In this issue

• This week: Comings and goings
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

With the world economy taking a sharp turn for the worse in the second half of 2008, there has been a lot of conflicting news recently about expats and their comings and goings.

On the one hand we’re told that those approaching retirement are fleeing Britain to find a cheaper cost of living elsewhere. Why? Well, for starters the weakening pound means rising import costs. Many of those about to retire will have far less money to retire on as a result of the the erosion of many pension funds in recent years. And the downturn in property prices means that those who’d been banking on selling a large city house, buying a smaller, cheaper one in the country somewhere and pocketing the difference no longer have anything like as much difference to pocket.

RIAS, a specialist insurer for the over-50s, have conducted research which shows that more than 400,000 over-50s are currently actively planning to leave the UK – and as many as one in ten more in that age group (that’s nearly another two million!) are considering following them.

Of course, it’s not just pensioners. Shelter Offshore – which seems to specialise in advising high earners to find tax havens – published a rather self-serving, politically biased and weasel-worded article which claimed that many of the 300,000 high earners expected to be paying more tax in the new 45p tax band would be leaving the UK as a result.

Hmm… let’s take someone earning half a million a year. Leaving aside the personal allowance, that means they’re earning £350,000 that’s taxed at the higher rate. So they’re paying an extra 5p in the pound on £350,000… that’s £17,500 more tax. In other words, they’re only getting £290,000 instead of £308,000. Do you think they’ll notice?

So where are the popular destinations? Well, Australia’s a perennial favourite, and the Office for National Statistics reported that it topped the list of emigration destinations in 2007 (followed by Spain, New Zealand and the US). But RIAS Managing Director Janet Connor suggested that the Mediterranean – France and Italy, as well as Spain – were popular, partly because of the climate, diet and lifestyle but also because the European Commission reckoned that those countries’ economies were likely to pick up sooner than most other EU economies.

Nevertheless, those who’ve already moved overseas face problems of their own. Former Minister for Europe Denis MacShane was quoted in the Daily Mirror as predicting that Britons living in Spain would soon face anti-foreigner attacks, as unemployed Spaniards blame British expats for “Taking Our Jobs”. He said that the burden on the Spanish healthcare system of large numbers of elderly Britons had already caused what he described as “rumblings”.

That’s maybe a bit on the alarmist side. But British expats face more immediate financial problems. For those who’d budgeted carefully on the basis of the exchange rates the pound’s enjoyed for much of the last decade, the fall in the pound’s value has left them seriously short of money. The Independent carried an article in late November which described some of the hardships faced by those who’d retired to Spain on little more than the basic state pension and who have seen the value of that pension drop by nearly 20% this year. And pensioners who live outside the European Economic Area, or in a country which doesn’t have a reciprocal agreement with the UK, face the same problem – but with the added insult of a frozen pension.

So in many cases expats are having to fall back on their savings. It’s some consolation, at least, that the average expat is better placed to do that than the average UK resident. According to Alliance & Leicester International, the five-and-a-half million Britons living outside the UK have managed to save an average of £54,600 per household, compared with the average in the UK of £31,300. The picture’s distorted somewhat by expats in the Gulf, who are only 10 per cent of the total but account for nearly a quarter of expat savings.

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

The Office for National Statistics has plenty of interesting stats about migration to and from the UK. They’ve published a summary of movements in 2007, together with links to several other related reports and stories.

Here’s a link to the Scottish Government figures for Scotland’s population and migration statistics. (Not so very long ago they were encouraging immigration to stave off a decline in population below 5 million, but they may have turned the corner now.)

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• being a man in bed
• silver lasses molasses
• high heel piggyback
• how do you spell the british word governor
• lacy slip around his penis
• hair wholesalers spain
• little acorn emba
• chefs that make prawn cocktail
• japanese men touching leg hair
• industrial pastry poland

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay & Dave
Editor & Deputy Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

– Mark Twain, US author (1835-1910)

Joke

A few years ago a high-flying couple in their fifties decided to go to the Canaries to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they’d spent their honeymoon 25 years earlier. But business commitments meant that they had to travel on separate flights, with the husband travelling the day before his wife.

The husband checked into the hotel – where, by coincidence, some friends of his wife’s happened to be staying – and, being a dutiful husband, headed straight to the hotel’s spanking new business centre to send an email to his wife. However, he accidentally put “.com” instead of “.co.uk” at the end of her email address, and without realising his mistake, hit “Send”.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the States, a widow had just returned home from the funeral of her late husband, a Methodist minister who had died following a heart attack. The widow decided to check her email, expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she screamed and fainted.

The widow’s son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen, which read:

To: My Loving Wife
Subject: I’ve arrived!
Date: January 13, 2002

I know you’ll be surprised to hear from me. Believe it or not, they’ve just installed computers here and you are allowed to send emails. I’ve just arrived and have been checked in. They’re expecting you here tomorrow and I’ve been assured that everything will be ready for you.

Hope you have a better journey than I did. Never mind, you’ll find some familiar faces here when you arrive.

PS It’s even hotter down here than you could imagine!

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

In this issue

• This week: Christmas crackers
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Depending where you are, only 43 shopping days until Christmas – 37 if the shops close on Sundays (or indeed Saturdays or Fridays) where you are.

It always used to intrigue us that one of the hardest Christmas-related things to buy while overseas was Christmas crackers. While living on the South Asian sub-continent we were usually in the fortunate position of being able to buy things from a commissariat, so we were able to get hold of them that way. But we weren’t able to put in for a private order for them, or indeed to bring them with us on our first arrival. All those explosives in the snaps, you see. Well, I suppose if you got enough of them together you might just have enough to blow the lid off a soft-boiled egg, but still…

Christmas crackers are a very British thing, so it’s a bit of a surprise to find that the inspiration for the idea came from France. More specifically, from Paris, where London confectioner Tom Smith went on holiday with his family in 1840. He noticed that bonbons – sugared almonds – were being sold in little paper twists, which struck him as being a vast improvement on the unhygienic British practice of selling sweets in open trays where they’d be manhandled by the vendor, coughed on by the buyer, crawled on by countless flies… so when he went home he took with him both the bonbon recipe and the concept of wrapping sweets.

The bonbons sold well over Christmas that year. That might have been that, but for the slump in sales in January. Casting around for an idea to boost sales again, Smith hit on the idea of double-wrapping them and enclosing a love motto (he’d noticed that bonbons were particularly popular with young ladies) between the outer and inner wrapper. His idea worked, and sales went up again – but unfortunately his idea was easily replicable and was seized on almost immediately by his competitors. The next step was to enclose a small trinket with the sweets, but again his rivals cottoned on quickly.

It wasn’t until 1847 that Tom Smith came up with the inspiration that gave him a unique design that he would be able to patent and thus prevent his competitors from stealing his idea. Sitting by the fire one day, he heard the crackle of a log and realised that a “bang” would give his design extra excitement. A bit of research later, and he had the perfect compound for the job: silver fulminate, discovered in 1800, a substance that readily explodes even in very small amounts – and a little of that painted onto the ends of two strips of paper (held firmly together by a short sleeve to make the snap, as it’s called) was all that was needed. He redesigned the paper twist so that it could be opened by pulling it apart (thus making the strips of silver fulminate in the snap rub against each other and explode to make the “bang”) – and, to all intents and purposes, the modern cracker was born.

In subsequent years, the sweets were dropped from the “Cosaque” (as the original crackers were known, in reference to the sound of Cossacks’ whips); paper hats were added; and the love mottoes were replaced with puzzles, conundrums and, eventually, the traditionally corny jokes. Luxury crackers were next on the scene, as the more well-to-do wanted gifts that were a bit special rather than the cheap little toys in the mass market versions. In 1927 one man even sent the Tom Smith company a diamond engagement ring and ten shillings (50p in decimal money, but obviously worth a lot more than that in today’s prices) to make a special cracker enclosing the ring. The cracker was duly made, but no-one ever came to collect the ring, and the man had forgotten to enclose his own address and never wrote to the company again! The company, now owned by Welsh company Brite Sparks, and the largest maker of crackers in the world, still has the cracker.

If you’re finding it hard to get hold of crackers where you are, you could always try making your own! One of our friends in India always used to ask us to save up toilet-roll holders for a few months before Christmas so that she could do just that. She made a good job of them, too. There are plenty of guides to making crackers around, on the Internet and in books.

Don’t blow yourself up making the snap, though!

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

We tried tracking down a Blue Peter guide to making Christmas crackers, but amazingly there didn’t seem to be one. But if you really do fancy the idea of making your own, The Field magazine had a useful article round about this time last year explaining how.

Apparently even UK forces in Iraq and Afghanistan fell foul of the concerns over Christmas crackers in air freight last year, according to the BBC.

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• brickies distracted
• swearing in maltese
• headless chicken irish rugby
• find the word hello in british
• small topic of india
• istanbul octopus garlic
• john constable- the leaping horse interpretation
• can i receive incapacity while living in spain
• i saw your email on the internet i want you to assist me by getting a nice property for purshase within your location as me and my family want to
• inglish names for a boys

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay & Dave
Editor & Deputy Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“Roses are reddish
Violets are bluish
If it weren’t for Christmas
We’d all be Jewish.”

– Benny Hill, comedian (1924-92)

Joke

Two crocodiles were sitting on the Victoria Embankment by the side of the Thames. The smaller one turned to the bigger one and said, “I can’t understand how you can be so much bigger than me. We’re the same age, we were the same size as kids. I just don’t get it.”

“Well,” said the big croc, “what have you been eating?”

“Politicians, same as you,” replied the small croc.

“Hmm. Well, where do you catch them?”

“Down in the car park under the House of Commons.”

“Same here. Hmm. How do you catch them?”

“Well, I crawl up under one of their Jaguars and wait for one to unlock the car door. Then I jump out, grab them by the leg, shake the $h1t out of them and eat ‘em!”

“Ah!” says the big crocodile, “I think I see your problem. You’re not getting any real nourishment. See, by the time you finish shaking the $h1t out of a politician, there’s nothing left but an @r$ehole and a briefcase.”

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

In this issue

• This week: The Terra Nova expedition
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

I’ve just read the book Cherry by Sara Wheeler. It’s a biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who was one of Captain Robert “Con” Scott’s party on the Terra Nova Antarctic expedition. It’s an interesting read, though it’s very much a book of two (or possibly three) parts: the first half divided almost equally between his early life and the expedition itself (which lasted nearly three years in all between the departure from the UK in June 1910 and the return in June 1913); the second half a description of the rest of his life – which was profoundly affected by his experiences in Antarctica.

The Terra Nova expedition has gone into the British national consciousness as a truly heroic failure. Undertaken partly as a scientific expedition, partly as an attempt to explore – and to reach the South Pole first, it also had a largely unstated end of reasserting patriotic pride (and moral fibre: as one of Scott’s companions wrote, “It will be a fine thing to do that plateau with man-haulage in these days of the supposed decadence of the British race”). But, heartbreakingly, Scott and his four companions on the final dash to the Pole got there on 17 January 1912 only to find that Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it by five weeks. Then, even more tragically, all five perished on the way back. Petty Officer Edgar “Taff” Evans died at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier suffering from malnutrition exacerbated by frostbite and concussion; Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates, almost crippled by frostbite and scurvy, famously walked out of the team’s tent into a blizzard to try and save his remaining companions; but in vain, as the three others – Scott, Lt Henry “Birdie” Bowers and Dr Edward “Bill” Wilson – died just 11 miles short of a depot of food and fuel (“One Ton Depot”).

The immediate public reaction was one of deep mourning at the tragic loss, coupled with great pride at the dead men’s bravery. This was reinforced by the message Scott left to the public (“Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale”); his edited diaries – which largely glossed over the shortcomings in the expedition’s organisation and conduct; and the photographic record of the expedition, which was shown to front-line troops in the trenches as inspiration during the First World War. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that, having been beaten to the Pole, Scott was worth far more to the Establishment as a dead hero than a living runner-up. The British love heroic failures.

The truth was rather more complex than that.

The whole expedition was hampered by having a dual purpose. The decision to conduct scientific research as well as explore meant that neither was done entirely satisfactorily; and when in September 1910 Roald Amundsen telegraphed from Madeira to inform Scott (by then in Australia on his way to the South Pole) that he too was heading southwards, it added to the pressure on Scott to hasten his dash to the Pole. All the more so when Scott discovered that Amundsen had located his base camp on the same side of the continent, and even closer to the Pole than Scott’s own. At one point there was even wild talk of going to fight the Norwegians, with “no law south of sixty degrees”. During the journey itself, too, Scott handicapped his team by picking up extra weight (in the form of geological samples) on the way back from the Pole, at a time when their health was already starting to deteriorate.

Scott’s own disdain for the use of dogs to pull sledges, based on his experience from an earlier Antarctic expedition (the Discovery expedition of 1901-04) made matters worse. He took with him a number of Siberian ponies, but they were of indifferent breeding and were ill-suited to Antarctic conditions; the ten taken on the final journey to the Pole all died before reaching the Beardmore Glacier, about halfway along the route. He also took three motor-sledges; one fell through the ice on unloading and was lost, and the other two broke down shortly after setting out. Only the dogs performed well, pulling their loads 345 miles further south than originally planned – but Scott had taken relatively few of these, not enough to take his team all the way along the journey.

A last-minute change of plan involving the composition of the Polar team may well have made matters worse. All the plans had been based on four-man teams; 12 men ascended the Beardmore Glacier, and the first support team turned back at latitude 85° 20′. But at latitude 87° 32′, Scott decided that five men rather than four would go to the Pole, leaving the remaining three to return. This meant a complex recalculation of weights and rations; and of the three who returned, one (Lt Edward “Teddy” Evans, the expedition’s second-in-command) fell seriously ill with scurvy and had to be rescued, causing further effort to be diverted at a crucial time. (It also meant, incidentally, that five men went to the Pole with only four pairs of skis.)

There was further confusion concerning resupply of One Ton Depot, the major depot some 200 miles away from the base camp. Just before setting off up the Beardmore Glacier, Scott had instructed Cecil Meares – the dog-handler – that five extra sets of rations, or three at all costs, were to be taken to One Ton Depot, with as much dog food as could be carried; but the dogs were not to be risked, nor was Scott depending on them for his return. But the delay in the dogs’ return meant that Meares (who was due to leave Antarctica in December 1911) had no time to see to the dog food before his departure, and no-one else picked up the dropped ball. Meanwhile, the redisposition of the last two teams meant that Scott was now relying on the dogs for a safe return after all; and he gave orders to Teddy Evans that a team of dogs should come further south than One Ton Depot to meet the returning Polar team. But Evans’s illness meant that that order too was lost in transmission – with fatal effect.

(One self-recrimination that haunted Cherry after his return from Antarctica was the knowledge that when he had left One Ton Depot after resupplying it in March 1912, Scott’s team were just 70 miles away. Cherry and his team of dogs could perhaps have gone to Scott’s rescue. However, this would have meant breaching Scott’s orders that the dogs were not to be risked – journeying further without dog food would have meant having to kill some dogs to feed the others – and at the time, there was no reason to suspect that Scott and his party had fallen severely behind schedule. Cherry was himself a late substitute for this supply run; the more experienced Edward “Atch” Atkinson had planned to carry it out but was diverted to deal with Teddy Evan’s illness as he was the only available doctor.)

Scott’s final Message To The Public stated: “The causes of the disaster are not due to faulty organisation but to misfortune”. Certainly it seems in the light of current knowledge of the Antarctic climate that Scott’s journey to the Pole was plagued with unusually severe weather even by Antarctic standards, both in the laying of depots (it had been planned to lay One Ton Depot more than 35 miles further south, which could well have saved Scott, Wilson and Bowers) and in the journey itself, notably the blizzard which stopped their progress for over a week those few miles short of One Ton Depot. And Ranulph Fiennes – himself well-versed in polar exploration – has defended Scott in the face of a torrent of criticism over the last 25 years or so, questioning the critics’ technical competence to condemn Scott’s decisions.

Nevertheless, Roald Amundsen – who beat Scott to the Pole essentially through clarity of purpose, good planning and careful selection of equipment – deserves the last word:

“I may say that this is the greatest factor – the way in which the expedition is equipped – the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order – luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.”

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

The British may love a heroic failure, but they also like keeping their sense of humour in adversity. Here’s an interesting story in The Times online about the passengers on the cruise ship Endeavour, which hit an iceberg off the Antarctic coast in November 2007.

[Obsolete content and links removed]

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• how to help people scam and become rich
• tongue mackay
• writing love writing love
• bird called expat
• astoria shredded suet
• what the hell is clotted cream
• ginger beer bucket
• neolithic life sex
• crispy aromatic duck was invented
• wired ribbons tying book

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay & Dave
Editor & Deputy Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate (1809-92), from his poem “Ulysses”
(quoted on the memorial cross erected at Observation Point, Antarctica, by the surviving members of the Terra Nova expedition)

Joke

An astronomer is in Darkest Africa on an expedition to observe a total eclipse of the sun which will only be observable there. The day before the eclipse is due, he’s captured by cannibals. Knowing that the eclipse is due around noon, to gain his freedom he plans to pose as a god and threaten to extinguish the sun if he’s not released, but the timing has to be just right. So he asks his guard what time they plan to kill him.

The guard answers, “Tradition has it that captives are to be killed when the sun reaches the highest point in the sky on the day after their capture so that they may be cooked and ready to be served for the evening meal.”

“Phew! Thank goodness for that,” the astronomer thinks.

The guard continues, “But because everyone’s so excited about it, in your case we’re going to wait until after the eclipse.”

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

In this issue

• This week: Letter from Dennis the BE dog
• Write for British Expat
• Virtual Snacks
• Sponsor
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

Some of you may be aware that BE sponsored a dog recently – Dennis on Gozo. You might wonder why on earth we would choose a dog on Gozo to be the British Expat dog. Well, our Malta forum moderator, GozoMark, a Gozo SPCA volunteer, can be very persuasive. Plus there’s the fact that it’s very hard to look at Gozo SPCA’s page of animals who need homes without feeling moved to help. Try it for yourself!

As well as a certificate of sponsorship, information about and photos of the animal you sponsor, you also get a letter from your “pet”. The one we received was superb and I wanted to share it with you. Here it is:

Hello Everyone at British Expat

I cannot tell you how pleased I am that I am to be your special sponsor dog – what an honour it is to be your first. Do you think any other dog has ever been sponsored by a web site ? Maybe not, in which case I am even happier.

You know my name is Dennis and you obviously chose me as I am such a super-duper good looking sort of a guy. I am not very tall so the other guys tease me a bit. I am now five years old and would you believe that I have been at the Gozo SPCA Shelter for three years now? Yes, I know, you would have thought that everyone would have been clamouring to take me so what went wrong? Well, people want tiny dogs or fluffy dogs or white dogs or big dogs but they never seem to want “Dennis” dogs and I get sort of overlooked. I have seen dozens and dozens come and go, but Dennis is still here.

Do I feel sorry for myself? Well, sometimes just a little bit, but then I am looked after so well and everybody loves me. Summer is especially good for me when the kids are on holiday and I have one special friend from the UK called Hector who is 8 and he is also my sponsor. We go to the annual dog show together and last year I was second in the class for non-pedigrees. By the way, he and I feature on the cover of our 2009 calendar, which everyone agrees is our best ever.

You may have heard that I am already a bit of a superstar, having featured recently with our Manager Betty (she who must be obeyed) on a live TV programme broadcast on a Friday evening. Everyone thought I was great and I must admit that I quite enjoyed my few minutes of fame. I am of course well used to doing the “meeting and greeting” bit as I regularly do school visits, something these Gozo SPCA people are rather keen on. They know that these days I can be relied on not to cock my leg in inappropriate places and I really do like kids, a rather important attribute on these occasions.

Although I would really love a home of my own, we are really well cared for at Gozo SPCA; we are fed twice a day and we all have a walk with the volunteers every evening. Twice a week we have a long free walk in the country; now that is what I call real fun! In fact it is such fun our walkers always have to catch me before the end of the walk as I like playing hard-to-get at the end and nobody seems to appreciate my sense of humour then – I can’t think why not!

It’s been great talking to you and I will be in touch again soon; perhaps with all this publicity I really will find a new home of my own – here’s hoping. Thank you for thinking of me and for your generous support for all of us. I heard a nice order for more yummy chewy bones being placed this morning – my favourite!

Love and licks from Dennis

Awwww! Wasn’t it a great letter?

I know we have a lot of animal lovers among our readers and many of you have pets – in many cases one you’ve chosen from a rehoming centre. But it’s not always practical for people to have pets of their own. Dave won’t let me have a dog because he says I have enough trouble looking after myself never mind anyone or anything else. But pet sponsorship is a nice way to get some of the joy of having a pet without taking on the day to day responsibilities.

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

We featured Dennis as our Pic of the Week not so very long ago.

You can read about Gozo SPCA and all their great work for animals on Gozo – and find out how to sponsor an animal – on their website.

Dogs are legendary for their loyalty and devotion to their human keepers. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Greyfriars Bobby, the Skye terrier that famously remained near his master’s grave for 14 years.

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• huge bovine features
• cottaging fun
• planting carrots to avoid carrot flies
• sillyart spouse
• are there any tortoises for sale in new zealand
• chinese peach figurine sex
• history of potato croquette
• why do i get bruises on my hand from boxing
• fish finger poster
• expat shopping moon pie

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay & Dave
Editor & Deputy Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.”

– Rita Rudner, US comedian, writer and actor (1953- )

Joke

This man sees a sign in front of a house: “TALKING DOG FOR SALE”. He rings the bell and the owner tells him the dog is out the back. The man goes into the back garden and sees a mongrel lying there.

“Can you really talk?” he asks.

“Yep,” the dog replies.

“So, what’s your story?”

The dog sits up, scratches his ear and says, “Well, I discovered this gift when I was not much more than a pup and I wanted to use it for the good of the country. So I told MI6 about my gift, and in no time they had me jetting all over the world, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, ‘cos no one suspected a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years. All the travel really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger and I wanted to settle down. So I signed up for a job at Heathrow doing undercover security work, mostly hanging round near shady characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dodgy dealings going on there and was awarded a chestful of gongs. Had a wife, a couple of dozen puppies, and now I’m just retired.”

The man is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog. The owner says, “Ten quid.”

The man says he’ll buy him but asks the owner, “This dog is amazing. Why on earth are you selling him?”

The owner replies, “He’s such a barefaced liar.”

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

In this issue

• This week: The globalisation of shopping
• Write for British Expat
• Virtual Snacks
• Sponsor
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

We’ve written in the past about the homogenisation of British High Streets (in a newsletter we sent out almost exactly three years ago, the last time we were in the UK. Has it really been so long?)

We were in Kuala Lumpur recently. In a way it was nice to see some familar shops there too, such as The Body Shop. But it got me thinking that it’s not just British High Streets which all seem the same these days, but almost every shopping mall in many countries.

In Thailand, for example, where we spend most of our time, we have Carrefour, Tesco, Boots, The Body Shop, Pizza Hut, Baskin & Robbins, McDonald’s, Häagen-Dazs, KFC, Domino Pizza, Délifrance, Marks & Spencer, Starbucks… Except for the two hypermarket chains, most modern shopping malls seem to have representatives of all or most of these chains somewhere. And there’s at least one supermarket which we know of which now stocks Waitrose products.

I thought it might be interesting to find out just how global some of these familiar companies are. Here’s what I found out.

Marks & Spencer are perhaps THE High Street name – they’re the UK’s largest clothing retailer (even after the rise of Primark and Matalan). It wasn’t until 1975 that they made their first foray across the Channel (to Paris). Now, despite having had to close several of their European wholly-owned operations (including that Paris store) in 2001, they have over 285 outlets in 40 territories, in addition to the 600+ they have in the UK. (One of the things they’ve been selling since 2006 is tumble-dryable suits! Whatever next?)

Incidentally, did you know that M&S might have been M&B? Apparently when Michael Marks took on Tom Spencer as his partner, the business was briefly known as, er, Marks & Boughton. (If Wikipedia’s to be believed, that is – I haven’t been able to find anything online to corroborate this…)

Boots seems to have had a chequered past, particularly in recent years. The first Boots shop was opened in 1849 in Nottingham by John Boot, and his son Jesse expanded the business into a nationwide operation. But although the first Boots store outside the United Kingdom opened in 1936, the company has often had difficulties establishing itself. Boots’s purchase of the Tamblyn chain in Canada, for instance, failed to lead to the kind of success it expected – possibly because the UK model was ill-adapted to Canadian circumstances. So although Boots International has a presence in 20 countries, in many instances this isn’t a retail presence; Thailand seems to be the one foreign country where Boots shops have really established themselves – with over 150 (compared with 2,500 in the UK).

The Body Shop brand has fared much better. It’s only 32 years old, but it’s grown from a single shop in Brighton to cover over 2,400 stores in 61 countries. It’s no longer an independent chain – Dame Anita Roddick and her husband Gordon sold it to Loréal in 2006, a year before Dame Anita’s untimely death aged just 64 – but it claims to maintain the same ethical standards which were its hallmark from its earliest years.

IKEA aren’t exactly a High Street name, of course – most of their vast warehouses are in edge-of-town locations or brownfield conversions of older buildings. But they’re certainly an international name. By the way, do you know what nationality of company IKEA is? Can you guess? (The answer is below this week’s Joke.)

According to Wiki, the chain has 278 stores in 36 countries, spread across Europe, the United States, Canada, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. (This varies a little from the facts on IKEA’s official site – they list 37 countries, and only 260 stores – but they only seem to be quoting up to the end of 2007.)

I found it quite fun to dig out these facts and figures. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them.

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

Founder of The Body Shop, Anita Roddick’s website is worth a browse.  Their links page has lots of interesting links too.

You know how Brits often refer to Timbuktu in the same way as Outer Mongolia and other places where most of us are unlikely to go? Just for fun I did an Internet search for shopping in Timbuktu. The most interesting thing I found was that the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye is twinned with Timbuktu. I bet you didn’t know that!

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• men like in bed
• what is british and garlic bread
• asmallworld invitation email eg view dear
• jedi census
• cook rice british colander
• this is me in bulgaria
• blackberry curry
• massage parlours trafalgar square
• otter antibiotic uk
• nuns jokes about themselves

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay & Dave
Editor & Deputy Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

(More a joke than a quotation, really…)

“A blind bloke walks into a shop with a guide dog. He picks the dog up and starts swinging it around his head. Alarmed, a shop assistant calls out: ‘Can I help, sir?’

“‘No thanks,’ says the blind bloke. ‘Just looking.’”

– Tommy Cooper, magician and comedian (1921-84)

Joke

Last night police were called to a branch of Pizza Hut after the body of a member of staff was found covered in mushrooms, onions, ham and cheese. The police spokesman said that there was a strong possibility that the man had topped himself.

IKEA question

We asked whether you knew which nationality the company IKEA is. If you thought it was Swedish, then you’re wrong – it was founded in Sweden, but it’s now a Dutch company, with headquarters in Leiden. You live and learn, eh?

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)