You can go home again

Keen Expat File observers will note a lapse of 15 days from the last missive. Not, because, a la my last post that I have blog fatigue, but that I went back home, in the welcoming bosom of family, and off grid. I had to work for the first few days I was there - slavishly so, I might add, for a publisher did pay my flights over to Boston. All right, slavishly might be the tiniest bit of exaggeration. But the time went too quickly and I didn't get to see as many people as I thought I would.

As always with return trips to the States there are mixed feelings. There are so many people I miss, of course. And so many little things: the home fries at the Boulevard diner; Fenway; Sam Adams on tap; the view from the top of Mount Monadnock, Jeopardy! with Alex Trebek; the love notes etched into the window pane in the Old Manse in Concord MA by Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne; that people in shops apparently really, truly want me to have a nice day...

But I left for a reason, I guess (I mean apart from the murder charge). And some of those things kind of make me break out in a cold sweat during most trips back: the shrill, strident tone of the news reporting; crawling, sprawling suburbanisation; the blinkered unthinking patriotism of most of the country; Simon Cowell...

Those things I object to in America exist in the UK, in one form or another. But the beauty of being an ex-pat is that you can tune them out to some extent. If you don't really belong somewhere, you don't ever have to care as much. But then, do you ever feel at home?