Hello America, Can I Interest You In...

It is hard to ignore America. That great wedge of land beneath Canada and above Mexico has spread its tentacles all around the globe and no more than to Britain where we have a history of borrowing some aspects of the American lifestyle. Cody of the It Is What It Is blog and i have put our heads together to thrash out the things we would take from each others countries and what we feel we could offer in exchange.

The first thing i would ask for is the US National Anthem. Great tune which soars to a passionate crescendo of pride filled gusto. Ours is so bland and tuneless even a rockets red flare up the backside wouldn't be enough to breath life into it. For this we would give you changeable weather. Yes we are obsessed with it here but that's because it is so unpredictable that we literally can have 3 days of weather in 1. It is what ex-pats miss the most apparently because the weather in most of America is so reliably unchanging.

Next on the table is your sportsmen. I don't know if you have noticed but our sporting fraternity is a bit rubbish. We have terrible tennis players, awful athletes, god awful golfers and shite swimmers. We will take any on offer, we are not proud as this summers Olympic medal haul will prove.
Your sportsmen in exchange for the British Communications Regulator (OFCOM) who ensure that the television news channels keep to a Broadcasting code of accuracy, impartiality and fairness in television and radio programmes. I have seen Fox news. You need OFCOM.

Something we need that you have is exciting politics and politicians. Watch our House of Commons, most of them are either asleep or have lost the will to even pretend they are not bored to death. No Obama-esque orations or Clinton style passion. Heck, i would even settle for some Hillary type pointing and manic grinning over Gordon Brown and his strangely eerie smile.
For this we offer you the letter U. The amount of times i have been accused of having the spelling skills of a monkey by you Americans. It's our language, we had it first so would it kill you to stick some U's into words? We would throw in an -ise to sweeten the deal so you can get shot of that -ize.

With the exception of a few bands you could count on two fingers, British music is in a bad way. You have more decent bands than you could shake a Amy Winehouse spliff at so throw a few of them this way and we give you the ability to not applaud every ten seconds. It drives me crazy trying to listen to someone over there and the speaker is constantly interrupted by applause and whooping.

Judges that hand out creative sentences like the man who called a police officer a pig and was ordered to stand on a street corner next to a pig with a sign saying the pig was not a police officer. You can have our game of football, or soccer as you insist on calling it. American football just looks like a load of men who jump on each other and then get substituted by another group of men who do the same thing over and over again. Seriously lacks the poetry and skill of a good old fashioned soccer match.

Finally, David Boreanaz, George Clooney, Brad Pitt. We have no good looking male actors. We have Hugh Grant and Bob Hoskins. Not very fair but i think you will be more than pleased to accept a selection of British swearwords for the trio. I know you don't have 'T*s**r' and its stronger cousin 'W*a*k*r' but how about ar*e, bo**ocks, bugg*r, sod and git? Tempted?

That's that then, mull it over and let me know what you are interested in.

Cody has his own ideas on what we need from you and what you need from us here.