The Sunday Times has un-paywalled my recent essay on my impressions of how Britain has changed since I left it 26 years ago. Money quote:
The stops on the train journey from my Sussex home to London are exactly the same, almost a long-forgotten mantra of Englishness to me: Hurst Green, Oxted, Woldingham, Upper Warlingham, Riddlesdown, Sanderstead … The names reassure. And after you’ve lived in America, the sheer depth of each tiny stop, the generations that have lived there or near there for centuries, the overwhelming sense of real place you feel is something I once took easily for granted. Now it has the shock of the old, a sudden remembrance that this little island really does have an identity, a character.
And what is that character? The longer I have been away, the clearer it has become. It is prosaic and pragmatic; comfy and yet rude; resigned, yet not in any way depressed. I left at the crux of the Thatcher struggle, after teen years in the dreary dreadfulness of the 1970s, when this country truly was at war with itself, when the ideological divide was profound, when north was pitted against south and when “society”, far from being “big”, was rumoured to be nonexistent. I come back for a roaring, very British scandal and a culture far calmer, a divide far narrower and an identity much more settled. Everything is different and yet everything is also very much the same. Everyone is grumbling, but, if you will forgive a generalisation based purely on personal impressions, it seems a country that still makes sense; that has come to terms with itself; a country that, unlike my new home, America, is not in the midst of a cold civil war.
The Dish 