"You call that driving? You bloody wanker!"

I’m not sure where my love of Great Britain came from… The music I listened to as a teenager (The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Blur)? The chapter books my mother read to me as a child (everything from C.S. Lewis to Roald Dahl to Noel Streitfeild? Or my childhood obsession with Mary Poppins? (If I had to hazard a guess I would say the latter). Whatever it was, I just love this country. And though in most ways, it’s just like home, I still can’t get enough of the way they speak here. Yesterday I sat next to the bus driver just to hear him hurl obscenities at passing motorists in his cute little cockney accent. Just like Burt from Mary Poppins, only much more inappropriate.