British Culture Moments in My Life

I only wanted a couple of things from Morrisons. The doors were open, I’d grabbed what I needed in about two minutes, and then I found every checkout closed. Even the self-checkout machines were locked. Eventually it dawned on me that it was Sunday morning.

I told this story in 2022, after six years in the UK, because little moments like that could still surprise me. Some British habits had become ordinary parts of my day, while others caught me out or simply weren’t for me. A bacon sandwich, a shopping trip and a conversation about washing-up bowls gave me plenty to talk about.

You can browse, but you can’t pay

I’d been walking home when I decided to stop at the shop, having forgotten what day it was. I arrived at about 9.40am. The store had opened its doors at nine, but the checkouts wouldn’t open until ten, so that first hour was for browsing rather than buying.

At first I assumed there must be at least one checkout open somewhere. When there wasn’t, I joined the other people waiting with their shopping. We stood there for roughly 15 or 20 minutes until a man came around, scanned the machines or pressed a button, and opened them. Then we could pay.

I found it a little silly, particularly with self-checkout machines. From my perspective, staff already had to be in the building while people shopped, and I wondered why the machines couldn’t be unlocked. That was my frustrated reaction to waiting, although I wasn’t the person who could properly explain the trading rules.

I normally spent Sundays filming, which was why I’d forgotten about this possibility. It wasn’t something I’d experienced back home in Canada, though I wondered whether I’d simply missed it. My own preference was that if you couldn’t check out until ten, the shop might as well open at ten. I just wanted bread and bacon for a Sunday bacon butty.

A sandwich that had become normal

Another day, I caught myself standing over the kitchen counter eating a bacon butty and thought how British it was. To me, this was simply a bacon and butter sandwich, and it had joined the fish finger butty and chip butty among the things I’d tried here.

The chip butty still made me laugh. My first one had been something I made on Patreon, a sandwich filled with french fries. All aboard the train to carb city. A bacon butty, though, was something I could suddenly realise I really wanted, and once that happened, it sounded perfect.

The bacon names could still get confusing. What people here called streaky bacon was what I’d just call bacon in Canada. For my sandwich I’d happily use whatever bread I had, a bun or even some baguette left over from something else, with butter and, for me, a little ketchup.

The bowl I couldn’t get along with

A conversation with a friend brought back a much earlier discovery from moving to the UK. Lots of people had a large plastic bowl inside the kitchen sink and used it for washing up, or washing dishes. I was going to be honest about this one. I hated that bowl.

I’d got rid of mine quite early on, although I understood some of the reasons people gave for using one. Friends and people I’d spoken to explained that plastic could protect dishes from rattling around against a metal sink. They also described keeping the bowl to one side so you could still rinse things and reach the drain while washing in it.

I could see the idea, and I’d tried it, but I still didn’t like it. That was a personal preference rather than a complaint about anyone else’s kitchen. Remembering the bowl made me smile because it reminded me of those early days of discovering things here.

By then I was grateful to have a decent dishwasher in the flat. An earlier flat had had a small, half-size one, and before that I’d lived in places with no dishwasher at all. I knew what it was like to do the dishes in the sink; the plastic bowl just hadn’t become one of my habits.

Editor’s context, checked 2 October 2026: GOV.UK explains that large shops in England and Wales are generally limited to six consecutive hours of Sunday trading between 10am and 6pm, with exemptions. This explains the trading restriction behind the browsing period; it does not require every store to offer browsing or use the same opening time.

Watch my original video about a Sunday shopping surprise and everyday British habits.