Britain

As Sigmund Freud pointed out way back in 1905, everyone feels a bit schizo about Mum. On the one hand, she carried you in the womb, she probably nursed you at the nipple. She made the greatest of sacrifices so that you exist. Heck, maybe you really love her cooking. On the other hand, you have to escape her. The Italians have a brilliantly pejorative word for the man-child who stays in the maternal home far too late in life: mammone. No one wants to be that guy. And to avoid it, sometimes you have to scorn your mother, to break the psychological apron strings. So it is with American attitudes to the Mother Country. The USA had many midwives, but the mother of America was unquestionably Britain/England.

My wife and I relocated to the UK a few months ago after spending the past 37 years in the United States, and I cannot stop comparing the two countries. I oscillate wildly between my irrational exuberance at America’s superior market efficiencies and my sheer amazement at how orderly and polite you all are. These reactions surprise me, as I am hardly new to these shores. I attended graduate school at Oxford, worked for a while in London, married a beautiful and talented Essex girl (TOWIE indeed), and have consulted for the UK government in Northern Ireland for the past eight years. But now I actually live here, there are so many things that I am seeing with new eyes and deeply appreciate about the UK. Let’s start with the major ones. No guns.

It was bound to happen sooner or later: a guest on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow presented an artefact which derived from the slave trade – an ivory bangle. One of the programme’s experts, Ronnie Archer-Morgan, himself a descendant of slaves, said that it was a striking historical artefact but not one that he was willing to value. ‘I do not want to put a price on something that signifies such an awful business,’ he said. It’s easy to understand how he feels. The idea of people profiting from the artefacts left over from slavery is distasteful. Yet, as Archer-Morgan said, it is not that the bangle has no value: it has great educational value.

When I go home to America next week for Christmas, I’ll go to church – the one my family and I used to attend every Sunday, a few towns over. I visit intermittently throughout the year when I’m back home, but I always go on Christmas Eve. The routine is the same: I sit quietly in the pews, sing along to the carols, and hope to have a second epiphany.   I had my first epiphany – that God exists – when I was a child. This, I’m sure, is the result of having two religious parents who raised me in the church. When I tell my British friends that I was brought up a Methodist, they tend to flash me a nervous look. I must assume that going to a Methodist church in the UK means something different than it does in liberal Connecticut.

What has Rishi Sunak’s government achieved in its first year? The highlights include a renegotiated Brexit policy and setting more practical net-zero deadlines. But Sunak asked the country to judge him on his ability to deliver his pledges set out at the start of the year. If polls are to be believed, voters are preparing to do just that. Inflation is falling, but that’s largely due to interest rate hikes announced by the Bank of England. The economy is growing, but barely. The NHS waiting list keeps rising – 7.6 million now in England alone. On this last point, no doubt the six-figure salaried consultants who keep striking deserve part of the blame. But to say the Sunak government is struggling to make good on its promises would be putting it rather gently.

My nine-year-old half-Russian daughter has arrived in England for the first time since she was a baby. As she knows almost nothing about British culture apart from Peppa Pig and Willy Wonka, my job is to put together a week-long programme before she goes back to Italy, where she currently lives with her mother, my ex-partner. They were living in Russia but left following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Ideally, my daughter will go home enthused about all things English and wanting a lifetime more. But where do I start? Peppermint Aeros and Crunchie bars are the things I want to pass on, far more than the music of Elgar First, there’s the question of food.

Adulthood was once determined by age, but now we’ve extended childhood far beyond the teenage years. If the government gets its way, the next generation will never grow up: there are reportedly plans to ban cigarette sales to anyone born after 2009. This would mean that, come 2060, 50-year-olds could be begging their elders to pop into the local corner shop to buy them a pack of 20. We need a new metric of adulthood, and I have a proposal. The real mark is not an age or any particular milestone, it’s really when you receive your first piece of unsolicited feedback. It’s a grim but unavoidable rite of passage: having personal and outlandish comments directed your way, often in such a breezy or casual manner you’d think they were talking about the weather.