Why is it that the English continue to get it all so wrong in New York? There is something particularly, peculiarly irritating about the Brits over here. This is a city that's wide open to strangers, lumpy with a homogeneity of schemers and immigrants, yet the Brits manage to remain aloof and apart, the grit in the Vaseline. Those with the voices like broken crockery, the book-at-bedtime accent, have a lot to answer for. The Brits believe that they have a birth-given sincerity and that it's not what you say but how you say it that matters. And that all silly, gullible Yanks, from policemen to society hostesses, will wave us ahead on life's road when we open our euphonious mouth. In fact, most Americans can't tell the difference between Billy Connolly and Russell Crowe, and why on earth should they? If you really, really want to disjoint an Englishman—ruin his day—then just ask him which bit of Australia he's from.

And then there is the air of patronage, combined with an odor of neediness and a thick-skinned, unembarrassable meanness. "Oh God, have you eaten with the Brits here?" a friend asked me. "They'll book a table for six, and then nine of them turn up. Ask for the check and they'll all have to go to the bathroom or smoke a cigarette or make a phone call, and there'll be one guy left at the table. That'll be the D.A.S.—the Designated American Sucker, who through sheer naked embarrassment will pick up the tab, and suddenly they'll all be back at the table, thanking him with their impeccable manners. This will be the only time they've actually spoken to him, because for the rest of the meal they'll be talking about people who they were at school with, who all have the names of small dogs. If there's no D.A.S., they'll hold an auction over who had the steak and two beers. I'm not kidding. You know what gets me? It's not like they're poor. Not really poor, like lots of immigrants. They just think we're lucky to have them. They walk into a room and imagine it just got classier."

The British in New York are not good mixers. We hunker together, forming bitchy old boys' and girls' clubs where we complain about and giggle over Americans like nannies talking about difficult, stupid children. An English girl, newly arrived, has been picked up by the expat coven and asked for tea. And rather nonplussed, she says, "It's sad and sort of weird. This is the way our grandparents used to behave in Africa and India."

New York's grand British club, the social embassy, is Soho House. Go up to the bar on any Thursday night and see the serried, slouched, braying, bitten-nailed ranks of them, all in need of a toothbrush, a cotton bud, and a dermatologist. Nursing beers and a well-thumbed ragged project. They're all here not making a film, not writing a book, not selling a sitcom. Don't tell me about your latest script. You're not a film writer. You're a handyman. You've never made so much as a wedding video. You do a bit of decorating, some plumbing, and you house-sit plants. There's no shame in it. It's what immigrants do.

In the Red Lion, a bar on Bleecker Street, half a dozen televisions pump out the Rugby match between England and Scotland. It's 9:30 in the morning and the place is packed with geezers and a few chubby-cheeked, ruddy rugger-bugger girls. They're a particularly big-boned, docile, good-natured type, who look like members of some alternative royal-family-pedigree breeding farm. The blokes are necking pints of Guinness and projectile bellowing. It's uncannily like being back in London. The only difference is that half of them are England fans, and half Scotland. If anyone walked into a Scottish bar back home wearing an English accent during this match, they'd leave wearing their nose as an earring. And it strikes me that there's something unreal about this. It looks right and smells right. It even sounds right. But it's not right. They're all playing extras in their own me-in-New-York movie. They're putting on the Britishness as a show. They're going through the motions only because they're here.