One Year On from One Year On

Staggered reader, would you believe that this week we passed the milestone of being here in the US for two whole years. Last year, I wrote a summary of what we love about the US, and what we miss from the UK. Today I'll regale you with a quick retrospective of the second year; what we did, what's different, and what's the same.

This time last year we were just scaling the peak of the second wave of the ongoing pandemic. If you'd have asked me then, I'd have said we'd be much closer to this being all over than it seems it is right now. Indeed, here in California everything has gone from "we're getting back to normal" to "OK, time to panic again" in just the last two weeks. At this point it's hard to believe that some of the changes we've seen aren't simply going to become permanent, but it's an evolving situation and I've given up predicting what happens next. It's clearly had a very significant impact on our time in Palo Alto - we've left California precisely twice in the last 12 months - but on the positive side it means we've become much more intimately familiar with the local area than we would have done otherwise. There are a small number of very special places on the planet, where magic things just seem to happen unbidden, and Palo Alto is one of them.

This year we've done a lot more "normal" things, making it feel less like we're here on an extended business trip, and more like we actually live here (despite the US government reinforcing the idea that we're visitors at every available opportunity). We've been to the dentist, we've been to the opticians, we've seen high school graduations and even been to a baseball game. Many things feel noticeably less weird than they did, but we're still very obviously English, British and European. For example, this week I had lunch with a colleague that's very obviously more American than me, and as we ordered and received our food I noticed that whilst for me, these were simple transactions, for my friend they were opportunities for a conversation. It was interesting to watch our quite different attitudes to the whole event.

We've travelled, although with nothing like the frequency or range that we expected to; we've been to various tourist destinations here in California (Mendocino, Sausalito, Lake Tahoe) and even made it as far as Seattle. For obvious reasons, we haven't flown in over 18 months and that doesn't look like changing any time soon; as it happens, I don't miss getting on places. We've learned a lot about the post-Gold-Rush history of California, which of course is a fascinating story.

I said last year that it didn't feel like we'd been here a year, but at the same time it felt like we'd been here forever. It's even more like that now: it feels like we've hardly got started in the US, yet packing up our stuff and moving here seems like another lifetime. We feel much more at home than we did 12 months ago, and if we could change anything it would be to be able to have more folks come and visit us from the UK. These last 24 months have been nothing if not unexpected - let's see what happens in the next 12 months!