SaffasintheUK

As we have settled into the UK, I have come to recognise (and love) the sights that are so intrinsically British .   The sights that are to the UK, what car guards, street vendors and taxis are to SA.   Today’s blog is a motley collection of the sights that I believe are so very British, although I’m not talking about the obvious ones such as rain and umbrellas, roses and manor houses…I’m talking abut the things you see all the time and don’t actually realise are more British than tea!   And these same sights will become as familiar to you as barbed wire on your garden wall back in SA. 1.   Red telephone boxes Red telephone boxes can be found everywhere! I love the red telephone box es, you see them everywhere! As much as the Telkom boxes died out in SA with the uptake of mobile phones, the red telephone boxes in the UK have clung to life.    If they aren’t still offering a telephone service, you’ll find they’ve been re-purposed a...

A colleague at work recently returned from her holiday to SA.  She’s looking tanned, relaxed and has been gushing about her trip….which sounds amazing.  Yeah, I’m secretly jealous especially in the dark months of winter when I miss the sun.  Eavesdropping on her conversations, I kept hearing her say how cheap food in SA is, and cost of living is so much cheaper and joking about moving back.  This puzzled me because I’ve done these sums before and I really don’t find SA cheaper than the UK.   In fact, the opposite is true according to my past research.   But, not wanting to be an obnoxious arse and correct her, I thought I’d do some number crunching again to see if anything has changed in the two and a bit years since we left SA. So I started with the most obvious, and simple comparison…groceries.   This is an easy one to check by creating a trolley online with Tesco and PicknPay. I took my most recent shopping list and decided to enter these ...

At this time of the year, my thoughts often turn to home.   It’s understandable as it’s a time for family and togetherness, but it’s also a time when your social media feed is littered with photos of people on beaches enjoying their Christmas holiday. I’ve often wondered about this feeling, this nameless discomfort that crops up from time to time, what exactly is it?   I really can’t say I’m actually homesick because I am not.   But there things I miss, things that would be considered “homely”.   Taking my loved ones out of the equation, I thought long and hard about this….what is it that I miss about home and does this mean I’m unhappy in the UK if I have these feelings? The short answer is no, it doesn’t mean I’m unhappy and I don’t consider myself homesick either.   So what is it that makes me wistful or nostalgic at certain times? The Welsh have a beautiful word for it – hiraeth, pronounced heer-eyeth.   Hiraeth is a word that cannot be tr...

So my DH messed up my Christmas gift, and I’m actually not at all upset about it.   I had recently heard about the £1 chef, Miguel Barclay with his cookbooks offering recipes that only cost £1 per person and I fell in love with this idea.   DH, in another life was a chef, and I’ve always enjoyed relaxing in the kitchen (I’m certainly not the kind of person that looks like her fridge is empty because I enjoy delicious food waaaaay too much).   Home cooking is hugely important to both of us and something we take great enjoyment from – in fact, when we packed up house to move countries, we had to get rid of well over 100 recipe books between us, far more than the average foodie household.   We take home cooking very seriously. DH is also the Minister of Finance and watches our budget like a hawk, and it’s a tight budget, so he walks a careful line every month, making sure we don’t spend frivolously.   So I thought, what a brilliant Christmas gift! The...