I have lived in the UK for over twenty years and though I have adapted well enough there are still things I miss from home.  It goes without saying that I miss my family and friends and for them there is no replacement.  But for most other things, alternatives can be found.  Not for everything of course, for example, I have not found a substitute for hot pepper jelly and we've just finished the jar we brought back last summer.  Still, there are other snacks that go well with gin and tonic and there is plenty of gin available so, crisis averted.

I miss the weather.  This may sound whiny because it appears to be a minor issue and it is difficult to convey just how oppressive the weather here can be over the course of many months.  It is cold a lot here.  It is grey a lot, less grey in the summer, but mostly grey throughout the year.  Even when it is sunny, the sun does not shine as brightly as it does stateside.  I sense your scepticism but in evidence I submit to you that my British father-in-law purchased the first pair of sunglasses he ever owned after his sixtieth birthday when he visited the US for the first time.  Up to that point he had never felt he needed them!

Another thing I miss is space.  The UK is a small, heavily populated land where there is very little space to be found south of the Scottish border.  Most houses are one of two types, either terraced houses sandwiched together the entire length of the street, or those euphemistically called "semi-detached," which are in fact fully attached to the house next door.  Any patch of open ground is likely to have a house plopped on it without warning and it is unusual to have a back yard big enough for kids to smack a baseball in without endangering neighborhood relations.

I hold this lack of space responsible for the British reserve as demonstrated when two people pass on the street without acknowledging each other's presence, a common occurence.  I suppose it's a sort of defence mechanism.  Perhaps in such a crowded country, to acknowledge every single being in one's close proximity would be overwhelming, burdensome to the human spirit.  Instead, ignoring each other creates a little psychological elbow room.  That's just my theory.

The final intangible that I miss is difficult to categorize because it is merely an essence, a spirit, an atmosphere.  I miss living in a relatively young country.  The United States, whatever its faults, is still a dynamic nation.  The UK is a tired elder uncle, jaded and knowing.  Sometimes it just wishes we, the US, would sit down and shut up; sometimes it tolerates us like an exuberant Labrador pup.  We are the naive teenager; we deal in certainties.  We are more likely to see the world in black and white.  We adhere to the belief that all things are possible.  We whoop and holler, are arrogant and brash, not always attractive qualities, not to everyone's tastes.

But no matter how unpopular our foreign policies are with our European friends, our popular culture remains attractive to them.  It is the James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Coca-Cola, Hollywood, wide-open-spaced promise of the iconic American dream at its glamorous best which even our worldly cousins find hard to resist.  I think that secretly they too want to believe in that over-the-top, hot summer America.  That's the one I miss.

This morning I heard Marina and the Diamonds singing "I'm obsessed with the mess that's America."  The song sums it up nicely. 

© Julia Barr 2010

All Rights Reserved

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz6P6ORjjzQ 

 This song grows on you, trust me.