a few fun things

[deird1]

English towns have delightful names. Yesterday we drove past a sign pointing right to Wigglesworth, and left to Giggleswick.

They also have ridiculously useful postcodes. British people, do you have any idea of how awesome your postcodes are? I can type a postcode into the GPS, and it'll direct us to within a few houses of our destination. Try that in Australia, and you'd have to spend a week tracking down the right house once you arrived...

And the sheep! They have tails! Real tails! This is seriously strange for me; Aussie lambs are de-tailed while still young, so all the grown sheep I've seen have been tailless. These sheep are new and funky.

Comments

[klme.livejournal.com]

Well now I need to see a photo of a sheep tail

[deird1]

Hoping to get one...

[velvetwhip]

Sheep! I love sheep!


Gabrielle

[deird1]

Yay!

[stormwreath]

*Tries not to be amused that almost the first thing an Australian notices about the UK is the sheep*

*Fails*

The handy thing about postcodes is that you can usually tell whereabouts in the country a letter has come from based on the first letters of the postcode - B for Birmingham, EX for Exeter, LS for Leeds, etc. It would be a lot harder to memorise the purely-numeric codes most countries use.

(Welcome to England!)

[deird1]

Harder, yes, but it does give you info if you know a bit. For instance, the first number is always the state, so that's reasonably easy. And all the postcodes near me are about one number off from mine, so I know they're in the vicinity.

[draconin]

Must be an odd sight. :-) I'm guessing here since I've never been to England but I suspect that it doesn't have the fly problem that Australia does. When I was a young tacker I lived on a farm in the wheat/sheep belt in WA and my understanding of the reason for mulesing was always that it was less cruel than leaving them to get flyblown with maggots. I still remember a few pitiful examples of flyblown sheep we didn't find in time that were... not pleasant.

[deird1]

*nods grimly*

Europe seems to be very un-flied. There are no flyscreens anywhere, which keeps weirding me out. People just leave the windows open.

[gillo]

We do have flies, and you do see a lot more screens in the south - southern France, Italy, other Med countries. Up here in Britain, though, it's too cold for most of the nasty flies, and most of them die off in winter. I've never heard of a maggot problem with livestock, but Oz is a heck of a lot warmer and closer to the Equator.

[brin_bellway]

British people, do you have any idea of how awesome your postcodes are? I can type a postcode into the GPS, and it'll direct us to within a few houses of our destination. Try that in Australia, and you'd have to spend a week tracking down the right house once you arrived...

You think so? I generally view ridiculously specific postcodes as a privacy concern. I have no problem admitting to the Big Wide Internet that I used to live in 08002, but there are only four houses in [Canadian postcode redacted]. Those pocket-change surveys claim to anonymise your data, but my postcode and my age demographic are all you need to know exactly who I am, and my postcode alone gives you a 50% chance of guessing my house right. (I know I said there were four houses, but two of them have been converted to businesses, so there are only two residences.)

So, how disconcerting is it being in a left-driving country again after having to get used to right-driving?

[deird1]

The left-driving is actually easy. In Germany I have this tiny instinctive bit in my brain screaming at me that I'm doing it wrong, no matter how many months it's been, so I still occasionally make a weird mistake. Here, it took me all of a day to reset myself back to "normal".

[curiouswombat]

Yesterday we drove past a sign pointing right to Wigglesworth, and left to Giggleswick.


And i can probably work out within a couple of miles where you were on the A65 - I used to pass that way to and from York when my daughter was there at university.

[deird1]

Heh. Cool.

[gillo]

You have sheep without tails? Why?

I know exactly where in Yorkshire you were when you posted this. It's pretty, isn't it? A lot of the sheep round there are breeds raised to need very little looking after - they raom the fells all year.

Postcodes are OK, I suppose - they just trained the SatNavs to use them properly. They were designed to make rounds easier for postmen as much as redirecting between towns, hence the level of detail.

I hope you are enjoying our country. Do you now see why a couple of hundred km is a long way here?

[deird1]

As draconin mentioned, the sheep in Australia get horrifying issues with flies laying maggots under their tails. The best solution we've found is to remove the tails as painlessly as possible, while they're little, thereby not leaving the flies anywhere to go.