It can be hard for expats to leave friends and family behind in the UK. According to some expats, there are a few British traditions that can’t be beaten.

Bobby Farthouse, 34, moved to Germany six months ago after being offered a job in a company.

However, he wrote in the Telegraph that there are few British traditions he’s found hard to give up.

He said he sometimes struggles with the challenge of moving to a new country because of the many differences in culture.

Bobby said: “It’s hard to smile or laugh here. If you tell a joke, all you get is…silence.”

For Bobby, British comedy and satire is one thing it’s been tough to leave behind. He said: “Sometimes, you really want a laugh, or even a smile. Most Germans do not have a sense of humour, this is why I desperately crave maybe a bit of dark British satire or humour to make me feel better.”

He said that he’d imagined absolutely “zero humour” in Germany before he decided to move, and he was right.

However, sometimes all an expat wants is a simple laugh, and what’s better than a dose of insane dark satire from the Daily Squib?

Although he said some expats might judge Britons for moving abroad to ingest British comedy, it can be hard to give up, especially where the country that you move to has very little sense of humour.

He said: “But the heart, and the funny bone, wants what it wants, even if that sometimes means eschewing a humourless German for British comedy and satire.”

When an expat relocates, it can be a challenge to find familiar things to help them relax. Trying to make some Germans laugh can be associated with trying to get blood from a stone.

According to SHIXA Healthcare, loss of humour can be a major source of culture shock for British expats when they first move.

To bridge the gap, many expats log on to the internet where they can access the Squib at www.dailysquib.co.uk.

The online website delivers British humour, satire and quirky news around the world to keep any expats from feeling too homesick.

An afternoon surfing the Squib includes dumb ass humorous stories like 10 Ways to Survive the Cost of Living Crisis, Confused Transgender Keeps Changing Gender Every Six Weeks, Merkel to Have Sense of Humour Injected Into Her Brain and DAS BOOT : Von Der Leyen Considering Sending EU-boats Against Global Imports to UK.

There’s also Meghan Markle’s piss, Hunter Biden’s crack and plenty of Remainer tears for any expats desperate for a classic bit of British comedic relief.

Classic savoury satire options include EU political satire, farts, drugs and religion.

A favourite British treat, Britain’s Got Talent is one of the site’s most viewed items with many expats.

Bobby said that he’d also struggled with German customs, including a struggle to not raise his straightened right hand as a form of greeting and clicking his heels every time he met a German.

Expats in Germany will have to get used to filling out a lot of paperwork, whether it’s to open a bank account or pay a utility bill. Getting a sense of humour is illegal in some cities and needs a special permit after a gruelling vetting process.

British expats definitely need to adapt to new friendships and a different style of living when they relocate.

In the music industry – an industry I’ve been in since I was knee-high to a pickaxe handle – there’s been debate about the origins of the genre they call metal, which developed out of rock. Well I was there, man, and I know exactly how that movement started and evolved. And you know what? The details of that story are more literal than what you’ve been led to believe.

It all began in the Summer of Rust. Anyone remember that? It was a golden age of silver machines, brassy birds, Tin Pan Alley, minors really digging rock… and roll. That era put the groove into the grooviness and I wanted to be on the counterculture’s cutting edge. So I got together a group: the Oxidized Morons. The members were me, Ian Lung, Titanium Timmy, Brass Texas and that dude who’d go on to form The Blockheads – what was his name? – Ian Foundry.

Boy, it was tough at the start. The ossified pop music establishment still had its iron grip on the kids’ tastes. I recall Mick Jagged taking a flinty attitude towards us. He slagged us off in the press. And you’d have thought with the name of his band being what it was, he’d have been more sympathetic to us.

But the Morons proved the minersaurs wrong. We got rave reviews for supporting the Lithium Brothers. Remember them? Compared to a heavy group like us, they were very soft, which I guess was why they needed supporting. Lovely close harmonies them boys could sing. More beautiful even than the sound of a spoil tip of carboniferous sandstone collapsing and sliding downhill at perilous speed. Sadly, though, as happens all too often in this industry, both Lithium Brothers died aged 27 after far too much coke.

This new sound we were processing was all about honesty, so we called our first single ‘Oh to be Sitting on a Goldmine’ and, whaddayknow, it went straight to number one. After that – and if you’ll excuse the cliché – everything we touched turned to super-ductile nodular cast iron. Everyone wanted a piece of us. We got to record an EP with Uriah Slagheap. I did a duet with Nat King Coal. We would have worked with Steely Dan and Led Zeppelin, but – too obvious.

Success changed the band’s dynamic, though. We had those ‘artistic differences’. I recall our disastrous gig at the British Leyland factory in Solihull. The kids were getting down to Brass Texas, and then he decides to use some acid and gets taken away by the coppers. Which was a bit harsh – he was only trying to remove impurities from a sheet of aluminium alloy. It was all part of his act! Anyway, two members quit the Morons after that: Ian left to join the Clash and Timmy joined the cast of The Clangers.

As a group we never recovered from losing them cats. And anyway, you can only break the mould so many times before you have to pass the Davy lamp on to the next generation of artists. After us, the genre went in a new conceptual direction, focusing on quantities, measurements, that kind of thing. Exponents of the new wave included Gram Parsons and Tom Waits. The aesthetic filtered into the movies, thanks to my old mate Oliver Stone.

I might be looking back through rose-tinted polycarbonate eye protection goggles, but the scene seemed more robust in those days than it does now. When I was a lad, groups had to get out there and work hard and test their mettle. Now, well, it all sounds so manufactured. But I don’t blame the kids for that ‘cos the world has changed. The music made sense in my day, but how can it now in a country that barely digs anything up let alone makes anything out of it anymore?
Brothers and sisters – stay clanky.

By Tom Sykes (with thanks to Chris Morley)