TomTom and Lady Hambleden

Ange, Anna and I have moved from a stumbling pace to a full run into the 21st century. It all started with my swish Sony Ericsson W810i mobile phone. As discussed below, it does more than any phone ever should. Ange is fully equiped with a mobile as well. Anna has a toy phone that sings songs. We have digital TV and broadband internet. The car tells us the temperature outside. Ange and I have set up Facebook accounts (we could both use 'friends'!), though still discuss why exactly we do. Social networking site are all the rage, so we're hip.

However, we took the quantum step on the weekend when we purchased 'sat nav' for the car. Apparently the TomTom software is the cat's ass of sat nav equipment. It's intuitive, it's relatively inexpensive, it's like my phone: pervasive amongst those that care. We set it up tonight. It was very exciting: the machine talks to you, warning you of upcoming directions. It is a serious improvement over Angela with a map. We had to choose the voice we wanted. We had a choice between 3 female and 1 male American voices, 1 male Australian voice, and 1 male and 1 female British voices. The Aussie male reminded me too much of the beep test and after years of misdirection from Ange, I'm not sure I trust female north American. Ange vetoed the north American male voice because she associates directions from that accent with driving control freaks (i.e., me). We went for "Mary": the British female. After all, we live here so we might as well have the right accent and it really won out by elimination anyway.

Speaking of British-ness, Ange had the most ridiculously British day at work on Wednesday last week. She left her office at the all-girl boarding and day school she works at. She walked across the courtyard to the car and drove east through Henley-on-Thames to Marlow, where she went north down a narrow, single lane country road that runs into the heart of the Chilterns. She was going to the Manor house in Hambledon (yes, discussed previously with photos). She had been invited by Lady Hambleden (yes, I'm serious) for lunch after the school had donated funds towards a charitable cause sponsored by Lady Hambleden. The ate their three course lunch which included apple crumble for pudding. Ange sat slightly perplexed with the cutlery at her disposal and quietly waited for the ladies around her to start. Turns out the spoon goes in the right hand and the desert fork is used to break and move the crumble to the spoon. After pudding, they retired to the drawing room for tea. Manor houses in the countryside, aristocracy, tea in the drawing room. It seems an unlikely work experience in Calgary. Chalk it up.

This is doing the rounds on email right now, but it makes me laugh, so I share it: