As someone born and raised in Bristol, but now living in Leicester, I can confirm this as fact.
Britain manages about 5 cultural divides per square mile. We’re efficient like that.
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I once went out for a fancy dress pub crawl dressed as a generic Celt, including blue face paint. This was in Aberdeen… Somehow I wasn’t murdered 
(I was 19, what can I say)
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There is a theory that when you have migration outward from a central origin, the center can be identified by having more cultural diversity per unit area. For example, the Austronesian languages originated on Taiwan, and spread out from Madagascar to New Zealand to Hawaii, but only one branch, the Malayo-Polynesian languages, is found off of Taiwan, while there may be as many as nine branches on Taiwan. The Anglosphere seems to illustrate this pattern.
To pick one topic dear to my heart, North and South Carolina have like 6 different bar b q styles between them, and people will argue passionately and bitterly about which is the right and true one. Plenty of room for cultural divide!
Yes, I know, the smiley face indicated the tongue in cheek sarcastic nature of your comment.
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I’ll bear that in mind if Satanic Mills comes in first. I’m probably more in need of help with customs and local color than with larger-scale history, though.
But Bojangles is favored over Popeyes in both from my experience.
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Then Texas steps in and says they’re all wrong!
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To try to contribute after participating in some derailing, my daughter and I finished Wee Free Men for bedtime reading and are over to A Hat Full of Sky.
Her summer reading series of choice have been: Cam Jansen, Princess Pulverizer, Greetings From Somewhere, and Magic Treehouse. All have been well accepted early chapter books at age 7.
I’m reading Joe Gores book Hammett after having noir callback time and re-reading Chandler’s Trouble is My Business collection.
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And St. Louis, Kansas City, Memphis, etc. Then there’s me who wants all the different styles so long as they’re done well!
Now there I’ll take your word on it. I don’t eat chicken so have no clue.
um… group read suggestion?
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That’s no way to talk about Watford fans.
(I have experienced the inverse - when I moved from Yorkshire to Gloucestershire, I was told I was moving so far south it was almost France. As I walked through Cheltenham, down Montpellier to the Promenade, watching people drinking wine outside a Cafe Rouge, I thought they might be correct.)
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Then don’t go to Belgium for beers 
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That applies to most things from what I can see
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I’ve finally got hold of the third Jack Reacher book, Tripwire, (when I collect series of books from charity shops, I still refuse to read them until I have them in order) and while I know it is really bubblegum for the mind, it is very well done bubblegum. It races through the plot, keeping you interested.
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I finished A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. I can see why it is considered a classic, and Forster does an admirable job of breathing real life into characters that could very easily veer into caricatures (the racism of the British, for example, isn’t just that the British are all racist, but was given a plausible sheen of “bringing civilization to those who don’t appreciate it”).
I still have issues with the book… the critical event at the Marabar Caves in particular is enormously unsatisfying, and the ending is pretty awful… but it was an interesting read, and possibly less depressing than most of the other books about India that I’ve read (A Fine Balance by Mistry, White Tiger by Adiga, The Life of Pi by Martel, and The Jungle Book by Whitemansburden are the only ones that jump to mind).
That stated, it is a relief to be done all my course readings for the year. I am looking forward to a rewarding read of Head On by Scalzi… I love a good sci-fi crime procedural (some of the best modern sci-fi has crime procedural roots… The Expanse and Pandora’s Star being two of my favourites, but even Sundiver has elements… ooh, and The Legacy of Heorot, albeit very, very light).
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You will see that, for example, in Kipling, who, despite his reputation, actually showed a lot of sympathy for the Indian people, in such stories as “Lispeth” and “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” and Kim. It’s worth noting that Kipling has other stories of imperial powers bringing civilization to other peoples: the Romans to the Near East in “The Church That Was at Antioch” or the Aerial Board of Control to Chicago in “As Easy as A.B.C.”
So I’m in the process of rereading Aaronovitch’s Midnight Riot, which is the American edition of Rivers of London. Early on there’s a scene where one of the characters, Leslie, is logging evidence onto a computer data management system called HOLMES, which is glossed as Home Office Large Major Inquiry System. And I glanced at that and thought, “HOLMIS?”
Then it occurred to me to wonder if (i) Rivers of London called it the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System and (ii) an American copy editor revised “enquiry” to “inquiry” (iii) without thinking about the fact that that made nonsense of the clever acronym . . .
That would be a classic example of “bad copy editor!” both because it’s changing something to conform to a rule without thinking about the secondary effects, and because the rule doesn’t even apply anyway: Home Office Large Major Enquiry System [would be] a proper noun, a name, and you don’t change the spelling of a name just to follow a rule for the spelling of a common noun (you can’t change the surname “Smythe” to “Smith” just because that’s how the occupation is spelled).
Aaronovitch’s own use of language isn’t always well informed, but I’m thinking this one’s not likely his fault.
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Definitely was Enquiry in the Rivers of London when I read it.
Actually, I did not know you could spell it as inquiry…
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I’m glad to have that guess confirmed!
“Inquiry” is actually the standard American spelling; it’s something I would correct routinely in a journal that used American spellings, for contributions from British or continental authors.
Its only really in the US that inquiry is used a matter of course. In the UK and Australia (I assume probably the same in NZ?), enquiry is a more informal alternative to ‘ask’ or ‘question’, whereas inquiry normally is a formal or official investigation.
So its almost certainly a US copy editor, perhaps using Find/Replace, making a mistake and messing up the acronym.
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Or just copy editing by the rules without thinking about the intended meaning. When I was training other copy editors the hardest thing to get into their heads was that the application of the rules of English always depends on the context.
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