My day with Michael Jackson
There only seems to be one story on the collective mind of America (and indeed the world) right now, and strangely it doesn’t appear to be the fact that I successfully got my green card yesterday. I feel bad that so much time and effort had been put into street parties and tribute concerts to [...]
A question of love
If you ask me, marriage is like a steak – they get better with age, and good ones are rare. And to be fair, if you ask some of my less fortunate acquaintances, lifelong legal partnerships can also be bloody, and too much of it might kill you. It works on so many different levels.
Fortunately [...]
Losing my voice
It’s probably fair to say that my greatest fear as an expat is losing my accent. Not that my accent is anything to get excited about, or a strange dialect that only three people in the world speak. But the idea of waking up one morning with a strange mid-Atlantic twang is enough to bring [...]
The game of the name
As I may have mentioned before, my mother is a worrier. Whether she’s panicking that I’ve got some kind of tropical sleeping sickness simply because I momentarily yawned on the phone to her, or reading a story about a car crash in – say – Idaho and phoning to check that I’m OK, she truly [...]
Checks and big balances
If the stubs on my book are anything to go by, in the three years preceding my move to the US, I think I probably wrote maybe one chequecheck. And even then I can’t be sure that I wasn’t just in desperate need of a piece of paper to write a phone number or address [...]
Funny how things change
It’s strange how your concept of what is acceptable in life changes as you grow older. When I was an eighteen year old, there would have been more chance of me running through the streets of my home town sporting nothing more than one fluorescent sock and a smile, than – say – wearing a [...]
You win some, you lose some
I’ve always hated the word ‘expat’, abbreviated or otherwise. It’s not the word itself, I guess, but more the notion that I ever ‘belonged’ to one part of the world in the first place. And more to the point, when I think of ‘expats’, I bring to mind the likes of Frank, Doris, Ethel and [...]
