Why I love Blighty

Helen Fielding | The Guardian - April 24, 2010


I know it’s so LA to be creepily upbeat, but being back in England is awfully nice.

There’s nothing like arriving back from Los Angeles to make you appreciate Blighty. And I know, I know: I’m lucky and I missed the worst of the winter, and I’m brushing over the traffic wardens and the clampers, etc, but these are the things I love about home:  

  1. The “sorry” conversations. “Soree!” “Soree!” “Sorree!” – for being vaguely opposite someone on the pavement, for eyeing the same packet of McVitie’s in the shop. “Sorree! Room for everyone, all squash in together and be friendly. Sorree!”

  2. Unabashed drinking. Going to dinner parties where the only people who aren’t gloriously drunk are the alcoholics.

  3. You can’t pretend to be prettier than you are. There’s no point lathering on make-up and fuffing your hair and trying to keep the whole edifice intact in your car. Next morning, you’re going to open the door to the postman in your nightie with your hair standing on end and walk to the shop in the pouring rain with a red nose and everyone’s going to see.

  4. “Well, there we are.” I love that expression. “That’s life, just get on with it, there we are.”

  5. TV programmes are clear about where they start and finish. In America, one minute you’re watching a serious report about a mud slide, and next minute a man with an orange face and fluorescent smile is saying, “Do you have erectile dysfunction?”

  6. Strangers take the piss out of you. I asked a girl at the yoga place where she found her paper cup: “They’re in front of your nose, yer ninny!”

  7. People appreciate it when the sun shines to the point of feeling singled out by God. “Glorious, isn’t it?” “Isn’t it marvellous!” “Haven’t we been blessed by the weather!”

  8. Blossom, and leaves starting to open. The only time palm trees change is when they fall over.

  9. Very old things casually unheralded everywhere. You don’t notice how extraordinary it is, living surrounded by relics of hundreds of years of ancestors, until you’re not.

  10. It’s all right for people to be old and look old without feeling they have to make themselves all surprised looking. People can potter along – or present television programmes – with preoccupied expressions, crooked teeth, wrinkles and wild hair, humming Bach cantatas without worrying that people will think they’re a crazy homeless person who can’t afford hair extensions, an orthodontist and a lift.

  11. Getting on with it in the rain: people playing football, kids on climbing frames with buckets pouring on their heads. In LA, the computer man will flake because it’s raining. “But wait!” you say. “The computer isn’t outside.”  

“No no,” he replies, darkly. “It’s raining.”

  1. Throngs of people walking and on buses and bikes. The LA Times ran a front-page piece recently by a former entertainment person who’d had to start taking the bus. You have to walk to the bus stop! And wait for the bus to come! And then sit with and maybe talk to people you don’t even know. The payoff was a conversation between an incredulous fellow passenger and our grimly brave new bus voyager.

“Do you travel on the bus a lot?”

“All the time, my friend, all the time.”

California is lovely. It’s beautiful and sunny and there are mountains and beaches and, contrary to popular belief, lots of very good people. But the best thing about England is the tone; and when you live here all the time, you can forget how very subtle, ironic, kind, stoic and hilarious the tone is here. And I realise it’s, like, so LA to be creepily upbeat and positive but, sorree! Being back in England is awfully nice and there we are.