Meanwhile, Loyd Grossman, an American-born food-show host and purveyor of his own brand of spaghetti sauce, radiated from my television set like a piece of performance art representing the pitfalls of long-term expatriate-ism. The problem was his accent, a bizarre strangulated sui generis concoction that sounded as equally incomprehensible to English people as to Americans. It was not even mid-Atlantic, except in the sense that perhaps it was the way they used to speak in the lost city of Atlantis.

I resolved to hang on to my own accent, mainly by watching a lot of American TV, and to assimilate as best I could while remembering where I came from. What happens then is that you begin to see through the looking glass from both sides. I began to understand how America appeared from 3,000 miles away — not just the things Britons admired, but the things they didn’t.

And so a country where even Conservatives are proud of the nationalized health service cannot comprehend a system that leaves tens of millions of people unable to afford basic health care. A country that all but banned guns after the slaughter of 16 small children in Scotland in 1996 cannot understand why some Americans’ response to mass shootings is to argue for more gun rights, not fewer.

Despite the sometimes immature behavior of Britain’s legislators, they manage to enact laws without deliberately obstructing the running of the country. Britons are perplexed by the sclerotic hatred infecting so much political discourse in America. And not one Briton I ever met understood why being able to see Russia from Alaska was at one time apparently considered an acceptable foreign-policy credential for a prospective vice president.

Britons admire and consume American culture, but feel threatened by and angry at its excesses and global dominance. They are both envious and suspicious of Americans’ ease and confidence in themselves. They want American approval but feel bad about seeking it. Like a teenager worried that his more popular friend is using him for extra math help but will snub him in the cafeteria, they are unduly exercised by the “special relationship” — endlessly deconstructing what it meant, for instance, when in 2009 Gordon Brown, then the prime minister, gave President Obama a handsome penholder made of wood from a Victorian anti-slave ship, while Mr. Obama reportedly gave him a stack of movies that were incompatible with British DVD players.