PeriodOne

Various ’special relationships’ could be connected with Lego, but this this entry focuses on the capitalised Special Relationship, i.e. that between the US and the UK. A wikipedia session has just led me to various Lego websites, one of which painstakingly and lovingly catalogues and cross-references every piece in every Lego set ever created. Even more exciting for the frantically procrastinating 29-year-old, the site also includes the instructions for all Lego sets which, when viewed, trigger waves of nostalgia.

But what I found most entertaining was a table which listed the respective names chosen for various space vehicles for the American and British markets by the Danish company. One, called the ‘Beacon Tracer’ in the US, became the rather pedestrian ‘Inspection Buggy’ for the UK. The excitingly rhymed ‘Vector Detector’ becomes the stubbornly utilitarian ‘Search Craft’. And the frankly over-the-top ‘Mega Core Magnetizer’ is crushingly downgraded to the ‘Mobile Recovery Centre’.

Spending a lot of time as I do with German students of English who seem to fondly regard my country as a kind of cup-of-tea period theme park where British-English-accented ladies and gentlemen play crochet with Prince Harry, and the States as the alluring, futuristic home of the kind of English they want to speak, I now see that we in the UK were programmed from childhood to understand that our mobile recovery centres, despite being the same as the American’s Mega Core Magnetizers (it’s even written with a z!), were never going to warrant the same attention.