As I cower in my Brooklyn apartment, emaciated and terrified, I can't help but think back to what a friend back in London said to me when I first told him I was getting married and moving to America. "I'll tell you what, old chap," he said as he snapped his braces and leant back on his servant. "I've met an awful lot of foreigners in my time, and most of them couldn't be more peculiar if they painted themselves puce and grew tits on their shoulders. I've lived in Belgium, for Christ's sake. But for all our shared language, Americans are the oddest of the lot. I wouldn't want to be you, my old mucker. Not for all the bumbershoots in Hertfordshire."



"Englishman in New York" has been in my head every day since I got here. God, I hate that prick.

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That was three months ago. Now I find myself in a country in which we all speak the same tongue, and yet every tiny task is so fraught with misunderstanding that it's less stressful just to barricade myself indoors and live on a diet of bathroom mold and cockroaches.

Here is a sample day in the life of a foreigner in your charming fucking country.

7:00 AM: Time for tea!

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Things don't start well. Staggering from the bedroom, I make a beeline for the kettle; like most Englishmen, my morning tea injection is the only thing that will reduce the shivers to a manageable level.

However, I soon discover there is a technical problem with my wife's electric kettle: The cable is missing. Being an excellent problem solver, I hold the kettle above my head and turn it upside down, causing its cold contents to cascade onto my forehead and thence into my dressing gown, where they venture downwards past the nipples, over the Pudge Hummock and deep into the forbidding copse of pubes where no living soul should ever venture. This is not how a morning cuppa should start.

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7:15 AM: Electric kettles are for COMMUNISTS