It was a hot night in a bar at my British university, 20-odd years ago. A group of young American women had come over for a summer school. Several of us British male students were hanging around them hopefully. For hours, both sides circled each other unproductively. Finally I got talking to an American girl. I told her I was about to go and study in her country, and she gave me the perfect piece of advice.
She said: “Most Americans are programmed to think Brits are smart and funny. But we also think you’re arrogant snobs. So if you can speak to Americans in a British accent but be friendly, you’ll be a winner.”
I followed her advice, and it has worked almost too well: I have acquired an American wife and children. Consequently, I’ve just spent yet another summer in the US. It’s much better to be a Briton across the Atlantic than at home, and the experience has only improved with time.
I first visited the US aged 10. I went to California, and could hardly believe that people got to live like this. The sun shone. Strangers talked to you. You could eat whatever you wanted whenever you wanted. In fact, Californians didn’t seem to tolerate any impediments to their happiness: if they didn’t like their spouse, they got divorced, a practice that in 1980 was a novelty to me. If they didn’t like where they lived, they moved. One day I saw a house being carted on the back of a truck to a better spot. Back then, ordinary Americans seemed to live like millionaires.
Traditionally, we Europeans have responded to the American cornucopia with mockery. Patrick Melrose, main character of the British novelist Edward St Aubyn, dismisses Americans as “just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next”. This is a version of the age-old spirit-versus-matter dichotomy: the notion that Americans may have stuff but Euros have history, etiquette, etc, summed up in the (unattributed) European witticism that America has gone straight from barbarism to decline without the usual intermediate phase of civilisation.
Still, Brits tend to like American stuff when we can get our mitts on it. Better, the US lets us reinvent ourselves. At home, to quote the musical My Fair Lady: “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him/ The moment he talks, he makes some other Englishman despise him.” But stateside, Britain’s caste system melts away. Americans can’t tell from our accents whether we are “frightfully lower-middle-class” or “posh twits”. Instead they tend to think we sound like Hugh Grant or Helena Bonham Carter or, at worst, like Higgins in the 1980s TV series Magnum, P.I.
And the British experience in the US keeps improving. The glaring longstanding omissions of American life — the BBC, English football on TV and guaranteed health care — are now increasingly on tap stateside. Perversely, Britain’s slide into global irrelevance has helped us visitors too. Previously, most Americans had some sketchy knowledge of British current affairs. Because Americans use chit-chat as a ritual of politeness, in the 1980s they often confronted visiting Brits with paeans to Margaret Thatcher (“She’s really sorting out your country, right?”); in the 1990s, people dissected the doings of Princess Diana and, in the early 2000s, they eulogised Tony Blair.
Now all that’s over. In the month I just spent traversing the eastern US, no American asked me anything about Britain. Almost nothing in British life registers in the US any more, and why should it? During my visit, the Labour leader Ed Miliband, possibly the next British prime minister, wangled a meeting with Barack Obama. Afterwards, a spokesperson for Miliband said they had discussed “Ukraine, Gaza and the future of the European Union... the economy, climate change and the approaching referendum in Scotland”.
It was almost like a Churchill-Roosevelt summit, with just one caveat: the entire conversation lasted 25 minutes.
I found Britain’s new anonymity particularly cheering because I had landed in the US straight from the World Cup in Brazil. A typical conversation there went as follows:
Friendly Brazilian: Where are you from?
Me: England.
Friendly Brazilian looks aghast, falls silent — too stunned by the gruesomeness of the England football team to think of anything nice to say about the country. (This was before Germany tonked Brazil 7-1.)
I ended my American odyssey in New York, inevitably wandering around mouthing Sting’s lines: “I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien, I’m an Englishman in New York.” In the mornings my children would play soccer on the grass outside our borrowed apartment. They used a rather childish concrete sculpture as a goal. One day a tourist came up and asked: “Isn’t that statue a Picasso?” I checked. He was quite right. For a moment I thought maybe I was the barbarian but obviously that couldn’t be right because I’m British.
— Financial Times