One Year On

Incredibly, constantly aging reader, this weekend marks our one year anniversary of arrival in the US. Here we'll take you through a summary of the things we love about our life here, and the things we miss from the UK.

We love the weather. As a reminder, we live in the city of Palo Alto, in the south of the Bay Area, in Northern California. California is big - it's roughly the size of England - and the climate varies throughout the state. Here in Palo Alto, the weather is almost universally fine and hard to fault: it's 27 degrees C and sunny every day in the summer, it's typically 15-20 degrees C and sunny every day in the winter. It doesn't rain at all from March to November, it rains a bit in the winter but not at the level you see in the UK. There's hardly any wind. It's entirely predictable, and it's predictably nice.

Wednesday looks awful by local standards!

Not only that, but the sunlight here has some kind of quality which it just doesn't have in the UK; colours seem more saturated and vivid all the time. I still haven't really got used to this.

The consistently good weather means you dress really differently - I've not touched my coats since we locked down - and there's much more scope for doing things outside. In fact, the weather has created something we like to call 'porchlife', where the porch here becomes a room in its own right.

We love the surprisingly large amount of high quality ice cream. My favourite ice cream here is from a place called Tin Pot Creamery, which is a small, local company. But there are 4 or 5 ice cream parlours in Palo Alto alone, and going out for an ice cream is a thing. There's also the concept of the ice cream sandwich. As someone who can't really resist ice cream, it's awesome.

We love the local produce. My favourite ice cream is a small, local company; my favourite coffee comes from Santa Cruz, which is a coastal town relatively near here. California grows a huge amount of food, so the three weekly farmer's markets which are within walking distance of our house are packed with fresh produce grown locally. In many ways the Bay Area is its own little bubble with a lot of local stuff which is unique to this area.

We love the fact that American festivals are refreshingly, unashamedly silly. Everyone here loves a special occasion or event; there's very little of the post-modern cynicism over this sort of thing that you see in the UK. It's good, naive, silly fun, whether it be Halloween, Thanksgiving or just the 49ers going to the Super Bowl. Now obviously, I personally am all about the post-modern cynicism; I'm a fully paid-up member of the post-modern cynics society. But it's refreshing even for me to see people having good honest fun with no real thought or appreciation for the complete ridiculousness of it.

I was reflecting with Helen the other night that surrealist comedy just doesn't exist in the US. A Monty Python, Vic & Bob, Mighty Boosh or Eddie Izzard just couldn't have started here (ok, they had Andy Kaufman, but that's about it). And I think this is all related: there's much more of an attitude of taking things at face value.

We love the planted verges. Palo Alto is incredibly tree-lined, but also plant-lined; the verges outside the houses are planted with all manner of flowering shrubs. I think there's something about each house owning and having to look after its own verge, but hey, we're renting, I'm sure someone else will worry about that.

We love living downtown. It's ridiculous and fantastic that we live within a 10 minute walk of amazing American, Mexican, Italian, Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants, as well as a Bloomingdales and a Macy's. Plus we're very well connected for public transport here by local standards.

We miss the NHS. I've written plenty here about the shambles of US health provision. The NHS seems both staggeringly effective and staggeringly good value for money compared to this.

We miss a peaceful society. Now, we live in California (a relatively safe, civilized state), and in the Bay Area (mostly above average safety levels compared to the rest of California), and in Palo Alto (very much above average safety levels even compared to the rest of the Bay Area). But there's really no getting away from the fact that the US is just a much more violent society than the UK, particularly with respect to what the authorities seem to be able to do to their citizens. This doesn't really encroach on our daily lives, because as I said we live in such a safe bubble, but the atmosphere is just different. Fireworks are illegal, guns aren't. This is very obviously the wrong way round; I rest my case.

We miss the BBC. Oh my goodness; American broadcast TV appears to have died a few years ago now, and the corpse isn't even twitching. No-one watches broadcast TV; it's all streaming services, which means broadcast TV is simply bereft. Recently I caved in and started paying for a VPN so we can have some access to BBC content, and it's like somebody turned the lights on; there is no chance of anything like Only Connect happening here. When I need a break, I watch BBC News. Ten minutes of BBC Breakfast before bedtime is a guilty pleasure.

We miss the weather. Now I know I said we love the weather here, and we do. But we also hanker for a bit of variety; just once in a while, not knowing what the weather's going to do would be good. It'd also be nice if it actually rained properly; when it does rain here it's fairly cursory, not particularly heavy, not especially persistent. I miss watching the rain thrash down and flood the patio. I miss thunderstorms; I miss that petrichor smell after a good rain.

We miss a functioning government (and other state institutions). I mean, where do you start when you're living under a government so bad that it makes you jealous of a country run by Boris? My usual talent for hyperbole is still not enough to summarise how appalling Trump's government actually is. And of course, it's actively getting worse as he realises he's going to lose in November, and thus of late he's been piling on the crazy stuff at unprecedented levels. Boris may be dangerous, he may not even be competent, but he studied Classics at the greatest University in the world; you cannot argue that he isn't clever. I don't have to say a lot more here than: Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV. Extra points for getting them in the right order.

We miss our garden. We have a great house here, but there's no garden to speak of, and we miss our garden a lot.

And of course, more than anything else we miss family and friends that we just don't see enough of while we're over here. That said, given the pandemic, we'd not have seen much of anyone even if we were at home in 2020. We certainly don't intend on staying in this country forever (and frankly, humble reader, if Trump does turn it around and win in November, I'll be booking the plane tickets), and we're very much looking forward to seeing everyone again both when we're able to travel, and when we make the big move back to the UK.

In some ways it really doesn't seem like we've been here a year; in others we seem to have been here forever. It's certainly been an adventure - let's see what the next year brings!