I'll never make a personal shopper...

I should be trawling through my files for something to use for this week's Gallery over at Tara's, but this week's theme is 'Creatures' and for the life of me I can't think of any suitable photos to use for it.

I can think of one I could use; that of a toad squatting fatly brown underneath an upturned log on the minibeast safari we organised for my son's 4th birthday, but since it just looks like a toad-shaped piece of bark (which I guess is the point of camouflage), I hardly think it's worth it. And I can think of one that I would like to use; that of a rolling wave off Noosa beach in Queensland Australia that shows water so clear you can see the silver shapes of fish hanging suspended inside it, but sadly that's an impossibility. Whilst the image is burned clearly (and I hope, for perpetuity) into my mind's eye, I didn't have a camera in my hand at the time, so I can't share it with you, I'm afraid.

So no entry in Tara's Gallery for me today.

Instead, a conundrum (and no, it has nothing to do with helping me come up with a schedule for what on earth to do with the Boys during the school holidays).

This afternoon I met a friend of mine who is soon to travel to England for the first time. Having lived in the US all her life, and not having travelled that much outside it before she and her family were posted to Moscow, she's keen to make the most of her experiences as an expat. A part of this is her wish to take home a tangible souvenir from each of the countries that she visits whilst she's more European-based. For example, she's decided that when they finally leave Russia to go back home to the US, she will take with her a samovar. This summer she's also visiting Norway (a troll is on her shopping list), Scotland (bagpipes are a planned purchase), and Croatia (where she's hit a bit of road-block as it seems the only things invented there were the tie and ballpoint pens. Who knew?).

What, she asked me, should she buy whilst in the UK? Her initial idea was to buy a tea set, which of course I pooh-poohed because, well, it's such a cliche (unlike the bagpipes, troll and samovar, obviously), and of course there has to be something permanent and tangible that reminds one of England that is more interesting than that.

She was interested. "Really? What?"

"Um...."

There was a long pause whilst I realised that for me, most of the things that speak of England are not tangible. Crisp Autumn days, the long-ago sight of burning fields in August, the sound of cricket matches (I almost wrote 'the sound of leather on willow' but who knows what hits on google that would turn up?), soft West Country rain, thunder and lightning ice-cream, eton mess, church bells on a Wednesday evening, patch-work fields, Class (with a capital ''C'), picking blackberries with purple-stained fingers in prickly hedgerows, rubbing dock leaves on nettle stings, cornish pasties, cream teas, roast potatoes and yorkshire pudding, mass hysteria over Wimbledon, morris dancers, school fetes, country shows, pub lunches, cotswold stone walls, Brit pop, 80's synthesiser pop, the New Romantics, The Wombles, Paddington Bear, St John's Ambulance, the Brownies, Bonfire Night - well, the list is endless*. But not one of those things can you package up and take home with you to pull out and show to someone to say 'And of course we visited England too, and this is what we came home with...'

She got bored waiting for me - her quintessentially English friend - to come up with something, and said "Well I guess I do already have my Waterford stuff, of course."

I woke up from my reverie. "Waterford is in Ireland", I replied. "Definitely not in England. You'll have an entire nation upset if you make that mistake, I promise - and it won't be the English. No, there must be something else. Other than a tea-set, I mean."

................

I've said I'll get back to her. Any ideas?

*BTW - I have a list of these for London too, but as anyone who's lived there knows, London is not really England...