Britface

Central Market is subject to a special promotion they're calling the British Invasion. The name is a reference to Beatles band and the phenomenal popularity enjoyed by the fab four when they first set foot over here, because Beatles band is one of those things Americans understand about Englishland and its culture, along with the Queen, red double decker buses, and Keeping Up Appearances. The promotion promises that the shelves of the supermarket will be lined with British stuff for the next month or so. The first I hear of this is when someone on facebook proposes that I enter the associated costume competition.

Register for our Passport UK Costume Contest and be entered for a chance to win a trip to London!

Let your imagination run wild and come dressed as any Brit from Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare to Elton John and the Spice Girls. The top costume at each store will be entered to win a travel voucher for two round trip tickets to London, plus a $500 Visa gift card.

Simply register using the link below, get dressed up on September 21st, check in at the main entrance. We'll then take your official party photo that enters you into the contest.

Once you've taken your official party photo, walk through the store to show off your costume and enjoy over a dozen British specialities like tea, shortbread, house-made sausages, smoked salmon, chocolates, English sparkling wine, beer and cider, plus the very ice cream served at Buckingham Palace.

Its all free and proper fun, sure to be a jolly good time. And remember, your costume could be your ticket to ride — to London!

It occurs to me that Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare would be a complicated choice given that they're actually two separate people rather than a single gestalt entity, contrary to what Central Market seems to believe. I consider going as myself, seeing as how I'm actually fucking English, but there are certain depths to which I will not stoop, not even in the cause of sarcasm. On the other hand, it might be nice to stock up on a few things which I can't otherwise get in Texas, assuming that's actually an option.

My hopes are less than stratospheric. Central Market aspires to be, I suppose, the Texas equivalent of Waitrose, a store for a better class of person, as the facelift-happy twats of Alamo Heights who shop there seem to consider themselves. This means that there is at least a place where I can buy Crunchie, Mint Aero and Marmite when the mood takes me.

Marmite costs about seven dollars a jar, in comparison to less than a quid back in England. Marmite is, as I understand it, a by-product of beer. American beer is made at a children's lemonade factory and thus yields no Marmite, so we have to import it, hence the price. I don't mind because although Marmite is nice every once in a while, contrary to the mythology, I can take it or leave it.

Unfortunately, that's about it for me and Central Market. Everything else I can get at my regular HEB, or at least Target; because otherwise even shopping for something as basic as a tin of cat food is a waste of time at Central Market when the only brand on the shelf will inevitably cost four dollars for a tin of what turns out to be minced alpaca seasoned with organic chard.

Bess and I drop in on Thursday evening, having stuffed our faces with curry at the excellent Bombay Hall over on Wurzbach Road. I'm here in the admittedly forlorn hope that they'll have a steak and kidney pie, and I'm expecting disappointment. Bess is here because she's looking forward to the sarcasm with which I customarily express my disappointment.

We enter the store.

'What are we looking for?' I wonder out loud. 'Is it all over the place, or will it be a big pile of British stuff on a table with Dick van Dyke stood next to it?'

'Look,' Bess observes. 'These have little Union Jack flags on them.' She indicates the pricing labels of something I don't immediately recognise, little red criss-crosses on blue and white stuck to a purple ball. The objects are bath bombs, it transpires, and not really my field of expertise; but it answers a question. Maybe these are Benedict Cumberbatch's bath bombs of choice.

The end of the aisle is embellished with a sign instructing us to keep calm and do something or other besides carry on. I still remember the first time I saw one of those posters. I still remember when the joke was funny. The display relates to stacked cans of Irn Bru, which is nice, although I always preferred watching the Irn Bru television adverts to drinking the actual drink. Around the corner is porridge, small boxes of it. I'm pretty sure porridge is readily available here and is known as oatmeal. Happily I've been able to make the semantic leap without experiencing too much culture shock.

We walk on.

I'm expecting really obvious, arguably slightly crappy things that I'm unable to buy over here - Heinz baked beans, Birds Eye fish fingers, Wall's sausages, Mr. Kipling's cakes, custard creams, but they don't seem to have anything along such lines. Everything else I could possibly want, I've learned how to make for myself with the only significant difficulty being getting hold of kidneys for steak and kidney pie.

The deli section is expansive and takes up about half of the floor space of the store. The British Invasion seems more in evidence here, with the alleged foods of Englishland sat in chiller cabinets amongst the usual fare. Much of this supposedly English product seems to have been supplied by one company trading as Jolly Posh, a name which I'm sure had them rolling in the aisles at some board meeting or other. The branding seems ill-suited for what is mostly a pretentious take on what you would eat in a transport caff. The Cornish pastie is the size of a handbag and suspiciously pale. There's also some kind of pie incorporating chicken, but I make a pretty decent chicken and mushroom pie and am disinclined to pay ten dollars for one which probably won't be as good.

On the other hand, I find there's a Jolly Posh black pudding and pork sausages, so I'm having some of that. Black pudding is unknown in Texas, and while we have sausages coming out of our ears, they're of ancestrally German descent and quite unlike the kind which kept me alive from 1988 to 2009. The strangest thing is that I've never been able to work out what the difference could be, only that there is one and it's pronounced.

'What are tatties and neeps?' Bess asks. She's pointing at a plastic container on the top of the counter, some mysterious substance within. I've asked this very same question of every single Scottish person I've ever known, and I still can't remember the answer, something to do with either parsnips or turnips - but definitely potatoes.

'I don't really know, although for whatever it's worth, I've only ever heard them referred to as neeps and tatties, never tatties and neeps. I'm not sure if that makes a difference.'

To my ears it sounds as though I've walked into a newsagent and asked for a packet of onion and cheese crisps.

Adjacent plastic containers house Scotch eggs and Welsh rarebit. That would be cheese on toast which has already been prepared so as to save us the misery of having to slice the cheese and stick it on top of bread, because who has time for that shit?

The Scotch egg costs nearly four dollars and is nice enough, but somehow not quite as good as the ones you get out of the chiller cabinet at your local corner shop in Peckham. Next to the Scotch egg are individual punnets of Yorkshire pudding and kedgeree. I'm finding this increasingly surreal. We seem to be in Iceland territory - the shop rather than the country - foods pre-packaged because someone somewhere never quite got the hang of mashing a fucking potato or slopping a knob of butter onto green beans; and kedgeree is the one food I can't stand. Even the smell of it has me dry heaving. I've eaten crickets, cacti, maguey worms, and all manner of Lovecraftian shite, but I draw the line at kedgeree.

The British Invasion isn't really English food. With a couple of exceptions, it's mostly a cargo cult version of what someone considers to be English food. My American-born wife once took the piss out of English food by referring to jellied eggs, or whatever the hell it is you people eat over there, and I've a feeling that if I asked for jellied eggs - even though there's no such thing - I wouldn't be disappointed.

I ask the cashier if I get a discount, seeing as how I'm actually English and all. She either doesn't hear or doesn't get the joke.

Against expectation, the sausages are great, as is the black pudding. No Mint Aero though, the fuckers.