So are we meant to eat it now?

I was at a special church service once, something with an international theme, and they were passing small pieces of bread round with salt - apparently there's a Polish custom of welcoming people into your home with bread and salt (at least I think it was Polish) so that's why. The thing that tickled me was when I heard someone sitting near me ask someone else: so, are we meant to eat it now?

Okay, to be honest I can see very well now why she might have asked, because probably the only similar experience she'd had in a church setting was when we receive the bread of communion, and then the custom is to eat it only after a prayer has been said.

But at that moment I'm afraid I burst into giggles. Because the Israeli part of me was thinking: of course you're meant to eat it, what do you think it's for? decoration?

The thing is, in Israel we do hospitality in a slightly different way to the Brits - if you come to someone's house, coffee is pretty automatic and there will always be something edible, but the edibles will be placed on the table without a word, and the assumption is that you can see it's food and you don't have to be told what to do with food.

Whereas the Brits are brought up not to touch food until they're offered it. So I have to keep reminding myself when I have friends round - don't just plonk the plate of biscuits down, offer the biscuits! Because otherwise the polite Brit can spend hours sipping politely at their cup of tea and ignoring the tempting biscuits, and leave my house thinking: how awful, she put those biscuits there in full view and never offered me one!

What do you mean "have you switched it on"?

Had another scatty moment today - a very long moment actually... It started when my mobile phone beeped to say the battery was low. So I took it to the little shelf where I normally leave it to recharge, plugged it into the socket, and went back to my desk.

As I was doing stuff on the computer, every now and again I thought I heard a beep from far away - very similar, it seemed, to the kind of beep my mobile phone emits in order to tell me that its battery is low.

Poor little phone. There it was, at the other end of the house, trying to communicate with me, and there was me in another room, totally ignoring it.

Have you worked it out yet? The Brits amongst you may have figured it out by now - yes, you're right, I hadn't switched the socket on.

The Israelis amongst you (and possibly people from other countries that don't share this British invention) may be wondering what on earth I'm talking about. Switch a socket on? What do you mean switch a socket on?

Well, this is one of those things I had to learn when I came to England. I remember when I discovered it - it was probably my second day in London, I was staying in a room at a university there (they let the students' rooms during the summer break) and had tried to switch the lamp on so that I could read in bed, but no, it didn't work. I thought it might need a new light bulb. The person at the reception desk was surprised when I said the lamp wasn't working - had I switched it on at the wall?

It's amazing the number of normal everyday things that can be different in different countries - so many things I've had to learn here! I had to learn that electricity sockets here have an on-off switch; I had to learn about bayonet-fitting light bulbs; I had to get used to separate taps for hot and cold water (though in the kitchen here we do have this fantastic new invention called a mixer tap - the only kind of tap I knew back home).

There are probably lots of other things that I don't even remember learning about, as I've got used to the way things go here. I've got so used to driving on the left that when I go home for a visit I have to really concentrate when crossing the road, and once on a visit to Poland I actually stepped off the pavement when I shouldn't have, and got a very loud beep from a driver who obviously didn't fancy the idea of running me over...

Now, is that poor mobile cooked yet :-)