The Importance of Being Dishonest

There is a question which every immigrant will get asked eventually by the beaming natives, and that question is: 'So how do you like it here?' And if you want the natives to keep beaming sympathetically at you, it's important not to answer this question honestly when you're going through that awkward patch when the novelty has entirely worn off but the familiarity has not yet worn in. (For my mother - not the most successful of expatriates - that awkward patch seemed to last all of twenty years, and she always, always answered that question with blinding honesty.)

You can say: 'Well, I miss my family.' Nobody minds that, and it just suggests what a nice person you must be. Missing your mother! Bless!

You can also venture a tentative criticism of your new surroundings, always provided you have managed to calculate what the natives' favourite pet grumble is. In England, you can probably get away with an adorably startled 'I wasn't expecting all this rain!' Or perhaps you could say 'I'm a bit worried about the parcel I sent via Royal Mail' or 'Do you know how to get an intelligent human being when ringing BT's helpline?' or 'So, I got on a train the other day to take a half an hour journey to London and they stopped the train and made me go by bus via Wales...' which should be good for an hour's worth of sympathetic ranting from your audience. Here in Northern Virginia, the pet grumble seems to be the traffic. People talk about the nightmare of their daily commute the way that my granny complains about her favourite health problems - with an immense, all-consuming fondness.

What you shouldn't say is what's probably on your mind - how everything looks wrong, and also, tastes wrong, and also, smells wrong, and the way that the locals talk funny makes it hard to understand them, and also, they don't look right either. (I remember my American husband looking around central Swindon in horror, and saying in carrying tones: 'D'you think it's poor nutrition or inbreeding which makes them look like THAT?') Nor do the birds, or the stars in the sky. The American and Australian Rhodes scholars at Oxford were particularly bad for vociferously listing all the things that they hated about Oxford, and England, and Britain - at the top of their lungs. The WEATHER and the FOOD and the PEOPLE, LIKE OH MY GOD, and I'd want to take them aside and gently point out that the English could understand them as (astonishing, this) they all spoke English too. And eventually most of them got over their initial homesickness, and grew accustomed to the lack of sunlight and real, proper beer and NORMAL football played the way we play it at home, but I imagine they spent the rest of their time there wondering why the English were so cold and standoffish.

It is very important to be dishonest at this point, because immigrants are expected to be grateful, especially immigrants to prosperous and powerful nations. You have been kindly let inside the hallowed portals. You are not really supposed to be hankering for whatever uncouth homeland you fled in the first place, and also, nobody asked you to come over here, did they? (But we hanker all the same. There is decided hankering over here.) This is perhaps especially true of America, where a sizeable proportion of the population seems to honestly believe that their nation's prosperity isn't so much a matter of their geopolitical fortunes aligning in the recent past as a matter of God selecting their nation out especially for extra blessings. (Nb: I'm not precisely sure where the rising fortunes of China and India - respectively godless and overly-godded from a Judeo-Christian viewpoint - fit within this thesis.) Failing to respond with sufficient enthusiasm not only marks you out as a surly cur of the serpent's-tooth model of ingratitude, it also suggests that you're an unbeliever in this key doctrine as well.

They do keep asking: 'So how do you like it here?' And I say, with an appropriately astounded smile: 'Ask me later, when the shock's worn off!'

And if that doesn't work to deflect the friendly natives, there's always the traffic.

Here be dragons - or snakes, to be quite accurate.

Icelandic natural phenomena be damned; we made it to Virginia a week ago. Most of the time, I forget that I have stepped into a metal tube and in this tube, roared my way across half the world; however, occasionally it's brought forcibly home to me just how far from home I am. We are living in a modern American townhouse, which means that we have gone from a cramped little brick Victorian terrace to a vast, featureless white box. You could probably fit our entire English house into the basement of this one.

It is a very good thing that we have all this space, as it's apparent that we won't be spending as much time outside. In England, we could walk to the doctor's, and to the dentist's. The post office was a scant few hundred metres away, as was the little supermarket, and when you walked through the woods behind the supermarket, you reached the tennis courts, the football pitch, and the park. In the other direction, the library wasn't far beyond the post office, and the school and the train station were a grand leg-stretching ten minutes' walk away. If you'd designed a small world for a two year old boy, you could scarcely have done better. When Jasper started climbing up the walls of the house, I could take him to watch trains, or to visit the sheep, or to the waterlands to throw stones into the Avon; we could walk around the paddocks by the Manor to visit the ancient horses grazing nearby, or we could hike up to the canal towpath and watch the boats go by. For the best part of the year, we did all this walking with rain dripping off the ends of our noses, but - sensibly for a child born in England - Jasper never seemed to mind the rain much.

This part of the world is clearly designed for cars, and not for walkers. The developers of this area have thoughtfully put in a little playpark under the giant power pylons, where they clearly could not slap any more houses; the wires crackle and hum overhead, and Jasper does not like it much. We have a short, unfenced little backyard, with a small tree demarcating the line between our yard and the neighbour's - however, the neighbour's gangly adolescent son has taken to shooting his little BB gun in the direction of our house. If I let my toddler outside, he runs the risk of getting potted, and I rather like his eyes where they are. Since our backyard appears to be a shooting range, we're reduced to trekking down a long concrete path by the side of the busy road for fifteen minutes in order to reach Goose Creek (which is, oddly enough, about six times the size of the River Avon).

Yesterday we went for a walk by the Creek with Jasper running happily on ahead of us. And then I am stopped dead in my tracks: 'What the HELL is that?'

'That..? Oh. Erm. I think it's a black moccasin. But don't worry. I don't think they bite.'

It was the biggest bloody snake I have ever seen in my life - black coil after black coil draped over a branch near the path, overlooking the river.

'They bloody well do! Also, it's fucking huge. Get away from it! HENRY!'

Then my sainted husband gets out his Iphone in order to google the wretched thing while Jasper sensibly tries to climb my leg to safety. (I miss the days when marital rows didn't involve looking up the correct answer on Wikipedia.) Thanks to Virginia's Herpetological Society, we managed to ascertain that a) the range of the black moccasin (deadly, incidentally) does not extend this far north, and b) that Voldemort's little pet was probably a black ratsnake (capable of growing past six foot in length, apparently).

Today, we did not go out in the yard (where the neighbour's kid was shooting again) and nor did we go near the river. Instead, we went to the local outlets, and walked mindlessly around and around, staring at all the 'Sale' signs.

Failure to emigrate

I like this village, I do, but sometimes I wonder about the inhabitants. People keep stopping and gazing at me in dumb amazement: 'Still here? I thought you were leaving for AMERICA?' Yes. Yes, well, if you'd walked past a newstand or turned on a TV or a radio over the last five days, you'd have noticed that there's a volcanic eruption going on and NONE OF US ARE GOING ANYWHERE.

I keep ducking my head in the village supermarket every time I pass someone to whom I've already said a lengthy, teary farewell. I didn't want to leave, but now it's embarrassing to still be here. Also, I have already taken my last nostalgic walk past Southcott Manor and my last stroll up to the canal past the waterlands, and eaten my Last Cornish Pasty, and drunk my Last English Ale, and read my Last Saturday Times, and I am very ready to leave now. I'm aware it could be worse - we could be trapped in a hotel room somewhere, watching our funds drizzle away, or stuck in an airport. But the lease on our house expires at the end of the month, as does our car insurance, our mobile phone contracts - and the sodding volcano keeps on exploding.

My husband keeps coming up with bright ideas. 'We could drive to Lisbon, and -'

Last time we drove back from London to Wiltshire, we got stuck in a traffic jam, and both children began writhing and screaming in concert. Jasper, not usually the most articulate of toddlers, started howling clearly 'No... car... me.... NO... CAR... ME' while Barnaby just howled. They kept it up past Reading, all the way home. I pointed out that possibly, just possibly, driving through France, Spain and Portugal was not going to work - not unless he wanted to listen to the tortuous repetition of 'NO... CAR... ME' all through most of Western Europe.

'What about a cruise ship, then..? I could send you and the boys on ahead -'

He is full of bright ideas.

I can't pronounce Eyjafjallajoekull but I'm giving it a two-fingered salute anyway

We were supposed to fly at noon on Monday. We will not be going anywhere. Like everybody else who've found their travel plans thrown into utter disarray, I am taking the eruption of an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano very personally. Some of us are trying to emigrate over here, ICELAND, you BASTARDS.

I now wonder why I bothered wasting so much time worrying about the visa when there were volcanic eruptions to worry about instead. We were so worried about the possibility of the car breaking down, or trains not running (a very real possibility, given the state of British rail) that we actually booked a hotel room near the North Action Tube stop the night before my nine o'clock appointment at the Embassy. Jasper, bless him, finds hotel rooms wildly exciting, and bounced on the bed, flicked at switches, and behaved like a cheery maniac until long past eleven. Then he woke up, delighted, not long after six am. This meant that he was a tiny screaming trainwreck by the time we reached the security queues outside the Embassy, and kept trying to zoom off towards the guards. Finally I shrieked 'JASPER! If you run that way, YOU WILL GET SHOT!' and then had one of those moments when you realize that everyone is looking at you and judging your poor parenting efforts, including the armed security guards.

The US Embassy in London is a giant concrete edifice with a golden eagle squatting in menacing fashion on the roof. Once you are inside, you find yourself in a large waiting room with huge glass windows; it's rather like being trapped inside an unpleasant concrete sauna as the sun beams relentlessly in. The baby was sweating: the toddler was sweating: all of us were miserable. There were fans stationed around the room, but none of them were turned on. I hissed at my husband 'I thought you people invented air conditioning?' and he said huffily 'We wouldn't waste it on the ENGLISH.' Unfortunately, we'd shown up on the same day as they were processing the Camp America counsellors, so the room was packed with hundreds of young Brits in tight, unflattering clothing, clogging up the computers and saying intelligent things like 'So, what d'you mean, I need my PASSPORT?' They processed six hundred of them while we were waiting. Jasper raced up and down and up and down and bellowed 'OUUUUUUT' at us, but there was no out, and alas, also no play area as there is on the US citizens' side.

We finally had our interview in the early afternoon, conducted by a very good-looking blonde who made an excellent advertisement for the US. We strapped Jasper into the pushchair, and balanced Barnaby precariously up on the ledge next to the glass. She asked me how long I'd been married, and I said 'Oh Christ. I don't know. Forever?' Then she asked us what year we'd married in, and neither of us could remember, so we had to work it out on our fingers. ('If you were twenty-two, and I was twenty-three...') She asked us how we met, and I said 'Do you want the real story, or the one we're going to tell the kids one day..?' (The fictitious story is lovely, and involves me hurrying across campus, my hair all windswept, my lashes downcast, and dropping an armful of textbooks which my gentlemanly husband-to-be then scooped up. The other story involves a bar.)

She gave us the visa anyway. Possibly Barnaby wearing his father's black Italian eyebrows lent our marriage some validity, poor infant. And then we went home and innocently, blithely, booked tickets for the nineteenth.

I don't know what we were thinking.

I like to think that when the Mayflower first left Plymouth, its passengers brimming with cheery expectations of the splendid and godly New World they were going to build there, one of the wives - probably one of the pregnant ones, fighting a losing battle with nausea - was looking glumly backwards at the receding coast of Devon, and thinking 'Bugger this for a game of soldiers.'

And possibly, with a hint of bitterness: 'I should've married Samuel Scrote. First bloody Holland, now the Americas... Scrote'd never have left the pig farm. No chance of being killed and eaten by savages there. And I'd have stayed near my mother, anyway.'

And then, reconsidering: 'Well, there's THAT to be said for Virginia.'

We are emigrating to Virginia. It is my husband's idea. He is full of enthusiasm. I am full of trepidation.