what the worst of it is?” he said.

Oh, boy, howdy, does any American right now know what the worst of it is.

“We’re doing what we can to fight it,” I said. “There’s a demonstration on Saturday if you want to come?”

“I don’t want to go to a Los Angeles demonstration!” he said. “What, with strangers smiling at me and people hugging me and everyone ordering me to have a nice day whether I want to or not? I don’t think so. That wasn’t what I was talking about at all.”

“Then what were you talking about?” I said.

He took a bite of his chocolate cherry Danish and frowned.

“The banknotes,” he said.

Yes, I was a little surprised by this, too.

“They’re all the same color!” he accused. “It’s ridiculous. In sensible places like Europe, they have different colors for different values, you can tell them apart as soon as you look at them, and then you can organize them in your wallet and pull out what you need when you need it. Over here, they all look the same, so you can’t keep them in order, and then you have to look at the numbers to know what you’re dealing with. It’s really irritating. Doesn’t it bother you?”

I had had enough.

“It’s a constant source of sorrow,” I told him. “When I wake up on a February morning, and even with all the terrible stuff that’s happening, the sky is still blue and the sun is shining and the jasmine is blooming and the Farmers Market is bursting with oranges and lemons, and I don’t know whether to be happy about that or worried about everything else, the very first thought that goes through my head is, ‘Oh, no. How will I face another day with banknotes that are all the same color?’”

He sat back in satisfaction.

“You see,” he agreed triumphantly. “It’s all wrong, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” I confirmed.