My Pudding Bum

It’s not just my birthday that seems to have the fabric of reality in a tizzy. Other strangely synchronicitous events also seem to be paving the way for the wife’s upcoming trip to England in December.

That’s right. For two weeks, she’ll finally be making her long-delayed pilgrimage to the land where the name of every subway stop has been immortalized in a Top 40 hit. It’s a trip she should have made long ago and I think England needs to meet her as much as she needs to meet it. Pilgrimage is not too strong a word for someone whose love of and devotion to Anglophilic pop (and pop culture) is second to none, at least in my experience.

The official excuse is that she’s going to see The Pogues play some holiday shows. Considering that even framed portraits of Shane MacGowan seem to harbor some dislike of me, I’ll be sitting these out, thank you. Besides which, I’m not going to Blighty unless someone guarantees me a whole bunch of singing chimney sweeps. But for the wife, it’ll be a trip to the moon on gossamer wings.

And the way is being prepared.

For instance, about a week ago we strolled down the main drag here taking in the sights of the annual Sunnyside Street Fair, an event which features any number of handmade crafts and bootleg DVD’s. It’s hard not to go to something when it’s one block away from your house.

Stretching the short distance between the train station, past the biker bar and Buddhist college, and down to the bank, it usually doesn’t take long to get the gist, although we did get hung up for a while in the Entertainment area where some energetic tots were doing their best to demonstrate the choreography they’d learnt for At The Codfish Ball.

Predictably, I got hung up at the budget CD stall where I took a chance on a 3-CD set of George Formby’s Golden Greats. For those in the dark, Formby was an extremely popular British entertainer in the 1940’s whose songs of sly double-entendre endeared him to the public. Titles like She’s Got Two Of Everything, With My Little Ukelele In My Hand, and With My Little Stick Of Blackpool Rock should give you some idea. They’re full of wordplay and just-avoided lyrics (saying waistcoat when the rhyme would clearly suggest knickers) and usually involve nudist camps, ladies in baths, and kilts gone akimbo.

Sort of the audio equivalent of a “saucy” postcard.

Anyway, they’re all terribly addicting, which means the wife has had to suffer through endless replays of Why Don’t Women Like Me? and Levi’s Monkey Mike. Formby makes the Sex Pistols sound about as British as Ashlee Simpson, so she should actually be thanking me for helping to acclimatize her to the environment that awaits her.

Then the other evening we’re checking out the programming on the new gay and lesbian cable channel they added to our package, which so far seems to consist of Xena marathons and reruns of The Graham Norton Show. It was on one of the latter that we caught Graham subjecting some contestants to a sort of Newlywed Game type show.

The female half of a British couple was asked what she thought her mate’s best feature was and she replied “his sense of humor” (or humour, if you prefer). Asked to reveal his guess, her husband held up a card which read simply "My pudding bum".

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I defy you to come up with a phrase more quintessentially British than My pudding bum.

It’s as if Winnie-The-Pooh and Paddington and Rupert the Bear all got together to discuss their best feature over a light repast of marmalade and jaffa cakes.

So ever since we witnessed this, the answer to everything around here has pretty much been my pudding bum. It will probably be quite some time before you can get any other words out of either one of us.

I figure by the time she leaves, no one over there will even realize she’s American. And these days, that’s sort of an advantage when you’re traveling.

I wonder if The Pogues will cover Step In Time ?