Every time we say goodbye: the truth about doing long distance

 

I have a love/hate relationship with Heathrow Airport.

If I’m standing in Arrivals, it’s the greatest place in the world because I’m waiting for my fiancé. John lives in America (in Minnesota, if you know your states), so we only get to see each other every eight weeks or so.

I get there for the time that his flight lands and strategise and elbow my way to the front of the silver barriers, then spend the next 60 minutes anxiously scanning the faces of people pushing trolleys, dragging kids and shivering in shorts until I see him.

This also gives me the chance to watch other people’s reunions, which is the best way to pass time when you’re a nosy people-watcher in a good mood. Last time a family with Northern accents had brought along a scarecrow called Tommy, and I watched a tanned, slightly dazed-looking teenager run straight into his parents’ outstretched arms. You only get that in movies or episodes of Parenthood or at the airport.

There are all these mini heart-lurching moments while you wait, like when you think a man with a similar haircut could be him but isn’t, or that guy who has a red hoody is him but isn’t, and then suddenly John is there, walking towards me with a massive grin.

There’s nothing like that first hug after eight weeks apart.

Imagine holding your breath and ducking under water. Your heart is still pumping but your whole body starts prodding you to get oxygen. Your lungs burn and your brain struggles to focus on anything other than breathing.

When you resurface and take that first enormous gulp of air, you understand how completely brilliant and perfect being able to breathe is. Seriously, WOW. You feel alive, in the most basic but fantastic way. Of course, after the first couple of minutes it becomes less amazing and just regular, the way you’re supposed to live – until the next time someone throws you into the water.

After that first hug it’s like we’re continuing from the last day we saw each other. He’ll hold my hand while he tells me about the annoying guy on the plane; one of us buys coffee from Costa and the other gets a table; we get on the Tube to Central with the suitcases, and laugh at adverts.

We always have that invisible link that you carry around with everyone you love even when you’re on your own, like a notebook of names, photos and facts about them stored in your heart. Even if you’re just thinking about whether you remembered to buy grapes or what was the name of that actress in that thing, the notebook is still safe in you somewhere. It opens up when you get a message from them or you find a stupid t-shirt slogan you think they would laugh at, or see a weird-looking cat that you want to tell them about. Sometimes, when you miss them, you open it up yourself and flick through conversations, snapshots and memories.

Another way of thinking about our relationship when we’re not physically together is that it’s like a shared folder on Google Drive. It floats somewhere in this thing we know as the Cloud, and while the thing it is – the folder icon we see on our screens – is intangible, it does exist. It also has 3D components scattered around the world, in the form of server centres and wires, whose unique properties can be matched up to form that thing we know functions and operates and is completely real, even if we can’t poke it or pick it up.

The weeks in between go in phases. Often weekends are harder than days when you can force your brain to think about work for eight hours. Being busy is the aspirin to your headache. In week one you reluctantly relearn your solo routine, resenting something that seemed so normal just eight days ago. By week two that muscle memory has come back and you go into autopilot.

Weeks three to five you waver between anger, sadness and being OK. You find films to watch, meet up with friends and family, read, walk, run, see art and photography, and that stuff makes it better. Weeks six to seven you finally have a sizeable chunk to look back on and you realise you only have two more weeks to go and it's like waking up on the first sunny day.

Week eight feels like some arsehole hit the breaks so it takes forever, as you find yourself counting days and then hours.

When we are together we still have that notebook and that shared folder, but we also get to have a physical presence - to act and be seen as a team. We get to eat Ben & Jerry’s in Leicester Square or walk along the Mississippi or get excited about dinosaurs in museums or ride alarmingly shaky roller coasters. Being together is going from a Mini to a sports car. We are not the recording of a favourite song: we are the live version played on stage that electrifies every nerve.

The good thing about having to go over an ocean and some more land and stuff to see each other is that we’ve been able to travel to different cities and stay in lots of hotels. I love hotels. There’s something so luxurious about being able to walk from your bedroom into your bathroom without having to put clothes on, and the TV is right there and you only have one suitcase and someone else is cleaning your sheets.

But while those adventures have been great fun, what I miss the most are everyday things. Cooking pizza together is this big culinary project, as is going to the supermarket, driving for seven hours to Chicago while listening to morbid episodes of Serial, and just hanging around reading or watching Netflix with my feet warming up on his legs.

I can leave a room and come back thirty minutes later and he’ll still be there. I go to sleep and when I wake up I reach over and he’s warm and solid right next to me, not just a voice on a cold plastic phone connected by a dodgy WiFi signal.

Even seeing ourselves together in photos is this weirdly intriguing experience, like going back in time and showing a Roman what he looks like with a camera, because it’s this visual proof that we existed in the world in the same space at the same time. Plus, hey, there’s the Tower of London, that was fun, and damn, my hair actually looked so good that day.

And then suddenly, just as you get used to this solid, 3D life – to the oxygen you were missing – you’re back in an airport and this time it’s the Departures gate. You take one more deep breath – one more hug, one more kiss, one more moment to feel on your skin and hold onto – and then you say goodbye, turn to leave, and you take the plunge again.

The dos and don't of chatting up people in public

One of the first things you learn at school, apart from the obvious stuff like how to spell your name and what Biff and Chip did at the zoo, is that strangers are dangerous and you should never talk to them.

While apparently sensible advice, this becomes a bit tricky when you’re also meeting a whole bunch of new tiny human beings and trying to strike up conversations over the sandpit. It makes even less sense as you get older and start noticing people across Year 8 discos and pubs and student unions with whom you’d like to do more than just discuss Pokemon and Dexter’s Lab.

The fact is that, sometimes strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet. All your friends were strangers at one point, even the ones it feels like you’ve known forever. Call me Pollyanna but I don’t think we benefit from a world in which we view everyone we don’t know with suspicion.

However, there are ways to go about approaching strangers that are better than others. I get stopped in the street by men quite a lot. This is quite a difficult problem to talk about, because people assume I’m bragging. ‘Oh God, some stranger asked me out again when I was just trying to walk home. Also my bank account is too full, my house is too big, and I’ve been asked to go and address the UN but it’s the same day I’m accepting my Oscar. Why is life soooooooo hard?’

I’ve stopped wondering why this happens and what it says about me. Probably it’s because I’m a young woman who walks around London by myself, and I’m a fairly solid middle range on the attractiveness scale that runs from Quasimodo to Cindy Crawford. I do hope I don’t just have some sign or weird pheromone only men can sense that says, ‘Talk to me, I will definitely have sex with you’.

Being hit on by a random person in the street is not always a problem (at least not when you’re single!) Like I said, not all strangers who approach you are crazy, creepy or trying to sign you up to a cult. Done politely and respectfully, it’s quite flattering. Who doesn’t want to be told that of all the people in the crowd, someone noticed you and was fascinated enough to come up and say hi?

However, done badly and it leaves you feeling pissed off and violated. It feels less like that scene in Les Mis The Movie where Eddie Redmayne spots Amanda Siegfried across the street and is like, ‘MAN ALIVE, I would totally give up my French revolutionising for that babe,’ and more like being the gazelle the lioness has got her eye on in a David Attenborough documentary.

The difference between the two is that the second is not a conversation, it’s a power play. They have an objective (your number, a date, sex, whatever) and the entire point of stopping you is not to open up the possibility of getting it, but to achieve that mission by any means necessary.

These interactions always start the same way. I’m walking down the street in my own headspace, trying to remember the words to Moves Like Jagger or if I bought yogurt the other day, when suddenly example guy runs up and says a variation on the following: ‘Hi, excuse me, I just saw you walking and I had to tell you that I thought you were really beautiful/I really like your eyes/I love your shoes/you look like you want to party.’

Look, I know, I know, ‘Oh poor you.’ Do I think I’m beautiful, have nice eyes or amazing taste in shoes? Well, yes to the third (Converses ftw) but the others, fuck, I don’t have time to worry about it. I’m just reporting the facts here, and these are the lines I get.

So OK, I’m only human, and actually the first few times this happened I was like, ‘Well isn’t that nice?’ Except for the, ‘You look like you like to party.’ Er, I’m carrying a Sainsbury’s bag full of groceries, wearing a huge parka and trying to storm down The Strand. What kind of parties are you going to?

This insincerity is your first sign that they are ticking off The Checklist.

I’m starting to suspect that there is a forum somewhere in the depths of the internet that tells men how to hit on women in the street, and post four is The Checklist. I’m all about helping people overcome shyness to approach others, but this reeks of a predator desperately picking out someone – anyone – so they can go through the motions, get it over with, and maybe get laid.

It goes something like:

• Approach with compliment. It’s OK, you don’t have to mean it. Look at what she’s wearing and go for that.
• Now you have her attention, make sure you get her to stop. You can block her path or touch her. You can even outright demand it. Just make her stop. 
• Now she has to talk to you to be polite, so ask her a question. Try, ‘Where are you from?’ If she asks you to guess, say somewhere sexy, even if it’s blatantly obvious she’s not Italian or Spanish or French. Comment on her clothes. Ask her where they’re from, say you like bright colours/trainers/novelty sunglasses. Again, this doesn't have to be true. Just make sure she can't leave without feeling like a rude person crushing some poor guy's brave soul. 
• Make it clear that you have somewhere to be right now but you are interested in meeting later. 
• If she says she’s not interested, just keep asking her questions. This will prolong the conversation enough to make her desperate to get away from you. 
• Now, ask for her number. If she says no, ask again. She will give in eventually.
• Only back off if she says she has a boyfriend/girlfriend/fiance(e).
• Walk off with her number. Wait five minutes, repeat.

The major difference between the ones you want to date and the ones you want to slap is that refusal to accept no for an answer. I know when you’re not really into the conversation, you’re just ticking off this list because you’re not listening to me.

One of the most frustrating things is that still, in 2016, the quickest way to get a guy to back off is to tell him you have a significant other. To be fair, no one wants to be the person trying to break up a relationship, but often it feels like the reason for this is that you’re showing them a ‘PROPERTY OF’ stamp. It makes you feel like you need to have someone else vouch for you (and they’re probably assuming it’s another guy) for your refusal to count.

One guy told me, ‘I wish you’d mentioned you had a boyfriend earlier, I wouldn’t have talked to you for so long.’ Because apparently I’m only worth talking to if you think there’s some slim chance you’ll get laid. Another wasn’t even put off when I mentioned I had a boyfriend, until I added that ‘He’s in the US Army’. My relationship status – and my now-fiance’s job title and particular set of skills – have nothing to do with whether or not I give you my time.

So given my cynicism, am I saying you should never try talking to someone you fancy in the street? No! I’ve never used Tinder but I think a face-to-face meeting with someone is a much better way of vetting the weirdos and just-completely-incompatibles than looking at a picture on a screen.

So, here are my top tips for chatting up people in the street.

Don’t approach people who are busy
If I am storming through Leicester Square with a suitcase or I’m on my lunchbreak or trying to get on a bus (yes, that happened) I probably don’t want to talk to you right now.

Be honest
If you’re serious about taking this meeting further, don’t big up your job or lie about what you’re doing later. I might not be able to tell now, but this isn’t the best way to start any kind of relationship (casual or whatever).

Don’t touch me

Seriously, you’ve already broken social norms by trying to talk to me, so show that you’re doing this the polite, non-forced way and keep your hands to yourself.

Be open to rejection
I will try to be polite – I’m not out to hurt people and I know it takes effort to approach someone. But I don’t have to give you my time, so don’t be a jerk if I don’t want to talk.

Use your common sense
Everyone has awkward moments but come on, guys. One time I was reading Maya Angelou when a guy came up, said ‘Hi, excuse me, etc’ then asked me what I was holding. I said, a book. His awed response: ‘Wow, for real? I’ve only read Harry Potter.’ Another guy merrily informed me that he was, ‘So high right now.’ In the street at 7pm. Good luck with those life choices, excuse me while I’m heading in the opposite direction.

Talk to me like a human
I once got some insight into pick-up artists from a guy who tried it on in the National Portrait Gallery. I turned him down and called him out on his bullshit. Turns out he was actually doing some class about how to talk to women (nauseating, I know). His view was that we are manipulative monsters out to make men jump through hoops before we consent to sex in order to make them pay for things. Yep. I pointed out that we are actually just people. He didn’t get it. The fact is, I am just a human so talk to me like you actually want to know about me.

Don’t pressure yourself into getting everyone’s number
If we talk and you realise we’re not compatible, you don’t have to get my number: that would count as forcing it. That’s the point of talking! Don’t put that pressure on yourself to follow through with everyone you hit on. You are not somehow less manly because you don’t actually want to sleep with everyone.

Probably some people will still be thinking this whole thing is some weird brag, and I can’t stop that. It’s actually just something that has been part of my life since I moved to London a couple of years ago. I’ve told my fiance about it, even though I imagine sometimes he would probably just rather not know. He’s not happy, just as I would not be super amused to find out that he’s got women throwing themselves at him (Alexa, I’m looking at you) but I know he trusts me. And I’m curious to hear from other people – whatever gender – to find out your take from either side. Does this happen to you? Have you asked someone out in the street? How did it go?

So go ahead and ignore your parents and teachers and talk to strangers. Just do it nicely.

Scary fashion trends to try: You - yes you - can wear orange

Orange coats are so in right now.

Orange is the colour of easyJet, prison jumpsuits, the Netherlands, fish fingers and obviously oranges. As a pasty person, I always avoided orange because it’s this bold, traffic light, look-at-me colour. It’s the same thinking insecure brides use to justify putting their bridesmaids in horrible polyester peach dresses: they don’t want to be outshone by something that’s meant to be on their team. Instead I admired 50 shades of orange from afar, silently giving an approving nod to those courageous individuals totally pulling off burnt embers, marmalades and even rave party neon at 1pm on a Tuesday.

But then February 2016 rolled around and a weird thing happened. The weather had suddenly decided to give us a parting blast of winter and dropped the temperature by 10 degrees. Suddenly, orange was everywhere. Specifically orange coats. Classy macs, padded parkas, trendy cocoons, even capes. Camouflaged among everyone else who went for the sensible, goes-with-everything navy coat at the first bite of winter, I watched these colourful mavericks nonchalantly hopping on buses and strolling the streets, no doubt going somewhere fabulous and exciting in their attention-grabbing gear that defied the grey drizzle.

In 1957 this guy called James Vicary claimed that flashing the words ‘EAT POPCORN’ at people in a cinema more than doubled sales of the snack. A lot of people weren’t having this and he was accused of being a fraud, but probably most of us can admit that at some point we’ve found ourselves buying or thinking about something because we’ve been battered with adverts for it. (I bet you haven't thought about fish fingers in years...) That’s how orange worked for me. Seeing so many people embracing what I always thought was a trend reserved for people who know without googling how to pronounce Moschino (it's a ck not a shh, apparently) spurred me on to open my wardrobe and my heart to this shade.

The final push was seeing my sister Claire casually slipping on a super smart orange mac, the colour of sharon fruit (an actual fruit, not a person). I’ve been hanging on to her fashion coattails since we were kids and she cut up old Tammy Girl socks as sweatbands (trust me, it was all the rage in the early 2000s), so somehow this served as a final tick against the phrase ‘Orange as clothes?’

And then I met the orange jumper. In a last ditch attempt to prove to myself that orange, like cocaine and potholing, was best left to other people, I grabbed a random orange jumper from the men’s section of H&M. And the bastard fit. And, worse, instead of draining my skin of any remaining rosiness like a colour-sucking leech, it actually made me look more alive. It pointed to the bit of pink in my cheeks and went 'Hey, look at this!' It made my eyes look a little bit more blue. It was the wingman my wardrobe had been waiting for.

The ‘money’ part of my brain managed to wrestle the ‘fashion’ and ‘but I want it’ parts down and run away without it, but they launched a war of attrition over the next few weeks. Unfortunately my office is within a lunchtime walking distance of three H&Ms. After visiting the jumper two more times, it ended up on a coat hanger in my packed-out closet.

It didn't stay there. We’re still in the honeymoon phase of showing each other off on strolls along Southbank on sunny weekends and in smug photos on my Twitter profile. We snuggle up for Parenthood binges on rainy evenings. I’m planning on introducing it to more aspects of my life soon, but for now we're finding out what works for us (ice cream necklace: yes; burgundy hat: no).

What I learned from years of being a distant orange admirer and a few weeks of coming out in wild support was that your own personal style needs to be fluid. Sometimes fashion risks strike out. Like that phase when I wore nothing but baby blue tracksuit bottoms with Tammy Girl slogan t-shirts (the early 2000s was a good time for that shop but a bad time for fashion). But if something catches your eye on other people, it's worth being bold.

What does Queen Victoria's sex life have to do with anaesthesia?

Pop culture has created an image of Queen Victoria as a sour-faced, prudish old widow in a massive black frock with a sagging frown. And also, more obscurely, as a werewolf. She was definitely fiery, brutal and ready with the cut-downs in the masses of letters and diaries she wrote throughout her long life, but she wasn't always a grumpy hag.

She had a dirty sense of humour and a quick wit, and loved sex and laughing at silly things. She was barely 18 when she became Queen in 1837, and her advisors tried to discourage her light-hearted interests out of fear that the public wouldn’t take her seriously. She was stubborn, playful and youthful, and these traits ensured that she was open to new ideas that were exploding around her in science and art - an interest encouraged by her husband Prince Albert.

A brief history of anaesthesia that won't send you to sleep
Early medical experts had two responses to basically any illness presented to them: draining blood or amputation. It’s not surprising, therefore, that they’d long been after a way to relieve a patient’s pain while they operated.

Unfortunately they didn’t yet appreciate the astounding facts being uncovered by clever science brains as anything more than amusing reads. Scientists had been mucking around with different chemicals that worked as anaesthetics – as well as other things – for hundreds of years, because that’s their job.

Laughing gas

For example, in 1772 Joseph Priestley discovered nitrous oxide, which lead seven years later to fellow scientist Humphry Davy apparently having tremendous fun trying it out on himself and animals, eventually noting that it could be used therapeutically.

(Scientists having tremendous fun or dying while trying out new things is a bit of a theme in history.) However, it was mostly used in comedy shows, including one launched by a man who named himself ‘Professor’ Samuel Colt, who used his show to raise money to build the prototype of a revolver...

Think about it as we see weed today. At the moment, it’s mostly a recreational drug to get you high, but it does have medicinal properties. Similarly, no one was interested in this party trick's potential for medical use until a man/dentist named Horace Wells attended one of these laughing shows in 1844.

Wells realised, as Davy had, that nitrous oxide could be an anaesthetic. He found this out in the only sensible way: he had the travelling circus performer administer it to him, realised he felt nothing, and then a few months later got his colleague Dr Riggs to remove his tooth while he was under its influence. Unfortunately for Wells, when he tried to demonstrate it on someone else, the patient cried out in pain and everyone jeered loudly and obnoxiously.

Ether is a gas
A few years before Wells saw more than the funny side of nitrous oxide, scientists were getting interested in ether. Again, they had been aware of how to produce this for a couple of hundred years, but it was a laughing stock among the public. Fortunately, doctors started trying it out and found that - phew - it worked.

The first public demonstration was in Massachusetts General Hospital, where John Collins Warren was scheduled to remove a tumour from a man's jaw. Apparently the man in charge of the ether, William Morton, showed up late but just in time to give the patient a 3 minute dose of ether gas that meant he didn't feel a thing.

From then on, Boston surgeons were all over the ether, willing to try it in other operations as it proved successful at keeping the patient sedated and therefore less likely to panic and end up dead. All of this dabbling with different methods and sharing of ideas means there’s still a massive debate over who anaesthetised who first and how well and who deserves the credit.

Back in Britain
In any case, the first public demonstration of ether as an anaesthetic in the UK was carried out on 19 December 1846 by dentist James Robinson in London. It does seem that some dentists are out to prevent pain. After this was deemed a success, diagnostic whiz-kid Dr John Snow worked out the best way to administer ether so that it wouldn’t kill the patients.

Dr John Snow is a bit of a hero

Not played by Kit Harington

John Snow is one of those people whose contributions to science have completely changed the world but no one has really heard of him, unless you’re talking about the guy in Game of Thrones, or you happen to work and/or drink on London’s Broadwick Street. One of his major contributions was proving that cholera is not airborne and found in bad smells, as everyone believed in the 1800s, but is transmitted by consuming germs transported in water. Sadly it took four outbreaks for the government to believe him.

Snow's main areas of interest were respiration and asphyxia, and the effect gases could have on people, especially in midwifery. After Robinson’s demonstration and his own previous dabbling, Snow developed an inhaler that would administer ether carefully. Like, not lethally. Unlike the Americans, Snow never tried to patent any of the equipment he built, and actually made sure each had clear instructions so anyone could copy it. He was also working with chloroform, which had been introduced to the UK in 1947 by Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson.

At this point, 34-year-old Snow was the go-to anaesthesia man for London surgeons - a nice step up for a young physician. The non-scientific public was aware of this magical new invention, thanks to both science journals and humorous publications like Punch magazine, including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Queen Victoria's kids

That's a lot of labour

Throughout her life, Victoria had enough children to make up a baseball team (that’s 9 btw) but she actually hated being pregnant and although she loved her children, she wasn’t super maternal. She extended her honest evaluations to them, once describing her five-year-old son as having 'a most strange face', and they were terrified of her temper like everyone else.

Let's keep in mind where she came from: she was an only child brought up by a mother who was more interested in wresting her daughter’s regal powers off her with the help of her manipulative boyfriend than in reading her bedtime stories and playing Barbie.

However, Victoria did like sex. She wrote lots of letters about what she and Albert got up to, including to her Prime Minister, and even got her husband to put a lock on his bedroom door so that all those children weren't eternally interrupting them in the act.

For the first five years of their marriage she was only not pregnant or recovering from labour for 16 months. In 1848 she was pregnant for the sixth time. Prince Albert was a science nerd and had read up about anaesthesia, so he approached her personal physicians about the possibility of using this new-fangled stuff to help his wife during the delivery.

Unfortunately, since it was still so new, they were a bit uneasy about administering it, especially since the only women who had used it so far were not royals, and a girl called Hannah Greener had recently died from the effects of chloroform during surgery. It also didn’t help that a lot of the clergy were against using pain relief in labour, believing women were meant to suffer through it as part of some divine plan. Of course, they were all men.

Drugging the Queen
So poor Victoria had to go through two more births before chloroform’s reputation had improved to the point that it was considered safe and appropriate. It helped that Simpson was a pretty big deal in the medical profession, and Prince Albert had started advocating for chloroform as President of the Royal College of Chemistry. Dr John Snow was called to the birth of her eighth child Leopold on 7 April 1853 to administer chloroform, which must have been a fairly terrifying job. He decided not to use his mask device but a drip and a bit of cloth. Going back to basics seems strange, but in the same way that some people prefer driving a manual car to an automatic, it probably required more work but made you feel like you had more control over the system.

Luckily it was a straightforward birth, if that's a thing, and Victoria described herself as 'satisfied', which is as much as you can hope to be when it comes to labour I suppose. Although medical journal The Lancet was critical of this decision, Victoria called Snow again to the birth of Princess Beatrice four years later.

Snow, in turn, refused to comment on his experiences with her, other than describing her as ‘a model patient’. Of course, one does not slag off the Queen if one wishes to avoid prison and/or a miserable life. One woman even tried to get him to talk by refusing to take the drug during labour until he told her what had happened at Queen Victoria's deliveries. Wily Snow said that he would tell her when she woke up and then scarpered while she was KOed.

Although we'll probably never know the gossip on Queen Victoria's experiences, her Royal stamp of approval was a big deal, and meant that other women could request chloroform in labour. Thanks Vic.

America vs. Britain by a Brit who loves the States

I’m something of an America geek. A lot of Brits below the age of 35 have a vague daydream about being Californian or living in New York, thanks to imports like Taylor Swift, Friends and M&Ms. But while most limit their interest to wearing t-shirts that say ‘BRKLYN’ or talking like they’re in The O.C., I learned all the state capitals and have a first class degree in English and American literature. I even had an America themed party. OK, I’m also just a regular geek.

Just to be clear, getting engaged to an American was not a weird extension of this. (I would not, in fact, recommend falling in love with someone who lives thousands of miles away, unless you’re a millionaire or teleporter.) However, it does mean I’ve visited the States more times than I would otherwise have cause too. I've been to Minneapolis (Minnesota), El Paso (Texas), Alamogordo (New Mexico), Las Vegas (Nevada), Chicago (Illinois) and through a bit of Wisconsin in the last year.

Despite all those hours studying and essay writing and movie watching, it wasn’t until I started going to different parts of this enormous country that I learned the true disparities between our cultures, lives, manners and languages. Here's my report from the field.

Customer service staff in the USA are ridiculously nice
In London, you are treated with a resigned politeness and disciplined if thought appropriate, like a friend’s child. In America, you are treated like the friend of a friend everyone is making an extra effort with. They do actually sometimes say, ‘Hi I’m Becky and I’ll be your server today’, possibly while holding a coffee pot. Most are warm, friendly and so helpful it would be suspicious if it didn’t make you want to hug them and set up permanent residence at the booth. (Just kidding, Immigration.)

The food is limited only by imagination
Americans are very much into self-determination – the right of the individual – and this extends to food. While we’re worrying about getting our five-a-day, this belief that you should be able to have whatever you want without some nosy government or First Lady wagging a finger at you means that American food outlets focus on taste and sheer delight over silly things like health and cholesterol.

Sweet, sweet heart attack.

Foods we would consider to be a meal – mac and cheese, pancakes – are served as side dishes. The portion sizes are huge, although this is partly because they are much more used to the concept of taking home leftovers (another way of putting you in charge of your own meal).

This can all be incredibly overwhelming. But it also means you have things like Dorito salad, chocolate brownie sundaes and bacon French toast. You can’t fight it. Just bring clothes with elastic and avoid mirrors and scales.

British accents are exotic and confusing
The first time I tried to order coffee in an American Starbucks, the guy stared at me as though I was speaking Elvish and turned to my fiancé for translation (he also got it wrong). To be fair, that was El Paso, where you’re more likely to get shot by a man in a Stetson than to hear a British accent, but this confusion was not uncommon.

You don’t realise you have an accent until you’re around people who don’t sound like you. This makes you horribly aware of your own voice, like when you hear Emily speak in Friends and think, ‘Wow, we sound like a bunch of stuck-up twats.’ Luckily Americans are very polite, so people might look surprised but the only actual comments you get are lovely, admiring ones. Having someone who sounds like the most glamorous LA movie star telling you they love your accent is like getting a wink from Chris Pratt.

British humour is sick and dark and brilliant

It seems like most American sit coms centre on families doing silly things to each other which result in minor misunderstandings and, vitally, Essential Life Lessons. It’s as though they’ve been sent through a sanitising spray that cleans out the gritty unpleasantness lurking in all families, workplaces and friendship groups.

British comedies, meanwhile, hone in on those dark and twisted aspects and poke, prod and manipulate them for our gruesome pleasure. We like sex in all its weird, messy, awkward glory. We like losers and angry misfits and we don’t want them to learn anything. Try explaining Four Lions, Blackadder, The Inbetweeners or Black Mirror to an American if you don’t believe me.

Americans refer to Europe as though it’s one country

Regardless of your views on the EU, it’s fair to say that Brits see the Channel as a dividing line between us and the rest of Europe. They sunbathe topless, eat dinner at midnight on pavement cafes and think that cheese and ham is an acceptable breakfast, while we’re tucking into the full fry up, slathering After Sun on bright red t-shirt lines and driving on the left. We also recognise borders between countries: Germany is not France, France is not Spain, and Spain is not Poland. 

Quite upsettingly, Americans don’t acknowledge any of these distinctions, cheerfully ignoring centuries of wars, tensions and treaties to lump us all in together. When someone says, ‘I think you can in Europe’ they could be talking about France, Germany or Wales (don’t even try and explain that this is not part of England). They also don’t appreciate it when you politely point out that this is a bit like calling Canada ‘America’ or Utah ‘California’.

It’s like they took British nature and went ‘Yeah, well watch this’
Someone decided to double then triple then quadruple the space. In London, no matter where you are, you can see a building. Unless it’s foggy. Even when you (God forbid) leave the Capital, driving along the motorway you’ll probably see rolling hills or some contemplative sheep or the outline of houses in a distant village.

Driving through the Texan desert or a Wisconsin plain, you realise just how vast and flat the world can be, how much sky there is. As someone who freaks out if I’m a car journey from anywhere selling fat free yogurt, the thought of living somewhere so fantastically remote makes me want to rock on my heels and hum. However, it is incredibly humbling to be see land so raw, powerful and untouched (aside from a billboard promoting cheese curds).

You hear about race more
Maybe this is just me talking as a privileged white girl who can’t look at my own society with the same distance that I view others’, but Americans acknowledge race much more openly than Brits. While we might refer to different ‘cultures’ or nationalities, they are much more blunt with labelling people ‘black’ and ‘white’ and ‘Hispanic’ as a primary characteristic. Which can be really jarring.

Public toilets are weird
This is one of the most unexpected differences and the hardest to explain. There’s just something slightly off about American public toilets. After far more thought on this subject than necessary, I’ve worked out that it’s down to the following things:

They rely on suction, not flooding the basin with loads of water, which makes an oddly alarming noise, like someone being sucked through an airplane window.

There is a gap in the cubicle doors, presumably so you can keep an eye on what’s happening outside.

The toilets are really low. And shallow.

The flush system is automatic but hidden, so you’re not quite sure if you can trust it to work or not. This means spending ages looking for a lever or a button or a chain, like the worst game ever, only for the thing to suddenly flush (suck) violently at random, startling the hell out of you. This is even worse when you’re not actually done. Thanks for that coronary, stupid robot toilet.

Also, the hand towel dispensers are automatic, which somehow feels incredibly futuristic. My fuzzy jetlagged brain found this particularly fascinating.

They have different rules about walking
In America, walking is not seen primarily as a means of transport but as an official Leisure Activity. It must be planned in advance and can be boasted about in the same way you might tell people that you’re tired from playing tennis this morning.

Depending on where you are, people who enjoy walking are either seen as eccentric or as potential low level criminals. This is a bit different in urban areas like Chicago, which has a dense city centre that makes it easier to walk from one place to another. If you’re not downtown and fancy a walk, you will probably need some other method of transport, a map and water supplies to actually get somewhere big enough to stretch your legs. Luckily it's worth the ride to wander round an absolutely incredible state park.

People are nice
When strangers encounter you, they say hello. They might even say good morning. They will probably call you ma’am or sir in a non-sarcastic way. And it’s not because they’re trying to sell you something or get you to join a cult and/or gym. They are just nice. Once you get over the initial shock, it’s pretty refreshing.

Americans love sports more than us
America’s love of sport makes British fandom look like the skinny kid who always got picked last in PE standing next to the steroid-pumped giant who can bench lift a car.

Booo....

Here, we get behind the national rugby team when they’re playing (winning), or wear a ‘soccer’ strip or get a horrible tattoo of our club’s shield, and that’s it. In America, roughly speaking, if you’re in the North you can choose from basketball, ice hockey (just called hockey), baseball and football, plus the more obscure stuff like wrestling or track. If you’re in the South, you can choose from football, football or football, with the others served up as an afterthought when the conversation about football runs out (which is apparently never if you’re in Texas and sometime in April everywhere else).

You see a lot of people casually sporting merchandise from their local high school, college and national teams, many of which have names relating to big furry animals or birds. The sports facilities and arenas in suburban schools cover more land than all the buildings in my high school.

However, while in Britain this display of fandom would likely end in daily riots, in America there’s no sense that you’re going to get people brawling in the mall because the Broncos beat the Panthers this Sunday. It’s typically American enthusiasm tempered with typically American niceness.

Tea is served with ice or straight from the microwave
Get used to coffee. Becky's got it ready.

A personal and Western history of the colour pink

My relationship with the colour pink is surprisingly complicated. During my ballerinas-Barbies-and-princesses phase, it was the default answer to ‘What colour do you want this in?’ – whether that referred to clothes, plastic jewellery or heavily dyed food products. But when I hit about 13, I started to rethink this apparently easy loyalty.

At that age, when you’re just starting to look at the world around you and decide who you want to be, I realised I didn’t really like the stereotypical feminine identity society was holding out, like a frilly straight jacket.

At this point, third wave feminism was a ripple somewhere in the ocean. It's after Girl Power, Riot Grrl and Buffy, but before ‘This Girl Can’, Everyday Sexism and Leslie Knope. Being ‘girly’ meant being silly, bitchy to your friends but also totally reliant on them, obsessed with boys and shoes, unable to look after yourself or go anywhere alone. I could be cattier than Garfield and was pretty confident I was going to marry Leonardo DiCaprio, but I was not very good at the other things on this list.

After a few lacklustre attempts to get better, I found I didn’t want to be. I don’t like being told what to do, so I hit back against things I felt were tying me to this expectation, like bras, dresses, fancy shoes – and, of course, pink.

Turns out I was not so much ahead of my time as behind it. Pink has not been a ‘girl’ colour for very long. This is one of those myths we all know, like people thinking the world was flat and Marie Antoinette suggesting that peasants eat cake.

Before the 19th century, people in Western society assumed that we were all born knowing our gender identity innately, therefore they weren’t so much worried about confusing babies by putting them in the ‘wrong’ colour, but about making sure they looked different from adults. Boys and girls wore pastel coloured dresses decked out with frills and lace, and cherubic golden curls were encouraged on every child.

In 1927, Time magazine prodded a bunch of experts at department stores to come down on one side or the other. They weren’t just selected for their grip on psychological trickery, but because prescribing colours to each gender would mean that parents who had a daughter then a son would have to buy a whole new collection of clothes instead of letting him run around in pink Hello Kitty skirts. Or whatever the kids were wearing then. All of them tried to assign girls the daintier, more delicate hue, but there was an equal split between whether this should be blue or pink.

This blissful confusion ended not with a bang but a wave of new thought that gradually grew and crashed in on society in about the 1940s. Psychologists in the 1890s had started to introduce the idea of nature vs nurture when it came to genders, suggesting that parents who didn’t want their little boys to grow up ‘soft’ while their daughters climbed trees and scared off potential husbands by arm wrestling them to the floor should think carefully about what their little darlings were dressing in. This was also a post-Oscar Wilde trial world, when people thought that homosexuality was caused by confused gender identity – that gay men were actually women – rather than an innate part of a person’s personhood.

So on the one hand, pink is just a colour, but thanks to human meddling, it’s also not. Associating yourself with pink still signifies that you’re ready to embrace feminine qualities. For example, when a company producing ‘manly’ things like power tools or computer equipment or pens (thanks Bic) wants to show us lady folk that they have taken our extensive needs into consideration, the first thing they tend to do it dye the stuff pink.

Fake ad: real product

Far from coming across as an excellent colour choice, this just seems patronising. By all means make pink hammers, but don’t pitch them to me as your women’s range. If the only thing you’ve changed is the colour, you have to wonder why they haven’t been marketed to us before. And if you’ve changed more than the colour, you might want to let me know useful modifications instead of chirping on about how good it will look in my handbag. I’ll do the accessorising, love.

However, patronising marketing campaigns aside, the future of pink is looking brighter. It’s been reclaimed and transformed into a colour of resistance – and not just for feminists. Alongside the rainbow, it’s the colour you'll see most of at gay pride. This is not because 'all gay men love pink, right?' but as a punch in the face to the pink triangle, which was the symbol forced on gay men sent to Nazi concentration camps for their sexuality. (The same symbol was also used to identify rapists and paedophiles, so you can see exactly how they were viewed.)

Where once associating homosexuality with pink was intended to shame gay men as both sexually deviant and separate from typically masculine characteristics, it's no longer a symbol of submission but a bold show of defiance – a celebration of an identity that some people may not understand but which isn’t going anywhere.

In a very different display of resistance, it’s also the colour of Breast Cancer Care. Since breast cancer affects mostly women, the charity has adopted the colour that we understand as representing this gender to show that for all the things that might separate those who get this disease, they have a sisterhood to draw on and teams of volunteers and scientists united under this colourful banner.

Once you’ve distanced yourself from an identity the world would force upon you, and realised that humans have the chance to be more complicated than that, you have space and time to start bringing back individual bits that you quite liked. You get to open up the box and discard the ideas, traits and symbols you don’t like and keep the stuff you do. Now that we’re swimming in the waters of third wave feminism, to use yet another ocean metaphor, our understanding of what is feminine has expanded. It can mean capable, independent, intelligent, resilient, thoughtful, organised and creative.

Rediscovering pink as an adult with a better sense of your own identity is like going through your wardrobe and finding a jumper you loved two winters ago but totally forgot about when the weather warmed up. It fits me even better now because I have more ways to wear it.

Now, when someone asks me my favourite colour, I’m happy to tell them it’s pink. Except on days when it’s yellow or blue or orange. Pink is lively. It’s fun. It reminds us of sunsets, flamingos and cupcakes. It’s playful but also bold and defiant. It comes from red, after all, the colour of blood, anger, love, power and strawberries. I still don’t like being told what to do, but now I’m doing what I want in a loud and proud shade of pink.

You can't re-fusch-her...

How it felt to be proposed to

Dramatic re-enactment

Being proposed to is something that girls are supposed to think about. I know this because I have read magazines, watched more than one rom com and went to an all girls’ school. Once, in a year 10 geography lesson, I overheard one girl confidently telling another that she intended her intended to propose to her in a hot air balloon. Never mind that we were about 15 at the time, and as far as I know the proposer in this plan was nowhere on the scene.

I reckon that we first learn this narrative from fairy tales and their Disney rehashes. After a bit of angst you’re going to stumble across the prince, face minor peril along the lines of losing your voice/having a hit put out by your murderous stepmother/being put into coma, or some other routine Jerry Springer-type stuff, and then after a snog or two you get married.

This storyboard is further backed up by a swathe of bossy novels, which spend about 300 pages pretending that the dashing hero is never going to propose to the plucky heroine and then, bam, 83 hours of your life later that is exactly what happens. You nearly had me there Austen, you wily minx. When those have started to seem a bit samey, you move on to glossy rom coms starring beautiful, funny, successful grown women all pining over the question of getting to that moment. Oh do shut up, Bridget.

Obviously, the initial reasoning behind this obsession was based on what for most women in the Western world is now a thankfully defunct social order. Since women can now earn our own money and pay our own bills and live alone, we’re not relying on some guy to come along and provide a way out of the parental home, plus a bit of cash. We get to find other purposes in life, like a high flying career as a trapeze artist or travelling to every abandoned McDonalds in America, or learning how to do the scorpion pose.

And yet society is still so in love with love that there remains to this day sensible adult people who spend time fantasising about their ideal proposal. There are hundreds of thousands of videos on YouTube to give you ideas, like the guy who buttered his girlfriend up with a puppy first (cue hysterical tears) and put the ring around its neck (cue sounds only the puppy could hear). There’s the guy who ropes his family and friends into performing a choreographed parade to Bruno Mars’ Marry You. You will cry. And hate yourself for it. And then, of course, there are the ones that don’t go so well, generally at sports games, but before we start dying inside for these guys, remember that these are probably staged. Or that’s what they’ll claim.

I am not someone who planned out how I wanted a future mystical man to propose. This is partly because, as the child of divorced parents, I didn’t think I would ever be getting married. Maybe some time after 35. And more likely never.

I had fully planned to be an old lady with purple hair, living in a New York apartment crammed with books and mad artefacts from my global travels, eating granola all day and wearing ballgowns and Converse because there was no guy around to be confused about my eclectic fashion sense. And then I went to Berlin and met someone who switched the gear on that grand life plan. Insert long story involving a deployment to Iraq and lots of Skype and over a year waiting to see each other again. I was sitting alone in Phoenix Airport, waiting for my flight back to Heathrow, when I knew that I was going to marry him, in the same unquestioning and total way that I know where the Tube doors will stop and which is the squeaky stair in my childhood home and that it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere.

Four months and a trip to London and a trip to Vegas and more Skype and many discussions later, including a 6am inquiry about what ring I wanted (er, huh?), we’re walking back to my flat after watching Bridge of Spies. Because nothing says romance like Cold War dramas starring Tom Hanks.

It’s a bit damp but mercifully mild, and late enough on a Tuesday night before Christmas that the Southbank has mostly cleared of tourists. I’m full because I've had nearly an entire bag of slightly stale-tasting sweet cinema popcorn and a cheeseburger and chips. My hair is all over the place because of the drizzle. But I don’t really care because he’s actually here, in 3D, and he has warm hands, and I have a sneaky suspicion I know what’s coming.

I’m intuitive, OK.

We get to our favourite bridge, which has a view east of Waterloo Bridge, Southbank, St Paul’s and the Shard in the distance. He pulls me gently over to the silver railings. And he gets out this white box. And time stands still.

Turns out getting proposed to is a lot like deciding to have sex for the first time. Throughout your life you’ve heard that this is a pivotal moment that will mark a dividing line between the time before you knew what all the fuss was about, and the time when you’re in the know. But it’s actually the decision itself that is more important, more formative, than the exact moment.

Standing in front of this man, who is funny and kind and maddening and caring, I decided that despite years of being steadfastly against the idea of committing to one person forever, actually, I’m more than willing to give it everything for him.

And like sex, you’re still the same person after it. That moment doesn’t change you. It’s more that you're knowingly going from one stage of your life to the next. Like levelling up or birthdays in The Sims when they spin round, lights burst out and now they’re a spotty teenager.

Then a drunk guy will come up and congratulate you on being madly in love, and you will smile and nod until he leaves.

I still don’t think everyone should get married, because you know what works for you better than some tax man or priest or nosy relative or diamond salesman. And there's no point planning how to get proposed to, whatever gender you are, because you won't know how it feels until you're there. If the method of question-asking is the most important thing to you, you've kind of missed the long-term implications.

I remember looking across the water as we turned to walk the rest of the way home. The view was the same, we were the same, but while crossing from one end of the bridge to the other, my life had definitely changed in a way I wouldn't have predicted for myself, despite all that Disney. So instead of trying to guess where my steps would fall, I squeezed his warm hand with mine and kept walking.

This old thing?