Guinness from a sippy cup

Matt and I think that it would be a good idea to have a dictionary on the bus. Our bus has wireless internet and we can Google anything in question but how good does it feel to hold the binding and page through an actual book? To feel weight that is tangible, not virtual? I will tell you: it feels nostalgic.

We sent a runner out and she came back with the Webster's New World Basic Dictionary of American English. I was clear on the fact that I would like to look up Amurrrican words, please. No matter how critical of the U.S. I may get, I am not trying to be British. I don't say mate or bloke or rubbish. I say cool. I say motherfucker. I do not say wanker. Smack me if I say wanker.

On our bus are five American Idols, a chaperone, a driver, a security director, me, Matt and Geoff, who happens to be a very English tour manager (Marmite, gin, impeccable diction, etc). And who, today in the office, was playing music from my last year of high school: Stone Roses, Wonderstuff, and Happy Mondays.

"Thank you," I said to him. "I feel like I'm underage again and drinking bottomless cups of coffee at Perkins all night with the rest of the pissed-off teenagers in Ohio."

Geoff shook his head mournfully at the thought of a world where the drinking age is over 18. "How did you DO it?" he asked.

Well? I didn't know better.

That is until English friends and our exchange student Joanna explained - "whilst" also lecturing me on the superiority of their Queen's English as opposed to my bastardy mumbling - that they'd been going for pints at their local pub since they were about four and a half years old. They hadn't actually gotten the hang of cursive until they'd drank a few pints of Guinness out of a sippy cup.