First published: 6 July, 2004
I went home this weekend. Not the odd little wooden cabin in Colorado but my original home, across the water, land of my ancestors, Great Britain. See me and Braveheart? We go way back. This is the fourth time I’ve been back to Britain since migrating to the Yooessuvay but for the first time, something strange happened. It didn’t feel like home.
On every other visit there’s been the reassuring feeling of returning to the place I knew best, the familiar, the comfortable. This time it felt…foreign. Each previous trip has been made as a Phoenix resident, a place in which as I’ve stated before, I was never really happy living. Now for the first time, I was returning to Britain from Colorado, a state in which I am hopelessly, helplessly and totally, in love. Although it might sound like I’m stating the obvious, it came as something of a surprise to me. After 13 years, Britain is no longer home, Colorado is.
The phenomenon first evidenced itself when my folks picked us up at the airport and helped us carry our bags out to the car park. Have British cars always been that small? There’s nothing wrong with small cars of course, I happen to think those of us in America are going to have to adapt to more fuel economical vehicles sooner or later, but it did feel decidedly odd. Then, once we were all aboard, my Dad did a very strange thing. He set of driving on the left side of the road. Now I was in my late twenties when I left Britain, learned to drive there and everything and have piloted a rental car there as a visitor without a problem so it was strange that I should find this so disconcerting. However, as we approached our first roundabout (“traffic circle” if you speak American) it was all I could do to avoid flinching as dozens of little cars came hurtling at us from all directions.
It’s pretty obvious that the architecture would look different from that in the US of course. Here we tend to tear down old buildings to make way for new ones and anything more than fifty years old is positively historic. I grew up in a house built before the Second World War and that was by no means old. Also, architectural styles tend to vary from one region to another, even within countries (although it seems every designer of modern houses works from the exact same textbook, but let’s save that rant for another day) so naturally, the buildings wouldn’t look the same as those in Bailey, Colorado. What was mystifying to me however, was just how…odd they appeared. I grew up with this after all. My folks live on the west coast of Scotland where the older houses are built from red sandstone, the newer in brick covered in a weatherproof surface called pebbledash. This is where the builders coat the walls with mortar and throw tiny pieces of gravel against it. The Light of my Life™ hates the look and has stated that should we ever move to Britain, we’ll need to chip it all off and coat the house with something else. Not too sure what she has in mind, the wood siding we have on our Bailey home wouldn’t last through a British summer, much less a winter.
And then of course, there’s the funny money. I’ve yet to read an American journalist’s account of a visit to Britain that doesn’t contain some mention of the funny money. Britain’s money is of course, no funnier than that of any other country. It’s just that unlike America, where every bill looks exactly the same and you have to examine each in turn to see what it’s worth, in other countries, each denomination is a different size and a different colour. Straightforward enough, so why did it all seem so complicated to me? Well, in my defence I have to point out that also unlike America, Britain tends to change the appearance of its currency every few years; partly to keep the counterfeiters on their toes, partly to provide work for currency designers and partly to give people something else to grumble about.
So on this trip I was having to adapt to a range of notes and coins completely unfamiliar to me. A big problem here of course, is that other than a slight American twang, which I’m told has crept into my speech over the years, when I’m in Britain, I don’t sound like a foreigner. So rather than a tourist fumbling with the unfamiliar currency, a creature to whom all but the most cold-hearted will allow some leeway, here we had a middle aged guy, looking and sounding like a local, but totally befuddled by the concept of money. I’m sure some of them thought I was simply being allowed a special day out. “It’s marvellous how they teach them to fend for themselves these days, isn’t it?” There’s no place like The Home, right enough.
The food was different, the television was different, and the accents, boy did they sound strange to my ears. Why was this suddenly so noticeable this time, when it’s only three years since my last visit? I really don’t know. It’s apparent I’m finally assimilating into the life of an American but have things really changed that much during my absence? Maybe during all those unhappy years in Phoenix, there was always some part of me that felt this was only temporary and one day I would return to Britain. Now I’m a Coloradan, I’ve been able to let that part of me go.
Earlier in the year I wrote about a visit we paid to some friends who live in a loft in downtown Denver. I talked in glowing terms about the beauty of their home and the conveniences right on their doorstep. I went on to say how we crawled our way through a blizzard to make it back to our little house up in the mountains, and how despite the shabby furnishings, gloomy lighting and ever present aroma of dog, this was without a doubt our home. As we walked in the door, after almost 24 hours of traveling, tired, cranky and not a little spacey, there was no doubt in my mind.
I’ll be a Scot until the day I die, but Bailey, Colorado; that’s home.
The Gunsmoke Diaries 