Tipping my hat to the men figuring it out as they go — Today is Father’s Day in the UK, but I always find it — like Mother’s Day — a bit confusing. Do we really need a day for this? What is it meant to symbolise? Why do all the posts on Mother’s Day seem to be paeans to endless sacrifice, dedication…

How should an Englishman celebrate Independence Day? — Celebrating the moment where the country you live in kicked out the one where you’re from is not without its irony. I have now been in America for two Independence Days , and I’m still no clearer about how to behave as an outsider. I spent the entire weekend last…

Why having British teeth is asking for trouble in America — It’s only when you move from Britain to California that you begin to understand what a horrific disappointment your teeth are to everyone around you. In The International League of Teeth, America is in pole position, with Brazil and a few of the Latin American countries tied close behind. Britain…

Why does LA have such an enduring love affair with neon? — I f your expectations of LA have been shaped by Raymond Chandler novels, film noir and L.A Confidential, walking around after dark here can bring on a sense of creeping dread. It’s a city of wide streets, limited pedestrians, and shifty-looking car-parks which are largely empty at night. As someone…

An unintentional encounter with ‘Murican patriotism — It starts, as these things always do, as a joke. At somewhere around 10 o’clock at night, after a long day of drinking in the sunshine, you make a drunken bet over a game of pool against a French colleague. …

On Clinging to The Queen’s English — One of the chief joys and struggles of being English in California is the gradual retreat into a grotesque caricature of Britishness, and there is no area where this is more of a challenge then your accent & vocabulary. After a few months of living in LA, I resolved that…

Traffic is to Angelenos what the weather is to The British. — Moaning about a logjam on the 405 Freeway, a pile-up on the I-10, or a bumper-to-bumper tailback on Lincoln Boulevard is the Angeleno equivalent of talking about how grey/rainy/miserable the weather is in London. To be honest, I’d much rather spend half an hour in traffic than thirty minutes on…

Where The American Dream goes to die — I spent Thanksgiving Week driving around the back roads and desert of California: up to and through Death Valley into Nevada, and then down round the Nevada side and onto Joshua Tree. For hundreds of miles and long periods of time we saw no-one apart from a bored F-15 Air…

Where abs are the new clothes. — A popular T-shirt slogan that I have seen worn into cliché around The City of Angels is the “Too Stupid for New York. Too Ugly for LA.” one. …