Home

No no no, but the BEST thing is seeing people repeatedly. Meeting up with old friends, lifelong friends, and saying 'see you next year' is rubbish. It hurts; a knife with two blades and no handle.

Saying 'see you on Wednesday' or whatever is bliss. It postpones the inevitable. It means we can pretend, for a week or so, that we are always here, that we are part of the whole, that we are not distant, not lost, not gone.

The best of times are stolen times: moments of serendipity snatched from weightier duties.

There's Lovely

Wales will always feel like home although perhaps it's blasphemy for me, being Saesneg, to say so. Coming back, even to a new part of the country, feels cosy and familiar. I lived in Wales for twelve years and still want to belong to it, if that is at all possible for an Englishman.

The relationship between the English and Welsh is a close one, still sore in places. We've been exploring some of the monuments to our joint history here in North Wales: the castles built by Edward I at the end of the 13th century. This was when Wales was subdued by the powerful English crown. By building massive castles like Harlech and Caernarfon, Edward followed up his military victories with psychologically crippling blows. These fortresses are massive, beautifully designed and brutally imposing. Today, of course, they serve the Welsh, boosting trade and tourism; nobody thinks of them as English castles anymore...

And outside of the towns, the mountains rise up, covered in grass and sheep, mottled and dappled by the shadows of the broken clouds that scud across the sky and obscure the peaks. Up and down the steep-sided valleys run tiny green steam trains on their narrow rails, belching yellow smoke into the clouds, their carriages full of waving passengers. The hills that aren't green are black, piled with broken slate from which burst blooms of purple rhododendron. And through all this twists the road, rising and falling and turning.

There's water everywhere. It rains, of course, but it also bubbles up, trickles down the mountainside and collects into streams that rush and gurgle over edges, bursting down in falls and cataracts. It drips inside the mines, sliding over the smooth rock in the darkness into the black stillness of an underground lake. Meanwhile the sea sparkles in the sunshine, rushing and moving, breaking against the cliffs and the cries of the gulls.

It's magical place; a great big country folded up into a smaller area. And this corner feels concentrated, more intensely Welsh than the rest, almost a caricature.

It's easy to leave, knowing we will always return.

Old England

More differences. British rain is soft, gentle and pervasive. As I sit and write this, there is a fine tracery of silver drops on the window, a delicate curtain of light. That doesn't happen in Houston where the summer storms unleash a rushing fury of fat wet bullets onto road and roof.

Of course the difference I can't get over with America is that it is just so new: shiny and young. Like a young adult, it is perhaps sometimes too earnest, too eager, when British sensibilities might tend to dry reticence.

I'm happy to think of us as a nation of fuddy-duddies and whilst we have been catching up with family and friends I have been revelling in the dusty dotage of England.

Last week we were in Leicestershire where we visited the house where Lady Jane Grey grew up - now a stately ruin set amongst parkland, overrun by peacocks and deer. We also went to the site of the Battle of Bosworth, which is where I took the picture at the top.

Billed by the visitors' centre as the 'second most important battle in English history' with the tag-line 'Two Kings, One Day', Bosworth, fought in 1485, was the decisive battle in the Wars of the Roses - a dynastic struggle for the crown between generations of rival heirs that took up all of the fifteenth century.

The Plantagenet ruling family splintered into Yorkists (white rose) and Lancastrians (red rose) who fought, usurped and executed each other into extinction until, at Bosworth, the last Plantagenet king (maligned Richard III) was defeated and killed by an upstart princeling called Henry Tudor.

It may be five-hundred years ago, but this is all desperately recent stuff. Henry became Henry VII and after him came Henry VIII and he is essentially the central knot of English history, what with the Split from Rome and everything. To this day there remains a fierce rivalry between the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, even if it is now limited largely to football and cricket matches.

Ooh, look! Speaking of cricket, here is some real village cricket being played on a real village green. Yesterday we went to dangle great-grandchildren in front of my grandfather who lives in a little village on the Wiltshire/Hampshire border. His house is right on the green and so were these chaps (albeit inbetween showers). I took W out to have a look and found myself having to explain not just cricket, but greens and even villages. There were maybe fifteen or twenty people watching and most of them were players. At the end of each over, the scorer hoisted up a board of numbers above his head and pointed it at us for us to see, waiting until I'd nodded or waved before he turned away. It was achingly quiet, only the sounds of the game and the breeze in the trees could be heard.

The cricket is quite new compared with the Tudors - organised village games only began in the seventeenth century - but the green and the thatched cottages around it present a scene which is older than England itself: for over a thousand years people have lived like this.

It's bewildering. But I'm about to head off for a pub lunch in Salisbury - if that can't help me find some perspective, nothing can.

Return of the Native

There it was: the first tiniest hint that my brain has been rewired for America.

The man in the shop looked on, his smile becoming increasingly waxy, as I tried again and again to swipe my card to pay for my purchase. Every now and again he would say, in a dull unbelieving voice, "No, insert your card please," and I would swipe again. We stood there, trapped in a loop, for about a day and a half.

Chip & Pin! Yes, of course, the card goes in like that. But definitely not a new thing, definitely introduced in the UK before I left. I had just forgotten. And this doesn't matter either, wouldn't matter, except for the fact that I had no obvious excuse.

In America, my accent allows me to be ignorant of all sorts of things. I can ask stupid questions all day long and people are delighted to help. But when I stood there in the shop, with my British accent and my British bank card, the man had no reason to assume I had been America for three years. In his eyes I was just an idiot who bumbled along not knowing how to buy things.

And then sometime later, I had to navigate a mini roundabout. Total chaos. Worse because there are roundabouts in America (some in New England and two in Houston if you can believe such a thing) but, of course, they spin the other way, like the fabled antipodean plug holes.

These were just hurdles and I'm over them now, having reasserted submerged behaviours. But I did not expect coming back home to pose such problems, that familiar and known things could be obstacles. I shouldn't have to work things out like I'm in a foreign country.

But I do.

Time/Travel

We've done it again: flung ourselves across the world in an aeroplane and wound up somewhere else, somewhen else. It's a bizarre thing to do, at once both numbingly routine and mind-bendingly exotic.

I get annoyed by some of it, obviously. The way the chap in front swings his seat back into my face before we've even taken off, for one thing. Another is the utter disconnection from the outside world; hopefully soon we'll look back, agog, at Internet-less flights the way we currently remember the days of smoking on planes.

The other thing that irks me is the way time goes out the window. Not the jet-lag inducing missing hours, but the lack of consensus. Time becomes fractured: some passengers are working off the destination time, others still clinging to where we took off from; some try to sleep immediately, some are determined to stay awake. And then there are the passengers who are making connections from or to a third continent and who knows what their clocks are set to.

The airline has its own ideas of course and will dim the lights, or serve you lunch in an attempt to help the transition. But all the while the sun or stars are peering in under open blinds, ever-shifting guides offering their own opinions.

The bare facts of our flight are that we left Houston at 4pm and landed 9 hours later in London at 7am. The advantage to losing six hours en route is that the journey passes very quickly, if only in hindsight.

My favourite bit of the journey is breakfast. It's the beginning of a new consensus. One can't argue with croissant and coffee and, with even just a light dusting of sleep, it is relatively easy to convince one's brain and body that some sort of night has been squeezed into the impossibly small space the schedule allowed.

Tell a lie, that's my second favourite part. The best bit is obviously getting out of Arrivals and into the grey concrete embrace of the Terminal 3 car park. If that sounds like sarcasm, be warned: I am VERY excited to be home again. The coolness of the breeze, the Belisha beacons, the indecent haste with which roads twist in the confined space, warping into an epidemic of roundabouts, these are the first delightful impressions of Britain.

And now we're safely with my in-laws. The boys are buzzing, full of energy, and the gentle sun is shining. The afternoon ahead offers the irresistible prospect of a quick pint with one old friend and a mad dash into London to see a show.

I couldn't sleep, even if I wanted to.

High Time

I'm packing and just had to ask myself if I have a sweater. I make that three reasons why it is high time I went back home for a bit.

1) it's too hot in Houston
2) I'm talking to myself
3) it's a jumper.