Not clueless

English is a funny old language. There are so many phrases that are grammatically correct, but we just never say them.

Yesterday afternoon, I was musing over (ok, I was being dragged by the arm and being encouraged to think about) what had happened to the playmobile pirate's sword. The boys were looking for it and I was muttering darkly that I didn't have a clue what had happened to the sodding thing but it would be certain to turn up piercing my foot shortly. Luke stopped me in my tracks, excitement filling his little face.

'Mummy! I have a clue!'

Why do we not say that more often? Why do we never have a clue, but seldom have one? I think I prefer the toddler take on it. I shall be endeavouring to have a clue more often. It is much more fun that way.

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Victoria, over at It's a Small World After All, is planning a round the world trip with her three children, they have just bought the tickets and everything. Getting into the swing of this travel thing, she is hosting a travelling with children carnival, complete with the horror stories of getting children from a to b with sanity far from intact, clothes vomited on and not enough time to go for a pee without small people opening the cubicle door. There are some brilliant reads, in an oh please let that not happen to me kind of way.

The really important things to bring back from home

I'm still unpacking. It takes forever and is one of my least favourite activities. But, as I try and create some form of order in the chaos it has struck me that what I have actually bought home from the UK is nothing like what I expected to bring home. Utterly food obsessed, I thought my bags would be stuffed full of things like marmite, mango chutney, popadoms, pine nuts, chocolate hobnobs and PG Tips and all those other things that we can't get hold of out here.

But when push came to shove, and I realised that we didn't have enough space to bring back everything that I thought we would it was the important stuff that stayed in.

- marmite and teabags. Obviously. But these were really the only foodstuffs that made the cull.
- childrens suncream. Althought the weather here is currently dreadful and we can only look at the English summer going on and weep, it will get hot here. Last year we couldn't find any childrens suncream that wasn't very thick and gloopy so I bought some back.
- new clothes. The clothes in Bosnia are surprisingly expensive, especially children's ones. It is far cheaper to buy them in the UK and bring them back, particularly when the second hand shops around my parents house are so great . I may have also snuck a few new clothes for me in when Dave wasn't looking.
- Calpol and Calprufen. We have enough to sink a small battleship. You can get similar in Bosnia, but I feel it is safer to stick with what I know. I know how many times I can give it to them, how much, that it is safe to alternate the two and that if it doesn't bring their temperatures down that we need to go to the doctors. When their temperatures soar, I don't want to be worrying that I haven't quite got it right on the medicinal front.
- a few English language books.
- a few box set DVDs. We really don't watch the local TV that often. We have no idea what is on, or when it will be on. So, we prefer to watch an episode of a show that we know we like, although what we will do when we finish The Sopranos I have no idea.
- many many many childrens DVDs. I can't take the childrens tv here, Cartoon Network is dreadful and even Adam says that the cartoons aren't very good. This way CBeebies still works its magic and I can take comfort in the fact that it is vaguely educational.

So alas, no room for the mango chutney. I'm still not sure if leaving it behind was a mistake.

An English Summer

On our short trip back, I'm finding that I've become more English than ever in my time in Bosnia. We've spent our afternoons eating fish and chips watching the village cricket match on the green. We've gone to the beach in the Isle of Wight and played french cricket, built sandcastles and eaten ice cream caked in sand. At the end of the afternoon, just as the sun was radiating its most golden light across the sea we sat in front of the beach hut, drinking tea and eating lemon drizzle cake. I've even thought about a little dip, but the sea looks a little too grey for my liking. We've paddled, we've poked around rock pools with a shrimping net. We went to back to our home city and watched the trains fly past, fed the ducks and had a terrific time in the playground. We've seen a few old friends and I was surprised and a little relieved to watch the boys play with their old friends as if they had never been away.

Combined with having the most lovely time has been the most beautiful weather possible. Gentle sunshine, hot but not unbearably so, a feeling of freshness echoed by the vibrant greens of the trees and spring flowers.

We miss Dave though. He must be in Bosnia for a further 2 weeks before he too can sample fish and chips and talk about cricket with someone apart from me (and my knowledge is pretty limited). We enjoy ourselves, but the boys ask after him all the time and I would love to have him here with us. I could talk to him about how wonderful our home country is when I have the outsiders rose tinted glasses on. By the time he gets here, I'll be moaning about the traffic, price of petrol and the economy like everyone else.

A British Ex-pat DISASTER

A great catastrophe has occurred, that only a British ex-pat can truly understand. It is making me wonder if we should go home. Life as I know it can not really continue. It has been an oversight of such catastrophic proportions that I can't believe I didn't see it coming. I'm in deep mourning and feeling pretty jittery.

We have run out of Marmite.

(note to the non-British readers of the blog who don't have a clue what marmite is: it is a black tar like substance which we spread, thinly, on toast. No one outside of the UK can understand the obsession with it and most non-Brits think it is utterly disgusting. It does look pretty foul and doesn't really smell that great either. We adore it.)

important bits of English culture

Before we moved here we did quite a lot of thinking about the ways in which the boys would be exposed to a new culture and how that might affect them. One of the things we hadn't really thought about before we moved to Bosnia was how the boys would be affected in terms of absorbing English culture.

Some things are no different: we have bought/had sent out enough tea bags to sink a Boston tea ship. The number of CBeebies DVDs that we have here would start a library of their own and I don't think they would be watching anything different if we were in the UK. The toy shops in Bosnia sell all the same sort of stuff - we've found great jigsaws, transformers, Thomas the Tank Engine kit, you name it really. I think they'll have enough cultural references with their peers to not make a difference on their return.

But this weekend I started to wonder about how we will build their cultural identity. This weekend was a big rugby weekend in the UK. England were playing Wales, which is an enormous match at the best of times, particular so this year. If we'd been in the UK we would probably have gone round to someones house and watched it on TV - the adults all participating in that time honoured past-time of shouting really loudly at the TV as England promise much and then proceed to throw it all away.

We looked around for people to watch it with, but for some extraordinary reason the game was not on Bosnian TV and noone wanted to watch it with us. We managed to access it via the Internet and D and I watched it on the computer, shouting at the screen as England adhered to form; promised much, threw it all away.

Adam was intrigued by this new routine and wanted to watch. But it became very evident that he had no idea what he was looking at. I realised that he didn't know what the English flag looked like, what our national anthem was, what colours the English play in. He doesn't know of our ancient sporting rivalries, the matches that have a little extra needle. As long as we remain here they won't be exposed to the English national games of rugby and cricket. He will see a lot of football, but he'll believe that the team he should support wears blue (although coming from a family of Chelsea supporters this is probably not such a bad step).

This got me thinking. Maybe we would be doing them a favour. Maybe a life spent not being constantly disappointed by the English teams performance (in football, rugby, cricket, insert name of sport here) would be preferable. But hours spent shouting at a TV screen as England collapse yet again is such an integral part of being English we need to ensure they are exposed to this. The next big rugby game is in 2 weekends time and we shall be watching it, teaching the boys to shout 'come on England' and sing the national anthem.

That said, the Bosnian football team are known for promising much only to spectacularly fail to deliver. Not so different really.

Amazon rules

Who would have thought it? Amazon.co.uk does deliver to Bosnia. We ordered a trial DVD to test out their commitment to getting us our stuff, and sure enough, one week later, there it was sitting on our doorstep having had a hassle free trip. It didn't even cost that much for postage.

This is great customer service from Amazon and extremely bad news for my bank account. I'm not sure how many DVDs or CDs we'll be ordering, but English language books that I want to read can be pretty difficult to find here. Now, I wonder if we can get someone to deliver some really good bottles of French red wine....

Halloween Pumpkins

I'm not normally a fan of appropriating other cultures and have always been a bit suspicious of Halloween celebrations in England, much preferring to get excited about the gruesome effigy burning that is Guy Fawkes on November 5th.

Back in Bosnia there has been a deluge of pumpkins. They are clearly now in season with everyone chomping away on pumpkin seeds and eating a form of savoury pumpkin pie (which took me by surprise the first time I tried it as I had always assumed pumpkin pie was sweet). Stuck for ideas to entertain Adam whilst Lukey was having a nap, we decided to give this Halloween pumpkin carving a go. Did you know that you can buy pumpkin stencils and special pumpkin carving kits? Neither did I. Obviously we didn't and hacked away instead with a big knife and a couple of spoons.

We are both very pleased with our efforts, lit up with candles they do look pretty gruesome. On display outside of our front door, they are catching the attention of passing Bosnians who are no doubt even more confused about what English culture entails.

A very English boy

Having worked out that no one else in his class speaks English, Adam has developed a new tactic. Instead of learning Bosnian he is going to teach them all to speak English.

The imperial genes run strong; he is English through and through. If in doubt, bend everyone elses will and get them to speak your language.

It has to be said, his success has been limited.