Tonight’s experience just reminds me quite how different NYC is to NW3. I was out at 8pm after a school thing with a bit of baby sitting time in hand, so I wander over to 3rd Avenue and get my very favourite lychee flavoured bubble ice tea with a large bag of rice crackers from the health food store next door. Best enjoyed at home in front of Project Runway or The Blacklist (new series just started last week). And then I decide to get a spontaneous (and that’s not something any mother of young children can remember being) manicure. I know I’ve gone on about these before, but I feel the need to share. Here’s how the conversation went with the very nice lady doing my nails:

“Chinchilly?” she asks.

“Chinchilla?” I respond.

I look at the bottom of the bottle of nail polish and see it does indeed say Chinchilly.

“Chinchilla? That’s an animal, someone told me that” she responds, as if I don’t know that.

“Chinchilly. Yes, a cold chinchilla!” I smirk and think she will laugh at my lame humour.

“Eh?” She sort of says, but in a Nepalese way.

I then have to explain that chilly means cold and that it is a play on the word chinchilla, but her eyes glaze over and I give up.

I then apologise for my British humour and remind myself that I left my humour at Heathrow last time I left London and I never make a joke here because there’s no humour here. Not my kind anyway.

(NB: writing this blog post, the text editor has told me I have made four spelling errors besides the obvious chinchilly. Can you spot the US and UK English?)