The Straight Scoop on the English

     England is a country that used to be gigantic but now has shrunk so much that it has to share a small island with two other countries, Scotland and Wales, and possibly others as well.  (Whatever happened to Pictland?)   Notwithstanding the fact that countries are usually self-contained, all three  of these are parts of a fourth country of uncertain size and location called Great Britain and also the United Kingdom, though in its best days it was ruled by queens.
     A short distance across some water are two other countries, Ireland and Northern Ireland or Ulcer, that may or may not be parts of Great Britain, too, though some also see Ulcer as being a part of not only Ireland but also of England -- a situation that is surely the explanation for its name.   As befits a place that could be a part of as many as three other countries, that name has a second spelling that, because it is less easily understood, is preferred, "Ulster."
     It's the kind of drollery that you get in and around those quaint and interesting people called the Brits and especially in ye olde England.
      I am very well informed on what goes on with the English of England.  I have never been there, but that very detachment puts me in an excellent position to collect insights, and so I will hereby pass a couple of them on to you, as follows:
     First of all you may be astonished to learn that only Americans still use the English language.   The  English spend so much time in their pubs that they necessarily suffer a great deal of language impairment, and, like the Australians, they have come to speak something else, and increasingly their films need subtitles.    Similarly because of all those pints they are not aware of this, and they will never become aware of it.   The Scots, however, have heard the ugly rumor that they've been heard speaking English or something like it, and now and then they try to scotch that by supplying subtitles.
       Everybody in England has lots of neighbors and never do anything without them.
       I think that's nice. 
       The English are too harmless and good-humored to commit real crimes.   The worst that can be said of the worst of them, even Jack the Ripper, is that they're rascals.   The English police, too, are very good-humored and they definitely know and appreciate a good joke when they see one, and everything in England is a joke because everything, even the gross stuff, is all in such good fun.  
      I think that's nice, too.
      Whenever they get tired of babbling in pubs and don't know what else to do with themselves, the English start up a business selling food on the streets to grownups, using beat-up trucks that apparently came from over here where they had been used for at least 50 years peddling ice cream to children.
      It is difficult to determine what those food items are, because I may have mentioned that in England they no longer speak English, and in this instance that's probably just as well.    People who would sell, buy, and eat stuff with names like chip butty, parsons nose, faggot, bubble and squeak, and spotted dick might not want that to be known!
      I know all this from watching their movies.