Faraway hills

Irish things the USA should definitely look into:

When you ask for tea in a cafe in Ireland, you don't get a paper cup of hot water with a teabag on the side, for your (alleged) infusing pleasure. You get a little teapot of tea made with real boiling water, and it's enough to refill your real teacup (with a saucer) about two and a half times. It's so nice to pour yourself some more tea. You also get real milk, probably in a little tiny personal-sized jug. There is no such thing as creamer. And that's good.

The genius of potato waffles. I may have mentioned this before, but every time we're home the humble Bird's Eye Potato Waffle becomes a staple of the kids' meals (well, Mabel's, anyway; Monkey ate one once, I believe, when he was about a year and a half old). I find it hard to believe that the freezer sections of the USA, replete with tater tots and french fries and hash browns, have yet to discover and embrace this simple article, because - here's the brilliance - you can cook it in the toaster. No other shape of potato item functions that way. But apparently North Americans are too attached to their regular waffle waffles to contemplate any other sort of waffle-shaped item. (These are not the same as waffle fries. They're potatoes in a regular waffle shape, not vaguely grid-shaped fries. Yes, there's a difference. Try making waffle fries in the toaster. Well, don't, because that would probably be a bad thing.)

Sausages. In the US, sausages come in many guises - big fat brats, cooked salamis, chorizo from Mexico (not the good stuff from Spain, I hasten to add, which is much harder to find), breakfast links and (urgh) patties. In Ireland, a saussie is a saussie, unless it's a cocktail sausage which is just the same thing only smaller. It's a breakfast sausage, but not remotely like the wizened wrinkly sticks of salt and gristle that we get over here. An Irish sausage is plump and juicy, burnished and conker-brown, glistening and savoury and delicious. Mabel, my little carnivore, thought so too.

American things Ireland could profit from encountering:

The snow shovel. It's not rocket science, lads. Sturdy wooden handle; wide, flat, light, strong plastic shovelling surface, enabling you to move lots of snow quickly, while it's still new and not packed hard. Looks like this, more or less. If they were readily available, perhaps you wouldn't have to mobilise the army to chip the layers of ice off Dublin footpaths quite so often this winter.