YOU KNOW YOU’RE A BRITISH EXPAT IF . . .
…on July 4th you don’t know whether to celebrate or mourn the shrinking of the British Empire. So you wear black and eat a hot dog.
….every American you meet tells you they love everything about the British – ‘from your cute little roads to your accommodating little Prime Ministers.’
…you are getting used to Americans telling you everything about themselves in the first sentence: “Hi. I’m Maryanne. I’m an alcoholic, co-dependent, cross-addicted, enabling incest survivor.”
…an American invites you to ‘come visit us in Cleveland’ and you’re astonished to find out that they actually mean it. Take a Brit up on such an invitation and you’ll spend the weekend with an impeccably polite British host seething with unexpressed resentment that you actually believed her when she said she’d love you to come and stay any time.
…during the Olympics, when the Americans end up with thirty-two gold medals and the British with one, you’re relieved it’s that way around. You’ve lived here long enough to know that winning is the only thing that matters in America, and the British are so much happier when their countrymen are doing badly. (The only reason they tolerate Richard Branson is because he consistently fails to get around the world in his hot air balloon.)
…you find yourself surrounded by people with names you’d definitely not call a Brit. Like Madison, Logan, Dakota, Randy and John Thomas. Any more than you’d call an American Phillippa, Graham, Hamish, Tarquin or Dido.
… you still find yourself cringing with British embarrassment when an Americans tells you they love you.
…. you came to America expecting to find it full of gum-chewing, gun-bearing, brash, self-centered people who rush about telling perfect strangers to stick things up each others bottoms. Instead you find a nation of encouraging, optimistic people who say “Go for it!” as often as your friends back in England said “Ooooh, I wouldn’t try and do that if I were you.”
