Wants and needs

When you move from where you happen to have been born and go to another country you expect things to be different. In fact that may well be the reason for moving, for the differences.
I expected to miss the normal things, like friends and family, but it was the odd little things that I didn't anticipate missing that were the shocks.
When I moved from Dublin to London I discovered they didn't have red lemonade. The savages.
This shock was on top of my discovery that they didn't have proper crisps. These two jolts were unsettling.
In Ireland, if you are waiting for the bus to work (and to be honest, you are always waiting) it's considered normal form to talk to the person stood beside you if you happen to make eye contact.
Usually just small talk about the weather or complaints about the lack of buses.
This behaviour in England got me a few funny looks and was soon stopped.
And then there is the stuff you pay no attention to when it's there every day and only notice by it's absence. Being a lapsed Catholic (honestly, never much of one at all, shhh) I never paid much notice to the nightly event on RTE , the national television channel, at 6 o clock. But the angelus , as far as I was concerned was eternal. It was accepted and expected, like sand on a beach or sunburn on everyone the day after the first sunny day, it's just there.
Except it's not.
In fact, in England they had never even heard of it. And I had to try to explain the concept.
It went something like this:
me- Well, it's on at 6pm and is a series of religious pictures and a ringing bell.
them- why?
me- the ringing bell is to accompany the reciting of prayers.
them- no, why?
I had no answer.