As soon as I disembarked from the plane at Heathrow, I knew something was wrong. Oh sure, I'd expected there to be something of an adjustment after three months in America when I came back to London last week: food portions would look miserishly tiny after 12 weeks of supersizing, and occasional fusses over MPs' expenses would seem adorably quaint compared with American politicians who threaten to beat each other up on national TV. But something else was . . . different. I looked back at the plane, just to make sure: huh, it looked like a normal plane. Maybe I wasn't actually in England? I crunched down on someone's foot deliberately at the luggage carousel.

"Oh, sorry," they replied, fretfully.

Definitely England.

I tried to put it out of my mind, but all the way home there was a sense of dislocation and it wasn't until I opened the British papers the next morning that I realised what it was: shark attacks, snow chaos, spies, the whole nation talking about a soap opera, student activism, public service cuts, strikes, blatant racism and homophobia. I hadn't gone back to England: I'd gone back to the 70s!

This was astonishing on several levels. After all, jetlag from New York is supposed to be a five-hour jolt forward, not a 40-year lag back. Also, that plane certainly didn't look like a DeLorean, the only vehicle that is scientifically proven to take one back in time (according to the University of 80s Movies, from which I have a PhD). But it was a Virgin flight, and who knows what that evil crackpot Richard Branson might be capable of doing. Then there was the pleasing alliteration element: 70s, snow, strikes, soap opera, spies, student. (Shame about the racism and homophobia. For reasons not just to do with ruining the alliteration, of course.) Spooky!

In this strange new land in which I have found myself, no longer is the collective noun for students "Pot Noodle" but "protest". This is all very commendable but it does raise the question of who the tabloids and ITV3 sitcom writers will use as a generic reference for lazy and useless if students are now more politically motivated than they have been since the 70s.

Perhaps as compensation, certain other stereotypes have been unashamedly to the fore in the press, such as a fascinating story in one newspaper on Monday about "strays", aka straight men who are a bit gay, which doesn't, disappointingly, mean they are sexually experimental, but rather that they listen to Women's Hour and can't do DIY. Because that's what gay men are like, you see. They're like women – or at least like women according to the laziest gender stereotype ever written. Similarly, yesterday it was reported that Pizza Hut made a group of young black men pay before getting their food because, well, you know what black men are like. I'm sorry, did I say we were in the 70s? I meant a Jim Davidson standup routine.

Then there are the tales of Jaws-like shark attacks in Egypt, spies infiltrating the land, soap opera plotlines making newspapers' front pages and an increasingly likely future of bleak national poverty, where everything looks a little grey and brown, as though the contrast on your TV has gone (and that, younger readers, is how the 70s looked).

How has this happened? Like I said, I considered blaming Richard Branson, but blame is merely another way of crediting someone with a certain kind of power, and, when it comes to Branson, I'd really rather not. So instead, I'm blaming Julian Assange. After all, that is ever-so-trendy at the moment, and the US media did claim that what they insist on calling "the WikiLeaks dump" would change everything. Yet it seems that the exposure of emails sent by various ambassadors, aka Ferrero Rochergate, and the revelation that every national stereotype you've ever sniggered at is true hasn't changed the world order. Maybe instead, it's ripped open the fabric of time and we've all fallen through to the past so that we can go back and do it all again properly. Look, Britain, you're either stuck in Back to the Future or Groundhog Day. It's your choice. Sort of.

A headline to ponder



To a degree that can only be described as geekish, I adore newspaper headlines, from the surreal ("Headless Body in Topless Bar") to the simply ingenious ("How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea?") The best headline not only sums up the article, but gives it a little twist with a pun, which has something to do with the story itself, or at least makes it more memorable. The satisfaction some people find in a cryptic crossword clue, I find in a good headline.

Yet "satisfaction" doesn't seem quite sufficient a word for what I feel for ES magazine, the weekly supplement that comes with London's Evening Standard, and a headline it came up with last week for a story about the benefits or otherwise of university: The Finals Solution.

It's funny, because I had just been wondering how much longer we'd have to wait before making puns out of the Holocaust. But it's following the logic behind the headline that is, as I said earlier, where one really finds the joy, and one can easily see the link between university and Auschwitz. Some might suggest that the fact that the article was written by a journalist called Moses might have been a further prompt, but I like to think that is merely a fortuitous coincidence. ES magazine, the chapeau is doffed.