I’m a thirty-something-year-old lecturer at a British university. I’ve published some articles and a couple of books. I have a scientific reputation. I’ve traveled to the US and various European countries to do research and give seminars at conferences.

All is great, right?

Except that somewhere along the way I’d developed a passion for computers.

The 1980s were the heady days of personal computing. New machines seemed to appear constantly—the BBC Micro in Britain, Commodore computers, the IBM PC and, most importantly for me, the Apple Macintosh in 1984.

I’d always had a deep connection with biological research, but computers gradually took over my working life. The Macintosh took center stage, and I started writing educational software.

Eventually I left my university job and started a small software company.

It didn’t get much traction in Britain, but one of my early projects, Dictionary of the Living World, attracted attention from Apple Computer in the United States. The American market began opening doors that simply weren’t opening for me at home.

It became increasingly obvious that if I wanted to make a serious attempt at becoming a software author and publisher, America was the place to do it.

So in 1993, I moved to California with my family and started again.

That sounds rather more straightforward written down today than it felt at the time.

Starting again in California

There was something about America -California in particular - that seemed to encourage the idea that starting a company was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

I’m not sure Britain actively discouraged entrepreneurship, but it certainly didn’t celebrate it in quite the same way. In America, telling somebody you were starting a business generally produced interest rather than raised eyebrows.

For me, that difference in attitude mattered far more than the mechanics of setting up a company.

And America immediately offered other attractions.

It was SO easy to lease a car, and at what seemed to me an extraordinarily reasonable price—although why I chose a purple Honda Civic as my first American car I still can’t fathom.

The grocery stores seemed enormous. And in those early years, American malls were genuinely exciting places to visit. Internet shopping has rather destroyed the wonder of trudging through miles of glittery storefronts, but in 1993 they still seemed impressive.

Then there was California itself.

I’d come from a country of green fields, hedgerows, cows and sheep. Suddenly we had the Pacific Ocean in one direction and mountains and desert in the other.

Not long after we arrived, I took my two boys out into the desert near Borrego Springs. I still have a photograph of the three of us standing there.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the photograph. It’s just a father and his two sons posing beside a road in 1993.

But when I look at it now, the landscape behind us still strikes me. Dry scrub, mountains, enormous blue sky—about as far removed from the England I’d left behind as I could imagine.

America felt big. Not simply geographically big, but full of possibilities.

And everyday life often seemed wonderfully convenient.

When I first arrived, I was amazed that many stores were open seven days a week. Grocery stores in California might be open from six in the morning until eleven or midnight. That was very different from the Britain I’d left.

I was busy trying to establish a business, so discovering that I could wander into a store whenever I happened to have some free time was wonderfully liberating.

Then came Easter.

My first American Easter

I remember trying to go shopping on my first Easter Sunday and being greeted by deserted car parks and shuttered malls.

Everything had come to a screeching halt.

So even the most capitalistic free-market economy in the world apparently closed down for one day a year.

But there was a much more serious Easter problem.

Chocolate.

I am an admitted chocoholic, and to my horror I discovered that America didn’t seem to have the enormous chocolate Easter eggs I’d grown up with in Britain.

British children learn about this particular form of excess at an early age. Parents give you an Easter egg. Grandparents give you one. Aunts and uncles give you one. Before long a small child can accumulate an unhealthy mountain of chocolate.

I sorely missed this tradition.

Easter was my first introduction to the fact that American holidays weren’t necessarily going to work the way I expected.

Celebrating Britain’s defeat

Then came the Fourth of July.

My first few Independence Days were tinged with a peculiar sense of guilt.

How could I join the festivities celebrating an American victory over the British Army?

This concern didn’t last long.

Once I discovered that Independence Day was largely an excuse for endless barbecues and fireworks, I managed to overcome my patriotic misgivings remarkably quickly.

Halloween was another adjustment. Britain in the early 1990s didn’t celebrate Halloween on anything like the American scale. The costumes, parties and trick-or-treating were all relatively new to me.

I’ve never been particularly enamored with dressing up, so Halloween has never been quite the delight for me that it seems to be for many of my American friends and family.

But there was one American holiday I came to love.

The Thanksgiving phone call

Thanksgiving has always been special to me.

I’d spent about 18 months going through the process of applying for permanent residency in the United States.

Then, on the evening before Thanksgiving in November 1994, my immigration attorney called.

I’d been approved.

I can still remember what an extraordinary moment that was. After the forms, interviews, biometric scans, background checks and waiting, we finally knew that we could stay.

I became a US citizen a few years later, but that Thanksgiving phone call is the moment I associate with America becoming home.

I’ve often thought Thanksgiving is one American tradition Britain really ought to steal.

It arrives at exactly the right time of year, when the days are getting shorter and winter is beginning to feel rather too real. It’s about family, food and taking a moment to appreciate the good things in life.

And I’ve always been a big turkey lover, so having two legitimate excuses for turkey every year—Thanksgiving and Christmas—seems entirely sensible.

I can even almost forgive some of the truly gruesome American Thanksgiving side dishes.

Sweet salads made with Jell-O. Sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. Mushy green bean casserole.

Almost.

But Christmas was different

If I had to name one thing I still miss about Britain, it would probably be Christmas.

Christmas was the big holiday of my British year. The anticipation seemed to build for weeks as the days grew shorter and December approached.

My first Christmas in California was an utter disappointment.

In Britain, I’d been accustomed to work winding down during the week before Christmas and not really getting going again until the first week of January.

You know the song about the Twelve Days of Christmas?

Well, that was much closer to how Christmas felt.

California in 1993 was rather different.

People might finish work a little early on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day itself was a holiday. And then, remarkably, they went back to work.

Where were the extended visits to friends and family?

The parties?

The sense that normal life had temporarily been suspended?

The joy of the whole season?

Over the years I’ve learned that there isn’t one American Christmas anyway. America absorbs traditions from everywhere.

I remember one year when my son had a Latin American girlfriend and we were invited to her family’s home on Christmas Eve for Christmas tamales.

I loved it.

It was a reminder that leaving one country doesn’t mean simply exchanging one collection of traditions for another. You keep some things, lose some things and acquire completely new ones along the way.

I’ve now spent more than three decades in America.

There are things about American life I prefer enormously. There are things Britain still does better. And there are things about both countries that have changed so much since 1993 that comparisons with the countries I originally knew aren’t always particularly useful.

But I don’t regret making the move.

America gave me the opportunity to reinvent my working life. It gave me a second country to call home. It gave my family experiences we would never otherwise have had.

And it gave me Thanksgiving.

I still think Britain should do something about that.

The marshmallows on the sweet potatoes, though?

America can keep those.

Ah, Britain! The land of rolling green fields, stately homes, white cliffs and The Beatles. The place where people are either upper-class and speak like the late Queen, or working class and sound vaguely like Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.

At least, that sometimes seems to be the Britain Americans have in mind.

I recognize that country. I’m just not sure I recognize it as the whole country I grew up in.

I spent most of the first 40 years of my life in Britain before eventually moving to the United States. Living on both sides of the Atlantic has given me an interesting perspective on the way Americans see Britain - and the way we Brits see ourselves.

Some of the stereotypes have a grain of truth in them. Others are decades out of date. And a few are just plain funny.

London Isn’t Britain

To many Americans, visiting Britain seems to be synonymous with visiting London.

Ask someone where they went on vacation and you’ll often hear, “We went to London,” even if much of the trip was spent hundreds of miles away.

I understand why. Heathrow is the principal gateway for millions of American visitors, and London has Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and most of the other British landmarks that appear in American movies and television shows.

But London isn’t Britain any more than New York City is America.

I grew up in Britain, but London was never the center of my universe. And the farther you travel from the capital, the more obvious it becomes that Britain is a collection of remarkably different places squeezed into a relatively small island.

Scotland isn’t England. Wales isn’t England. Northern England isn’t southern England. Cornwall sometimes seems to regard itself as a separate country altogether.

Which brings us to accents.

There Is No Such Thing as a “British Accent”

Americans frequently refer to someone having a “British accent.”

But which one?

British people have an ear for accent subtleties akin to the way a dog can sniff the air and tell that a poodle walked past twenty minutes ago.

We can often tell not only which part of the country someone comes from, but sometimes their social background as well, after hearing them speak only a few sentences.

Accent and class have traditionally gone hand in hand in Britain.

When I was a college student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most television and radio broadcasters spoke what we thought of as “BBC English”—the carefully enunciated speech associated with the educated classes of southern England.

Thankfully, things are much more egalitarian now. Turn on British television today and you’ll hear accents from all over the country.

Sometimes rather challenging ones.

I frequently watch British television shows with my American wife, and we often end up turning on the subtitles. This becomes almost mandatory when the drama ventures much farther north than London.

And sometimes the problem isn’t the accent at all. It’s the words.

When I first moved to San Diego in the early 1990s, my then-wife, who was Scottish, was driving around town when she realized the car was almost out of gas.

She stopped at a shopping center and called out, in a heavy Scottish accent:

“Can anyone tell me where the nearest petrol garage is?”

Blank looks.

A few people simply ignored her, perhaps assuming she was some sort of crazy foreigner.

Eventually someone who had recently visited Britain understood what she wanted and directed her to a gas station a few blocks away.

Petrol. Gas.

Garage. Gas station.

Two countries separated by a common language, as the old saying goes.

No, It Doesn’t Rain All the Time

Then there’s the British weather.

“Foggy old England” still seems embedded in the American imagination, perhaps thanks to Sherlock Holmes, Victorian London and countless movies involving cobblestones, gas lamps and mysterious figures emerging from the mist.

There was once some truth behind the image. The infamous Great Smog of London in 1952 was a genuine catastrophe and helped lead to Britain’s Clean Air Act a few years later.

But modern Britain isn’t permanently shrouded in fog.

Nor does it rain every day.

British weather is certainly unpredictable, and winter can be cold, damp and depressingly grey. But summers can be beautiful. Temperatures are generally less extreme than in much of the United States, although increasingly hot European summers are making air conditioning considerably more attractive than it was when I lived there.

When I was growing up, air conditioning in a British house would have seemed absurd.

These days, perhaps not so much.

Snow is another misconception. Much of Britain gets relatively little of it. A few inches can bring parts of the country to a standstill, which provides endless amusement to Americans accustomed to winters in places like Minnesota, Michigan or upstate New York.

All Right, Let’s Talk About British Teeth

We knew we were going to get here eventually.

Americans seem fascinated by British teeth.

The stereotype isn’t really that British people don’t look after their teeth. It’s that they don’t necessarily expect teeth to look the way Americans do.

The United States places enormous cultural emphasis on the perfect smile: straight, even and impressively white.

Britain traditionally put rather less emphasis on the cosmetic side of things. Orthodontics certainly exists, and British attitudes are changing, but the pursuit of the dazzling Hollywood smile has never been quite as deeply embedded in the culture.

When you’ve lived in America for a long time, you notice the difference.

So yes, you may encounter more imperfect smiles in Britain.

But Austin Powers was perhaps exaggerating.

And Yes, British Food Used to Be Pretty Awful

This one is harder for me to defend.

When I was growing up, much British food really was awful.

Vegetables could be boiled until they had surrendered both their texture and any lingering hope of nutritional value. Meat was often cooked until there was no possibility whatsoever that it might still be alive.

Things have changed enormously.

Modern Britain has excellent restaurants and an extraordinarily diverse food culture. Indian food in particular has become so thoroughly absorbed into British life that curry regularly competes for the unofficial title of the country’s favorite food.

And a good Sunday roast—roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, vegetables and gravy—is still one of my favorite meals.

Notice that I said a good Sunday roast.

On a recent trip to Scotland with my wife, I enthusiastically explained what a treat she was in for when we ordered one at a restaurant.

What arrived was a tasteless, chewy hunk of beef.

Maybe some things never change.

“Have You Met the Queen?”

I’ve been asked this by Americans more than once.

Britain has around 70 million people, so the statistical likelihood that every British person is personally acquainted with the Royal Family is fairly low.

But I have to admit that my own answer is slightly more complicated.

No, I never met Queen Elizabeth II.

But she once walked across a hallway just a few feet in front of me when she visited the university where I was teaching.

There was no eye contact, no royal conversation and, sadly, no invitation to Buckingham Palace.

My main impression was how surprisingly small she seemed.

I can do slightly better with King Charles.

When I was at college, I shared an apartment with a Romanian princess who had apparently been a childhood playmate of the then Prince Charles.

So I suppose that puts me only a couple of degrees of separation away from actually knowing a royal.

Perhaps the Americans who asked me weren’t so far off after all.

Britain Is Small. Getting Around It Isn’t Always Quick.

Americans sometimes underestimate Britain because it looks so small on a map.

And by American standards, it is.

You can drive from southern England to Scotland in the time it takes to cross a couple of large American states.

But that doesn’t mean every journey is quick.

Britain has an excellent network of motorways—the British term for freeways—but once you leave them, distances become deceptive. Head into rural Scotland, Wales, Cornwall or parts of northern England and a relatively short distance on the map can involve hours on narrower, slower roads.

Try driving from the far southwest of England to the north of Scotland and you’ll discover that Britain doesn’t feel quite so small after all.

The compensation is the scenery.

Once you get into the Scottish Highlands in particular, you can find yourself traveling slowly through some of the most awe-inspiring landscapes anywhere in the world.

Sometimes crawling along isn’t such a bad thing.

The Britain I Remember Isn’t Quite There Either

There’s another side to all this.

I’ve lived in America for more than three decades now, which means something rather strange has happened.

Britain changed while I was away.

So did I.

When I go back, I’m still unmistakably British. I recognize the humor, the language, the places and the little cultural signals that are almost impossible to explain to someone who didn’t grow up there.

But I’m also now looking at Britain partly through American eyes.

Things that once seemed completely normal can suddenly seem peculiar. Things I once complained about can seem rather wonderful.

And sometimes I find myself remembering a Britain that doesn’t really exist anymore.

Perhaps that’s the most interesting thing about leaving the country where you grew up.

You don’t simply leave a place behind.

The place moves on without you.

And after enough years have passed, you discover that you’re not quite the person who left it either.

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