5 Questions for Britain

as for english people, well, as i said, they are likely to use english/british interchangeably.

i would like to dress like i am in dickens!

people who don't like vegemite simply aren't applying the correct amount. it's not bloody jam, don't spread it like it is.

2) It has the tactics of chess and a great deal of grace and subtlety when played well.

3) By product of the brewin industry. What shall we do with this waste yeast? oh we'll boil it up with some salt and flog it. (Entrepreneurial thrift, vegemite is a waste of good vegetables)

4) Why the hell not. Naming meals or courses after the most common things eaten or drank in them at some point, sheer madness I tell you.

5) 1 country, 4 nations, 4 (at least) national identities. As for sports the IOC recognises Britain, FIFA gives special consideration to the 'Home Nations' because they invented 'Association Football'. Britain keeps it this way so it gets 4 votes in FIFA decisions. Another anomoly are that in Rugby there is an All-Ireland team and no NI team (unless you count Ulster which is a subset of Ireland, playing in the Celtic League). This is not unique, the Faroe Islands are danish but they get their own national team.

(one is Donegal; I can't remember the other)

(x-post)

you ignorant arse drools

While you've got the book down read 'In Defence of English Cooking', 'The Moon Under Water', 'The Lion and the Unicorn' etc etc & more of the mysteries of this funny little pissstain of an island will be explained.

When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.

When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game. See?

5) In football it has been a hard fight, to retain separate teams for the four UK nations. As well as historical reasons, there was the fact that administratively football was run completely separately in NI and Scotland, with their own authorities and leagues. The odd one out was Wales, where its clubs were part of the English structure. To maintain the distinction, Wales set up its own authorities and league - but the teams at a professional level in England still play in England.

'Fag' and 'bumming' can have those meanings here too, they are just secondary ones so need clarifying by context.

Cricket could have been okay if they had decided to play it for a sane length of time. It is surely not much less inherently action-packed than baseball.

Actually Wales is a principality and Northern Ireland is a province, so only England and Scotland are nations.

I Love Marmite - HomepageArticles and FAQ about Marmite from a devoted fan who also directs Marmite haters to appropriate information. www.ilovemarmite.com

Still nations whatever their monarchichal designation. although it ould be argued that NI is a fragment of a nation.

In fact there are three in the Republic - Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal - making nine in all.

I thought you were only supposed to spread Marmite on toast and not make a drink out of it? Can't stand the stuff. Promite is the only way forward.

You forgot your pie.

The only people who conflate Englishness with Britishness are neither (or Southerners, who don't count as most of them are practically French!).
"I'm British by birth and English by the Grace of God!"

Not for the last year or so. It is now yeast waste. With Salt. YUM!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovril

Football is far better than any other sport. The deal with cricket is not to think of it as a sport, but as a way of passing the time while sitting in the sun. Rugby is terrible - just a load of fat blokes running into each other.

There is NOTHING in the world superior to marmite on toast for breakfast.

The 'tea' thing is tricky, and is kind of related to social class / north-south divide. Some people have breakfast,lunch,dinner others have breakfast,dinner,tea. The 'pudding' thing is simple - that's the name of the meal, and some puddings happen to have the word pudding in their name (though, confusingly, some non-puddings have the word pudding in their name, eg Yorkshire Pudding). The word 'dessert' is only used in restaurants.

The Britain thing is tricky. Very tricky. When I have to enter my country on a drop-down menu it takes me forever to find it, because I keep forgetting the name of it (I don't think I ever use the words 'United Kingdom', so I keep looking under England, or Britain, or Great Britain until eventually I remember).

This is rubbish and a typical uninformed view. The only positions where you might be able to get away with being fat, at any level, are in the front row. That's 3 positions out of 15. And those guys are not really fat, they're usually incredibly fit and powerful. In fact the great thing about rugby is that it is a game for all shapes and sizes. I would agree that in the pro-game the backs are beginning to look like forwards, but at grass roots level you'll get 10-stone scrum halves and wingers.

We have four teams at football because we invented it, then the next others were the nearest countries to us. When FIFA formed, they didn't want to piss us all off by urging us all to merge. The Olympics were invented by the French, so they were proper and correct about having us in as the UK.

I'll settle for : "Rugby league is terrible - just a load of blokes running into each other"

League is pants - ALL the best bits taken out - rucks, mauls, scrums, lineouts! And when they get tackled they just....stop.

i hate the fact that in school, you have to play the games of the old colonial upper class, instead of the game of the people. so outdated

When I was in school, we had to do just about every sport ever invented; or, at least, it felt that way.

Darts?

By a strange twist of fate all the male PE teachers at my comprehensive were Welsh, and they insisted that we played Rugby instead of football. Obviously this wasn't very popular, and it can't have been much fun for them either because none of us seemed capable of learning the rules, even after three years of it. Maybe this was some kind of reverse colonialism - the Welsh imposing their sport on Essex as revenge for centuries of oppression.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A61345

They DO stop at the tackle, (unless they pass out of the tackle. Everything stops while they heel it back and then go again. Until the sixth tackle, then they kick. Yawn.

You saucy wench!

Mark - I have very little experience of RL players but the one I did 'experience' was unable to keep going for long off the field. Cue Dr. C telling us how great RU players are in this department.

You've just answered the question yourself, that's exactly WHY cricket

english people use english and british interchangeably, as though they are the same thing

So do most people who aren't Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish. Britain's a redundant concept anyway.

Dear Britons: Since "bumming a fag" means borrowing a cigarette in your culture what do you say when you want to have anal sex with a homosexual?

Depends which Conservative Shadow Minister you intending having sex with