One of the places we’re thinking about settling is East Anglia, somewhere near Norwich (the county town of Norfolk). A story on the BBC about an ill-advised politician speculating that the unexpectedly high levels of diabetes among children there may be due to inbreeding.

This reminded me of a nurse friend who explained the medical notation ‘NFN’. If a baby is born that seems relatively unresponsive it might be noted as NFN, meaning that it’s response is about what you’d expect given environmental issues, though it may be below the expected norm. Similarly if an adult patient appears slow, NFN would imply that it’s just the way he is rather than part of a medical problem.

NFN stands for Normal for Norfolk (or Norwich).

One of the joys of British television is the existence of minor channels. These differ from specialist channels such as Discovery (though we have those too) because they don’t have a particular focus. They exist, instead, to show programs that are expected to be less popular than would be required for the major channels.

This has several benefits. It allows a series that couldn’t make it to ‘the big leagues’ to still be seen by an appreciative audience. Some of these develop into very popular programmes that make it onto the major channels, and conversely they provide a safety net that means a poorly viewed program on the major channel can be shifted over rather than just cancelled (I found the cancellation of a perfectly decent series a real irritant in the US).

The benefit I’m enjoying right now, however, is space. The European Athletic Championships are going on in Sweden at the moment, and we get to enjoy 5.5 hours a day of coverage across BBC 1 and 2. Now I know that I could subscribe to something and get sport coming out of my ears, but for a relative cheapskate like me being able to watch excellent coverage of an exciting event (and for those of you who’ve only seen US coverage of athletics, you’ll have to take my word that the actual competition itself is often thrilling, and doesn’t require you to know that the US athlete’s mum once had a harrowing knitting accident) is a real pleasure.

Oh, and thanks to the overbearing nanny state, there are no ads either.

One of the things you find when moving country is that people ask you what like/dislike about your new country. When we moved to the US we didn’t have a big plan, we just stumbled into it. We didn’t have in mind to become rich on the fat of the US (figuratively or literally), and we didn’t specifically plan to stay or come back (though we’d always assumed we’d want to come back at some point). Nonetheless it was incumbent on us to comment on our new home.

The two things I would routinely point out (once I’d worked out that this was required) were normality and optimism. The former highlighted that Americans are really the same as Brits, at least from hour to hour. We all want to do whatever work we need to (either for money or for self-satisfaction/ambition), see family and friends, watch the football (whatever shape it might be), eat too much and bitch about others. Look wider than that and you can find endless differences in our attitudes to the rest of the world, consumerist natures, etc, but day-to-day we are the same. I suspect that’s true of most peoples around the world.

Optimism is, perhaps, the most basic area in which we differ. In America there is an assumption that things will work out. Whatever it is you’re thinking of trying, you should go for it because there’s a good chance it will work. And if it doesn’t, the next idea will. Whether it’s a new business or just a new haircut, it’s worth doing. This isn’t universal, of course; there are plenty of people who live without hope, or with utterly false hope (lottery, NBA draft, etc). But while it isn’t universal, it is pervasive; wherever you go there will be someone who aspires.

In the UK, and I apologize for my choice of words here but it’s really the best way to put it, the general assumption is that things are basically shit. You can try to build a business, but you’ll fail. Yes you can go to college, but you’re not really bright enough. That looks like a great car to buy, but the guy who’s selling it to you is trying to rip you off. The Millennium Dome? A stupid idea from the start. Actually the Millennium Dome was a stupid idea from the start, but the point is that it couldn’t have been thought of otherwise because it involved ambition, and ambition defines shitness.

I’m not a particularly ambitious person as it happens – I’d quite like to start a business, but can’t even aspire as far as working out what it would do – but living once again in an environment where the default attitude is cynicism can drag even cynical me down, and I’m sure it will take some getting used to.

On the other hand, the bacon here is fantastic.

One of the things I’m finding confusing about the move back to England is the sheer quantity of Englishness over here. For the last 7 years I’ve been used to hearing Americans, so any English accent or reference to an English place was enough to raise a small ‘ooh’. I’m still having that same reaction now; a DJ on the radio just mentioned a particular city and my first thought was ‘ooh, that’s…oh, right.’