In article ,
Janet Baraclough wrote:
The message
from "Mike Lyle" contains these words:

They get some bizarre ideas over there.

That could possibly be related to duff guff handed out by Brits in
uk newsgroups.
Such as (British weather) "can be anything from arctic to tropical,
and our gardens can be anything from desert to swamp".

Sigh, yes :-(

Hyperbole is one thing, but that is round the bend. As someone who
has a clue what the real tropics, real swamps and real deserts are
like, the claims that the USA has them make me laugh (all right,
they have real swamps). But claims that the UK has them make me
despair, because they are so far beyond the conception of people
who know only the UK that it is impossible to explain.

All right, reedbeds and estuarine marshes are swamps, of a sort,
but we have tiny areas, effectively nobody lives in them, and we
have no examples of most of the wooded types of swampland.

We DO get up to arctic conditions, but nobody gardens there. Some
people garden in (warm winter) sub-arctic conditions, with immense
difficulty, so I will pass the "arctic" claim as mere hyperbole.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.