MrsTeapot

I asked this question for summer time gifts before. In the end we ended taking Pimms and bought USA lemonade to mix with it. Most people were not fussed by it (with usual fruit/cucumber in it) though one person liked it.

We also took some fudge and they all declared it to be like something in Italian, which I imagined was Italian fudge probably!

I got the impression whatever we took food-wise wouldn't be good enough.

The above winter advise about dairy milk bars and tins of roses/quality street or Harrods named tins is great advise for winter.

GeorgeYoung

As we'll be back in the UK over new year, I'll try raiding the supermarkets' left-over Christmas stock for Quality Street tins and the like in that case. Cheers!

pugliese

definitely .... and nobody can wash up like the Italians, so they would think it's an attempt on their lives through poisoning with the "detersivo".

Tweedpipe

Longlost tribes in Borneo? Why not indeed - a shrunken head, plus it would be an interesting challenge to find one, although they are available on theBay. I could imagine them hanging one in the car's rear window, or from the top of the windscreen to prevent boredom in some of those infuriating traffic-jams.
And before anyone asks, "What's particularly English about that?" my wife would be the first to answer, "The dark English humour", which she now takes for granted!
Or tell them a few sarcastic jokes, another English speciality according to Mme TP. And they're free.

Pica

😂

Pica

😂 Our neighbours allhave dishwashers, I have only a sink.

Geordieborn

A World Cup ticket would go down well

Sancho

Wikipedia seems to think squashed fly biscuits and flies' graveyards are both OK. The main thing, of course, is that outsiders (people like foreigners) don't know what you're talking about. It's like that with a lot of jargon/slang -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garibaldi_biscuit

Donna Noble

Loving the inclusion of the word "informal" in that Wiki entry: "conventionally consumed with tea or coffee, into which it may be dunked in informal social settings"

However, they're not optimum dunking material are they? All those dead flies at the bottom of the cup ....

philat98

I wonder what Garibaldi was doing in South Shields?

ononno

McVtie digestives are best dunking material

spouse of scouse

I'm puzzled by the posts that say don't send this, that or the other because the recipient won't think it's good enough. Isn't giving someone a gift, whether brought or home made, a kind gesture that should be appreciated?

Sancho

Here you are -

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/...n-ever-8305200

Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi visits Tyneside | Mapping Radical Tyneside

Geordieborn

Never believe anything they say in the Chronicle! There was an Italian restaurant in Tynemouth (on the right side of the river across from South Shields) called Garibaldi's. I think the lovely old guy that owned it got homesick and went back to Italy. Perhaps Garibaldi left more than just biscuits up North!!

Lorna at Vicenza

It should be like this, but Italians are generally fixated on their own recipes. They even turn their noses up at recipes from different regions although still Italian food, so you can imagine how some of them turn their noses up at "foreign muck". Today's teenagers are much more willing to try new stuff even though that mostly consists of American junk.