We were in England for a wedding in the countryside and, oh, it all looked lovely. Rolling hills, lush meadows, roses tumbling over honeyed stone cottages and apple-cheeked children scampering along the grassy lanes. I’ve lived in California for most of my adult life by now, and I’d forgotten quite how ridiculously pretty it all was.

“It’s so beautiful here,” I told the woman in the mullion-windowed tea shop on the winding High Street where I looked in for a spot of afternoon refreshment. “The grass is so green and the flowers are so big and blooming and beautiful – it’s just gorgeous.”

“Well, yes,” said the woman, looking a little surprised. “I suppose it does look quite nice.”

“It must be all the rain,” I said, thinking of the sad brown lawns of my dear, drought-challenged home state. “It does make stuff grow, doesn’t it?”

“Well … yes, rain does that,” agreed the woman, her expression shifting subtly from the slightly surprised to the marginally concerned.

“And the buildings!” I added. The very oldest standing residence in Los Angeles, the Ávila Adobe House on Olvera Street, is a mere spring chicken of barely 200 years. “This building we’re standing in now must be, what? Four hundred years old?”

“About that,” said the woman, who was now looking at me what can only be described as kinda funny.

“Four hundred years!” I exclaimed. “It’s like walking into a story book! Would you believe there’s even a cricket match going on the green? Cricket! With the men dressed in white and the bats and the wickets and everything!”

“Cricket,” confirmed the woman, now glancing a little nervously around as if she feared she might find herself in need of assistance.

“It’s perfect!” I cried. Eagerly, I scanned the pastries in the glass case by the door: pastries had loomed large in my childhood. “You have Bakewell tarts!” I caroled delightedly: you never see a Bakewell tart in Los Angeles. “And – ooh, Eccles cakes! I love an Eccles cake!”

I was about to take a seat and order myself a sugar feast when I was attacked by a sudden vigorous sneeze – another thing I’d forgotten while I was living in California was the particularly lethal nature of the English pollen. Not to worry, I reminded myself: across the street I had spotted a small outlet of the venerable British drugstore chain Boots the Chemist. Good old Boots, I reflected a little mistily, remembering many an emergency Boots run in streets high and low in days gone by: you could always rely on a Boots.

“I’m going to Boots!” I announced both firmly and proudly. Then shook my head in nostalgic wonderment. “Going to Boots to get something for my hay fever, can you believe it?”

“Ha,” agreed the woman just a little faintly.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said. And winked, merrily. “Always hoping I don’t get run over first, because I can never remember which way down the street to look for the cars, hahaha!”

“Uh … haha?” responded the woman, by now white with open fear.

It was only when I was safely across the street, into the store and halfway through paying for my inhalant, that I remembered that – although these days I act, think and apparently speak like the American tourist that for all practical purposes I have now become – still, as far as my accent goes, I continue to sound exactly like a person who has never strayed a hundred yards from the shore of England’s green and pleasant land. And that since Mr. Los Angeles, on whose booming Californian tones I can usually count to broadcast the fact that my life lies across the Atlantic these days, had taken himself off for the afternoon to visit the nearby Folly, the woman at the tea shop had had no way in the world of knowing that my American-style effusions of amazement at the details of the English daily round were the perfectly reasonable reactions of someone who now lived half the world away. As opposed – just to take a random hypothetical example – to the manic babblings of an unhinged and possibly dangerous locally dwelling barking madwoman.

AND YOUR POLICEMEN ARE TERRIFIC

The Immigrant Chronicles