Back to My Bubble

Every now and then a wave of nostalgia and sentimentality falls over the household and we have a craving for all things British.

Naturally this mood recently coincided with the departure of daughter No 1 back to England which left us feeling bereft and at a loose end.  Lucky her – she gets to go back to England – unlucky us, we just have to stay here in California and suffer….

Yes I know it’s totally irrational and stupid.  The temperature has been in the 80’s all week; we’ve had wall to wall sunshine.  I don’t have to go to work; I can please myself how I fill my day; and yet my days seem empty and worthless. I’ve read all the British magazines my daughter brought out with her at Christmas and we’ve nearly eaten all the Cadbury's dairy milk.  Even watching Downton Abbey on the comemercial free Masterpiece Theatre TV channel hasn't helped.

I’m homesick.

No matter how much I’ve become accustomed to the American way of life; this will never feel like home.  There’s too much here I don’t like and too much I’ve left behind.

I don’t like being asked if I can spare a couple of cents or a dollar every time I walk down the street into town.  I don’t like seeing people climbing into skips, scavenging and foraging in bins for plastic bottles to exchange for meager amounts of cash at the re-cycling point.  I don’t like seeing elderly men and women huddled  in doorways surrounded by their life's belongings packed into a shopping cart. I don’t like being accosted at crosswalks by seemingly respectably dressed men and women who ask if I’ve seen the light and tell me I wont get to heaven unless I repent all my sins.  What sins? I haven’t sinned.

I want to be able to walk into a shop and browse in my own time without being pounced upon by effusive sales “associates” who insist on telling me their name along with their latest offers and act like they want to be my new best friend.

I have this craving for a “normal” life where I get home from work and start preparing the evening meal watching The Weakest Link; where I can chat to my neighbours as I trim the front hedge or water the pot plants by my front door.  Just mundane, everyday stuff that I don’t do anymore. 

I want to walk to the village post office and exchange a few pleasantries with the staff who always ask me how I am; not because they have to but because they genuinely want to know.

I want to stop as I stroll home and chat to the friendly elderly couple who live at the end of the road;  I want to stroke my cat who will be sat patiently waiting for me on the mat outside the back door; I want a  night out gossiping with my girlfriends; I want to sit by a roaring fire in an English pub;  I want to meet my old work colleagues for a cake, a coffee and a chat;  I want walk up and down the aisles of Sainsbury’s filling my trolley with products that I know and love, pausing to catch up with a couple of old friends I bump into that I haven’t seen for a while.That just doesn’t happen here.

And I suppose it's because I'm in this morose "all things British must be good" mood that I found myself defending Ricky Gervais after the Golden Globes.  I 'm not  a particular fan of Ricky Gervais,  but he’s like the packet of Paxo we saw on the shelf in the “English Shop” in Santa Monica.  My husband got very excited at the sight of the Paxo Sage and Onion stuffing and said we had to buy it to have with our Christmas dinner.  Well that was just pointless because our daughter was with us for Christmas and she's a vegetarian and we’d already decided we were going to have fish.  I suppose we could  have had the Paxo with the fish but well we bought it because it was British and it reminded us of home.  Not because we liked it.

So I stuck up for Ricky Gervais amongst my new American friends who had found him rude and not at all funny and couldn’t understand why he had even been selected to present the Golden Globes. I tried to explain, as politely as I could, that Ricky, bless him, was just voicing opinions that everyone thinks but nobody here is actually brave enough to say, in his own sweet sardonic way. After all, the Golden Globe producers would never have asked him to host the show if they didn't want him to be a tiny bit controversal now would they?!

Cynicism, irony, sarcasm - totally wasted! They really just don't get it out here, but you see, to me Ricky represented that packet of Paxo.  Funny how these things we never even liked before have now become so dear…..