Grey or Gray

What is the correct spelling? Grey or Gray?
Do I have grey hair or gray hair? 
(and no, it is completely irrelevant here what shade of grey/gray we are talking about!)

First: both are correct, but gray is the American version whereas grey is British English. Both forms are used in both US and UK, but in America gray is simply more common and used about 80% of the time.

As I am typing this on my laptop with the British English Dictionary installed, the spelling gray is actually highlighted in red as spelling mistake, and the autocorrect wants to correct it to Gary! So there is my answer I suppose.

I was writing a character description of an Asian Immigration Officer who wears a wig which is very obvious to identify as a wig, mainly because does not really suit him due to the wig not allowing for a single grey hair. He is of that age where a few grey hairs should show. Now the setting of this scene is going to be an airport immigration office in an Asian country - so there is the question whether they would American or British English. But in any event, I shall stick to British English in my writing. As always, consistency is key, so once you decided on one spelling, stick to it. And best not to mix up American English and British English in one book / article. 


Happy Writing
Peg x 

The £50 loaf of bread

Imagine the village’s food store, and it’s the only food store around here. Sure, there are other ways of getting your food – driving to the next big town, eating what’s in your store cupboard, growing your own. But let’s say you can only go to the village food store. And you want to buy bread.

The only loaf of bread available is £50. Clearly priced, nothing sneaky. You don’t have to buy it. You won’t die of starvation if you don’t buy this bread. But surely, this is just a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a loaf of bread. Daylight robbery. No ingredient or labour can be that expensive to warrant such a price. But, one might argue, if you chose to buy it and it’s clearly priced as such, well, that’s your problem. If you fall for it, if you are foolish enough to buy it, that surely is your problem, isn’t it?

I have just recently returned from a 7 day holiday in Turkey. What’s that got to do with the price of bread? Just bear with me here.  My mobile phone bill, normally a modest £38, is a whopping £96.17. All the extra charges are for calls abroad. Now I was pretty sure that roaming was turned off (the hotel had Wifi!), and I made sure that I only called home about 3 times. Yes, I was aware of the charges as they kindly informed me so via text message on arrival. But I was pretty confident that that amount must be wrong. I mean, come on, 3 phone calls. Maybe 4. Itemised bill check: Yes, there were 3 actual calls, about £3-£4 each. Also got charged £1.50 every time I tried to call my daughter and it went to answer machine (call duration 2 seconds). Got charged £1.25 every time I received a call, and a few of them had been the very informative: ‘We are contacting you about your PPI’ computer voices (call duration 2 seconds).  Yes, I actually paid for the most annoying and anger inducing phone call in the world! Got charged every time my husband gave me a quick call (‘Are you in the room or by the pool?’).

For that amount of money, I could have probably booked a cheap flight to the UK and back to Turkey mid-week. But at least now I know how they can afford to pay for my £1 lunch deal every Monday.  That’s a lot of sandwiches.