I have lived in Germany for 7 years and I am married to a German. I lived most of my adult life in Scotland but was born and brought up in Liverpool. My father’s family were mostly Scottish and my mothers family were an Irish/Welsh mix. It gets more complicated than that, but it doesn’t have that much effect on cultural identification.
Liverpool, in common with a lot of major port towns, has a large immigrant population. That accounts for why many people in the town don’t identify as being primarily English, even though the city is nominally in England. The “Scouse not English” thing is just a shorthand for saying that we are all mongrels!
Anyway, the next part of the crumpet saga; I managed to persuade her to toast the next lot and she then proceeded to put pepper on them and moaned that they were ‘too crunchy’.
I used to play this stupid fucking game once or twice a night with my remarkably ADHD and equally adorable amigo. We got it down to a pattern, completed it in under two minutes (there may have been PEDs involved). Just tried it for the first time after about five years, and I missed nine countries. Surprisingly I remembered all the Oceanic and Central American islands like a melody.
