Let’s take a break from doom and disaster. There’s enough to go around, so it’ll be there for us later. Instead, let’s dig through the search engine questions that Lord Google sends me and see what people want to know about Britain. I promise, you won’t learn a thing.

Food-related questions

british baking powder biscuits

There is no such thing as a British baking powder biscuit. Except at my house and they’re the American kind. And I can’t invite you over anyway because we’re still in lockdown–or we were when I wrote this and I trust we still will be when it goes live. Besides, there aren’t enough to go round. Sorry.

There is such a thing as a British scone, but a scone is not a baking powder biscuit any more than my cousin is me. Much to my cousin’s relief, I’m sure. They (and we) do have a family resemblance, which is why you’ll find British people who are horrified at the idea of eating biscuits and gravy. They’ve either mistaken baking powder biscuits (not sweet) for scones (a bit sweet but with a similar look–family resemblance and all that) or for what the British call biscuits, which are what Americans call cookies.

Is that confusing enough that I can stop there? Let’s talk about something else.

can cats eat sticky toffee pudding

Yes, technically speaking. They have mouths, which allow them to eat all kinds of things. But they can only do sticky toffee pudding if their humans (a) bring some home for them or (b) make some themselves. Cats–and I know this will upset some of you—can’t cook and wouldn’t bother if they could. A nice raw mouse is good for the digestion. Both going down and coming up.

You’re welcome.

raisin monday

This isn’t really about food, it’s about tradition, but raisins are food so let’s slip it in here.

Raisin Monday is one of those bizarre, centuries-old British traditions that—

I was going to say that no one can explain but this one’s unusual in that the origin is known. It’s just that even once you know it, it doesn’t make much sense so you still come away feeling like you don’t know. It involves raisins, shaving cream (that’s a modern addition), and silly costumes. Also alcohol, which may or may not be a modern addition. I can’t urge you strongly enough to go read the full explanation.

brussel sprouts and christianity

Is it just me or are the questions here getting stranger?

Brussels sprouts are a vegetable. As such, they have no religion. Neither, for the record, do apples, figs, or green beans. Neither does my cat, Fast Eddie, although he’s not a vegetable. Even the most evangelical proselytizer will, I think, accept that this is how things ought to be.

With that out of the way, we can address what may have been the question behind the question: Do brussels sprouts have any significance in Christianity? I’m probably not the best person to answer this–I’m not only Jewish, I’m an atheist, as I have to (have to, mind you) mention here every so often–but I can take a reasonable outsider’s guess. To the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, brussels sprouts are not mentioned in the Bible. Ask Lord Google about brussels sprouts and the Bible and you won’t end up with one of the psalms, you’ll end up looking at recipe and gardening books that claim to have the definitive word on whichever. They have titles like The Broccoli Bible.

Broccoli, just for the record, is not the same as brussels sprouts. And it has no religion either.

If there is a brussels sprouts psalm, I trust that someone will let me know about it. Or possibly write it. Ignorance like that can’t be allowed to continue, even if it’s mine and I treasure it.

This whole idea that brussels sprouts have some religious meaning comes, I’m reasonably sure, from the tradition of making two cuts in the base of the stems before you cook them. In theory, that makes the stem cook at the same speed as the leafy part. And since the two cuts form a cross (or an X, depending on which way you hold it), you end up with a kind of instant religious imagery, or you do in the minds of people who live surrounded by the imagery of that religion. I’m sure that somewhere along the line, someone told a younger someone, “That let’s the devil cook out of them,” and that got passed down through the generations.

I learned to make two cuts in the stem in the Jewish atheist kitchen that I grew up in and around. (That’s not a carelessly worded sentence. Of course my kitchen was both Jewish and irreligious. If you’ve never discussed religion and philosophy with your kitchen, you really should.)

Where was I?

The cuts weren’t a religious act. That was just the way I was taught to cook sprouts.

As an older, lazier, and more skeptical cook, I discovered that you don’t have to do anything more than rinse the things and dump them in the steamer. They come out just fine.

Who let me get started on this? Honestly, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

They also ripen in the winter, so in Britain people tend to serve them at Christmas, reinforcing the idea that there’s some meaning in it all. Much of life, my friends, is meaningless. The meaning is all in what you bring to it. And if that strikes you as profound, consider the source and throw the thought out your mental window.

Which gives us a neat transition to our next category:

The search for knowledge about life’s important subjects

is it called great britain anymore

No. Bucking the trends, it (that’s the country) has decided that Great Britain is too non-binary a name and from here on it will be called either Mary-Sue or Bear. It will (a) choose and (b) send in the paperwork for the change as soon as it decides which gender it is. In the meantime, it would like to be addressed as the country formerly known as Great Britain.

spiffing – do people say this

In the fourteen years that I’ve lived in Britain, I’ve heard it used in one conversation. To be fair, though, once it was dropped into that conversation, we must have repeated it three or four times each to reinforce how absurd the whole thing was. It was a spiffing conversation.

what is the financial system based on giving instad of taxes in churches like the church of England

I think what someone’s looking for here is the word tithe, which isn’t a financial system. Financial systems are things like feudalism, capitalism, socialism. Tithing is what Merriam-Webster calls a voluntary system of giving a tenth of your income to a religious establishment, but there was a time when it was about as voluntary as gravity, taxes, or believing what everyone around you did. This was back when you didn’t talk about “a religious establishment, “ or even “a church,” you talked about “the church,” the one and only, which you belonged to and paid your money to because the church had the power to demand that and you had the power to say yes to it. Imagining a life lived outside of the church was, for most people, like imagining a life lived outside of human society.

Tithing preceded that Church of England. The C. of E. just continued a tradition established by the Catholic Church, and that made me curious enough that I visited an Orthodox Church website to see if the Orthodox Church has tithes. It says tithing is “ is the Old Testament injunction to set aside 10% of all one possesses for the work of the Lord.” So yes, the Orthodox Church does that as well, and I’m going to guess that the tradition predates the split between eastern and western Christianity.

In Islam, the parallel tradition called zakat and it’s considered a tax, but it’s 2.5%, not 10%. In Judaism, tithing first appears in the Torah not as a commandment but as a practice of the patriarchs–or so the website I looked at told me. It’s not that I know this stuff. This being the Jewish tradition, the explanation involved sages with varying opinions on major and minor points and explanations of how the world’s changed since the patriarchs wandered through it and why that does or doesn’t back up the varying opinions. In other words, it’s long and full or arguments. For about half a paragraph, I was filled with nostalgia, then I gave up because it’s not a topic I care about and I’d found what I needed. You’re welcome to follow the link and split hairs to your heart’s content.

first word in the name of a document king john signed

That would be Magna. As in Carta. Although he surely signed other documents as well, in a roundabout sort of way, since signing as we know it wasn’t the way people validated documents then. If you were important enough to sign a document, you had a seal to do it. And if you were important enough to be king, you had people to wield the seal for you. Because why should a king exert himself?

Ihow do i pronounce west derby

I was ready to say, airily, that you pronounce it the same way you pronounce East Derby, only you switch East for West. Then I remembered where I am, and more to the point where Derby (East, West, chocolate, and plain) is. This is an English place name we’re talking about, and English place names are treacherous beasts. You don’t want to turn your back on one, ever. The only safe way to find out how one is pronounced is to creep up on the place in question and, once you’re near enough to see the “You are now entering” sign (or its equivalent; I think “You are entering” is an American thing), point at it and ask the closest person, “How do you say that word.”

And once they tell you, hope they’re actually from there, because if they’re outsiders they might be too embarrassed to tell you they don’t know and they’ll get it wrong.