The Tale of the YDD and the Post Office

Today I went into the big post office at Trafalgar Square to post a parcel. I like this post office because it has longer and more obscure opening hours than many local post offices, so if you find its Saturday afternoon, and you need to post something, you can. Because they are in town, not far from Trafalgar Square, Leceister Square and several London sites, you often get a lot of foreigners in there sending stuff home. They also have a little shop of postpaks, stationery items, weird stuff like a small selection of DVDs, minispeakers for ipods (go figure? - yep, I'm just going to go to the post office to buy a speaker for my pod) and things like that, plus seasonal cards.

Mother's Day in England is like the 3rd Sunday in March or something (this year its March 18th) and so the post office had a selection of Mother's Day cards. I'm happily minding my own business in the queue, thinking about how much I need to insure my parcel for (its my camcorder which I am sending off for repair), when suddenly my quiet deliberations are broken by an American woman with her loud, shrill, nasal "Honey, I cain't buy any of these cards because they all spell 'Mom' wrong". Seriously love, you're in England. They ain't gonna spell 'M-O-M' on their cards now, are they? And you'd think if anyone's gonna spell words correctly, the Poms would, it is England after all and the language is called 'English', not 'American'...

Although that being said I have been stunned as to the large number of English people who can not pronounce "th" correctly. People, its "THREE", not "FREE".... and where on earth does "innit" come from? Or, my personal fave - "l" - which gets pronounced as like a cross between a "w" and an "el" - so "Will Young" becomes "Wiwl Young". Maybe this is just a "Sowf Larndin" fing...

Anyway, this YDD in the post office thing got me thinking about our perceptions of different nationalities. For example, when I was growing up, we would always go on about the "loud Americans" and how whenever there was an American around, you always knew their business because you couldn't but help overhear their conversation - it was in your face.

But now its the Aussies who are developing a poor reputation. You know the types, the young bucks straight off the boat, who think that no Australian has been here before, and that you aren't patriotic unless you punctuate every word with several diphthongs and tripthongs, with mouth wide like a cheshire cat so you get that 'just so' drawl, chucking in a few "G'day mates" and "She'll be right, mates", and that you have to go hang out at the Walkabout or the Redback til chuck out time, then be loud, drunken and obnoxious on the streets - this is a right of passage for young Aussies travelling abroad. People, stop it. You are giving us a bad name.

This really hit home to me when I was in Vilnius, Lithuania. I was reading the guest book in the youth hostel when I came across a comment from someone asking if there was anywhere to go where there are no Australians. The answer? Kiev, because Aussies need a visa for the Ukraine...

Oh, and the meaning behind the title "YDDs"? Well this is a term that Judy, Leisa and I coined when we went to see "The Mousetrap" in London. It stands for "Yankee Doodle Dandy's" and we would use it as a code for any time we encountered loud Americans, particularly those commenting on how much bigger and better everything is "back home"...

Finally, just to set the record straight - I have nothing against the Americans, English, Italians or any other nationality whatsoever, in fact, I have many dear friends of those nationalities (who I've probably lost now thanks to my comments)...