Amberance Goes To [REDACTED]

About a week ago, I was doing this temp job for a few days which turned out to be the single most blogable thing that has happened to me since I've been here. And annoyingly I can't really tell you anything about it, because I had to sign a social media non-disclosure agreement that said I wouldn't tell you where I was and I wouldn't tell you who else was there (this was a pointless concern, since if someone important/famous had been there, I almost certainly wouldn't have recognized them because knowing who people are is not my strong suit (witness my once asking my brother "What is a Kardashian?"), so I couldn't tell you who I may or may not have seen even if I wanted to. I would, however like to point out that posh people generally do wees the same as everybody else in my recent experience). It even had specific words in it that I wasn't allowed to use in conjunction with anything I said on the subject, which eliminated most of the nouns and verbs I could use to talk around the situation.

The only word that seems to be left to me at this point is "hat". SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS, WHAT IS WITH YOUR HATS? First of all, where are men even getting these top hats? Is this an item in every Englishman's wardrobe that I didn't know about? Can you rent them? Why don't more top hat wearers grow mutton chops, which in my mind is the entire point of wearing a top hat? Also, god forbid that you take your hat off. There are people walking around, mostly men, also wearing hats, politely taking people aside and saying "Sir, I am afraid you can't be in this area without a hat" and then the other guy goes "Oh sorry, my bad" or something a lot more stereotypically British and wealthy sounding and goes and dons a hat. And I am not kidding about stereotypically wealthy sounding Englishman - StereoNinja does a joke voice which I call Posh Old Man Voice that I think is hilarious, and I overheard a guy talking like that and started giggling, then realized he wasn't "doing" a voice, he actually talks like that.

That is just the men. The women...I don't even...seriously, WHAT IS ON YOUR HEAD? Is that...an aquarium? Mind you, I was also made to wear a hat (which was provided to me because in what universe would I own a fancy hat?), but my hat was just, you know, a hat. And sure, lots of ladies around me were also wearing hats that did in fact resemble a hat, but those hats mostly appeared to have been deliberately created to go with the dresses they were wearing, which I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure mostly were mostly the work of top class fashion designers that people who are not me will have heard of. But then the crazy hats. I am not kidding about the aquarium hat, by the way, but there were others, each one bigger, weirder and less hat-like than the next. Oh and also a camera crew running around the place all day long grabbing crazy-hatted women and stuffing a microphone in their face and saying "TELL ME ABOUT YOUR HAT!" I really, truly, could not have been more out of my element in this setting if it had taken place on Venus.

Oh, as far as who I maybe did or didn't see: I think it is probably within the rules to report that, as predicted, I recognized not one single person. The closest I got was when I was coming out of the ladies toilets (which have baskets full of hair pins and extra nylons and other assorted things it would never occur to me to provide for my guests) and one of the other workers said to me, "Oh, you just missed [REDACTED] going by! She was right over here not two minutes ago!" to which I replied "Huh. Neat." because there was a zero percent chance I would have known who that was without being told even if I had been there when she walked by.

Finally, I would just like to report that [REDACTED]*-drawn coaches look all fancy and cool, but really they just go too slow and back up traffic for miles and shit all over the road.



*For real, the thingy I signed says I can't use that word if I talk about this.