Getting into the spirit of things

Greetings, Anglophile reader, as this week brings us the archetypally American holiday of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving marks the start of the holiday season here, where basically no-one does any work from the middle of November until the second week in January. Honestly: pretty much no-one's working next week, then it's less than 3 weeks until it all stops again for Xmas.

This year's socially distanced Thanksgiving has caused a run on small turkeys, by which I mean, turkeys which are only slightly larger than literally any turkey you'd see in the UK. A small turkey is 6-10 pounds, apparently - so I guess we'll be eating it for that whole 6-week holiday period given that there's only two of us.

Anyway, over the last few weeks we've been making a concerted effort to get into the spirit of all things American, immersing ourselves in the truly American experience. So yes, dear reader, I've taken the two ultimate steps in American-ness: I've switched my phone so it now shows me the weather in Fahrenheit, and I've ordered and started using a US-layout keyboard! I know these are hardships, but dear reader, I'll do almost anything to bring you that authentic American feeling. So just as a quick ready-reckoner for Fahrenheit: 70s and 80s is "California as you know it", 60s is "a bit nippy", 50s is "genuinely nippy", 40s and 30s are "I'd have stayed in England if I knew it was going to be this cold".

However, you've got to draw the line somewhere, and there are some things I won't do even for the benefit of this august publication. So you won't find me drinking this:

Of course, the other thing that has happened in the last few weeks is that, well, 2020 seems to have almost stopped being 2020. It seems we have a relatively normal person set to occupy the White House from the end of January, and while I continue to touch my artisan wooden wrist rest whilst typing this, it appears the courts have been sane enough not to entertain any challenges to the election result. Georgia's recount has confirmed Biden as the winner there. We also have vaccines in the works, although I may hold out for the proper British vaccine to become available given this country's relatively loose grip on the principles of science.

Finally, a point of some dispute in the Beevers household: reader, does this look like legal tender to you?

OK, so it's got "This note is legal tender" written on it, but it doesn't take a criminal mastermind to come up with that, now does it? Two dollars??? Is this the US monetary system pranking me? The fascination with notes rather than coins here is already difficult to comprehend, and the idea that they're all the same size and colour... and now for some reason they want to make it worse by dropping in denominations that I've never seen before and have some entirely artificial granularity to them.

The answer of course, is never to carry cash, dear reader. I think the Queen got that idea from me. As I'm sure she's saying to herself this week, "All this could have been yours, if only you'd have paid your taxes".