As soon as I reached my 17th birthday, I learned to drive. This was mid-60s Britain, and stick shifts ruled the waves. We heard about those new-fangled automatic cars they had over in the USA, but automatics were still very rare in the UK.

Even today, pass your UK driving test in an automatic and your licence only covers automatics unless you later pass a test in a manual.

So my student driving was done with a stick shift. I learned in my mother’s late-50s Morris Minor, which she’d bought after previously driving my grandad’s 1940s Austin 7.

My grandad had bought the Austin as his first car in the mid-50s, when he was already close to retirement. He took his driving test a number of times but never managed to pass. The Austin sat in our back yard for years, used by my mother until she bought the Morris Minor, and was eventually sold for scrap.

That wasn’t an unusual fate for British cars in those days. The cool, damp weather and practically non-existent rust protection meant that many were lucky to see a decade before being consigned to the scrap heap.

But by 1968, I was ready for a car of my own.

I’d travelled by train to university in Birmingham for my first two semesters, returning home to Deal for the Easter break in mid-April. My parents had a surprise waiting for me: a six-year-old Morris Mini, registration XAP47.

Newly repainted with a light blue body and a white roof, it was beautiful.

I was in love.

The original Minis had famously go-kart-like handling, but their performance was underwhelming, to say the least. XAP47 had an 848cc engine developing all of 34 horsepower and a top speed somewhere around 75 mph.

Not earth-shattering.

I quickly made the first of many modifications: reversing the front seat brackets to give myself an extra two inches of legroom—an essential fix for any taller Mini owner.

No matter how slow it was, the Mini became my faithful companion for the next five years.

And as for those performance limitations? No problem.

I had Speed King.

Speed King was a salesman in his 40s who always dressed in an old sports coat with patched sleeves and baggy corduroy trousers. He lived in the downstairs apartment of the house I rented with some student friends in Acocks Green, Birmingham.

He owned a souped-up Hillman Imp and, as we only had street parking, he was forever tinkering with it on the road outside the house.

“You can make that go faster, you know,” he told me, looking at my Mini when I proudly drove it up to the house for the first time.

I looked at him blankly. I didn’t have a clue how to work on a car.

“Well, you need a bigger carburetor, polish the cylinder head, upgrade the valves and install a straight-through exhaust,” he told me.

“To start with.”

So, with Speed King’s assistance -and the loan of his set of professional-grade auto tools - I became a weekend mechanic, trying to coax every additional fraction of horsepower out of that tiny engine.

How much faster did the car really go?

Probably not that much.

But every little helped, and the new exhaust sounded wonderful.

I couldn’t tell the story of my old Mini without mentioning the late Clive Trickey. Trickey wrote a number of books and manuals about tuning Minis in the 1960s. Although I’ve long since parted with them, I can still remember poring over their grease-stained pages, reading and rereading his words of wisdom before attempting the next improvement to XAP47.

This, of course, was long before YouTube. If you wanted to learn how to modify your car, you found a book, borrowed some tools and had a go.

And I certainly had plenty of opportunities to test the results.

Ah, the journeys I made in that Mini.

There was the regular trip between Deal and Birmingham, and later the far longer, eight-hour drive between Deal and Edinburgh.

Funnily enough, the Mini must have been deafening compared with a modern car, but my young ears didn’t seem to have a problem with it. There was no climate control, no navigation system and very little between me and the road. Yet I don’t remember thinking of it as uncomfortable or primitive.

It was simply my car.

I drove north into Scotland for the first time on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the autumn of 1970. After following the M6 north, I turned off near Moffat and suddenly found myself on what felt like a completely different journey.

The road wound through the soaring scenery of the Southern Uplands, majestic hills rising on either side of my tiny Mini. There seemed to be no other cars around.

For a young man who had grown up in the relatively gentle landscape of southeast England, it was extraordinary.

Just me, XAP47 and the Scottish hills.

I was truly alone with nature.

Two years later, the Mini and I finally parted ways.

I’d been fighting a losing battle with rust for several years. Eventually, when my father offered to help me buy a brand-new Ford Escort, I realized it was time for XAP47 and me to say goodbye.

The Escort was newer, faster, quieter and unquestionably a better car.

But it wasn’t my first car.

More than half a century passed.

There were plenty of other cars along the way. I left Edinburgh, eventually left Britain, moved to America and lived a life that the 18-year-old driving XAP47 around Birmingham could hardly have imagined.

A few years ago, my wife and I moved to the Charlotte, North Carolina area and downsized to a house with a smaller two-car garage. We decided we could manage with one car and sold our second.

Eventually, though, we began to miss the flexibility of having two.

I wanted something small enough to fit comfortably beside our other car. I started looking at the possibilities, and then the answer suddenly seemed obvious.

A Mini.

So, 58 years after my parents surprised me with XAP47, I found myself walking into a Mini dealership and doing it all over again.

Except, of course, I wasn’t.

Today’s Mini is almost comically different from the car I owned in 1968.

My 1962 Mini didn’t even have seat belts. The new one surrounds me with airbags, cameras, sensors and electronic safety systems. XAP47 produced 34 horsepower. My new Mini Cooper S has roughly six times as much power and can theoretically approach 150 mph—a claim I have absolutely no intention of verifying.

But the biggest difference is what happens when I sit behind the wheel.

I sometimes wonder what the 18-year-old me would make of it.

Instead of the wonderfully basic dashboard I remember from XAP47, there’s a huge circular display in the center of the car controlling everything from navigation and climate to entertainment and driving modes.

And then there’s Go-Kart Mode.

Yes, really.

Somebody at Mini apparently decided that a car whose original claim to fame was its go-kart-like handling now needed an electronic setting actually called “Go-Kart Mode.”

Select it and the car changes its responses to make everything feel sharper and more aggressive. The steering becomes heavier, the throttle more responsive and the car even adds a more aggressive engine sound to the experience.

What would Speed King have made of that?

I suspect he’d have approved.

My new Mini is so technologically superior to XAP47 that, viewed from 1968, it might as well have come from another planet.

It’s faster.

It’s safer.

It’s quieter.

It’s more comfortable.

It’s better made.

And it doesn’t appear to be dissolving from rust before my eyes.

My new Mini is faster, safer, quieter and better made than XAP47 in every conceivable way.

But if someone pulled up outside my house tomorrow in a little light-blue 1962 Morris Mini with a white roof and registration XAP47, and offered me the keys in exchange for my new one, I’d make the swap in a heartbeat.

Not because XAP47 was a better car. It wasn’t.

But for a moment, I might just be eighteen again.

I became fascinated by computers before I’d ever actually used one.

In the late 1960s, I was studying biology at Aston University in Birmingham back in the UK, sharing a flat with two Welsh engineering students. One day I picked up one of their FORTRAN programming manuals and started reading it. Something clicked.

In biology, I was learning how a single fertilized egg somehow develops into an enormously complicated living organism. Cells divide, differentiate and organize themselves into tissues and organs. I began wondering whether you could write a computer program that simulated that process, and perhaps learn something about how it happened.

There was one fairly obvious problem. I didn’t have a computer.

So I learned to program, at least in theory, from my roommate’s FORTRAN manual. It wasn’t until several years later, when I moved to Edinburgh to do a PhD in genetics, that I finally got to try my programs on a real machine.

Using a computer then bore very little resemblance to using one now. There was no screen in front of me and certainly no keyboard connected to the computer. The mainframe lived in a computer center. I typed my program onto punch cards, handed over the stack of cards and waited - sometimes a day or more - to find out whether it had worked. Often it hadn’t. Then I found the mistake, punched another stack of cards and tried again.

By 1973 I’d become sufficiently obsessed with using computers to simulate life to write an article for New Scientist called “Can a Computer Grow Limbs?” My PhD work was later published as a book, Computers and Embryos.

After that came personal computers, the Macintosh, graphical interfaces, the internet, smartphones and all the rest of it. I’ve had a ringside seat for a remarkable half-century of computing. But I don’t think any of it has surprised me quite as much as what is happening now.

More than 50 years ago I was wondering whether a computer could simulate the development of an embryo. Today I regularly sit at a computer and have a conversation with it.

From punch cards to conversation

Artificial intelligence isn’t new. There were researchers working on AI and machine intelligence in Edinburgh when I was doing my PhD, although what could actually be accomplished with the computers of the time was obviously limited. There was a computer program back in those days called ELIZA. It was the world’s first chatbot and mimicked intelligence by transforming input sentences and posing them back to the user. No real intelligence involved, although legend has it that the creator’s own secretary asked him to leave the room so she could have a private, emotional conversation with the program.

We’ve come a long way since the late 60s when ELIZA was written. Modern AI has completely changed the relationship between us and the computer. With the mainframe computer I used in Edinburgh, I had to learn its language. I had to tell it exactly what to do, in exactly the right way. Get one character wrong and the whole thing might fail — and I’d possibly have to wait until the next day to find out.

Fun fact. After a couple of years of sending a stack of punch cards to the Edinburgh mainframe computer, they proudly installed a state-of-the-art “Mini Computer”. Small enough to squeeze into the average bedroom, I could actually visit the computer center and interact with the brand new DEC PDP-8 mini computer using a computer terminal with a keyboard. To get the computer started, I had to pass a small strip of computer tape with symbols on it through a reader on the front of the computer. This strip of tape was called a bootstrap, giving rise to the term “booting” a computer that we still use today.

From those early days, the computer revolution moved quickly. The Macintosh was a revelation when it arrived in the 1980s because suddenly the computer was doing more of the work. Instead of having to remember an arcane series of commands, you could point at something and click on it. That seems completely ordinary now, but it certainly didn’t at the time.

Then fast foward to today with touchscreens and Siri and Alexa.

And now I can just tell a computer what I want.

Not in FORTRAN. Not in code. Not by working my way through six menus and trying to remember where somebody at Microsoft decided to hide a particular command.

I can ask in ordinary English. For someone who started with punch cards, that’s quite a leap in technology!

So what do I actually do with AI today?

Some of my uses of AI are decidedly unglamorous. I recently wanted to replace a mattress because I was waking up with lower-back pain. A few years ago I’d have Googled “best mattress for lower back pain,” opened a dozen websites and then spent an hour trying to work out which ones were offering genuine advice and which ones were trying to sell me a mattress.

With AI I could say: here’s my age, height and weight; I sleep partly on my back and partly on my side; this is the mattress I have now; this is what I don’t like about it; and this is where my back hurts. Then I could ask another question. And another.

I’ve used AI in much the same way for everything from medical questions to trying to work out what was going wrong with my Bermuda grass.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that I simply believe whatever it tells me. AI gets things wrong. Sometimes spectacularly wrong. And I certainly wouldn’t let it diagnose a serious medical problem and act on the answer without talking to a doctor.

But it’s remarkably good at helping me work out what questions I ought to be asking. That’s the part I hadn’t anticipated.

Google was very good at finding things. AI is good at letting me keep saying, “Yes, but what about...?” That’s a surprisingly big difference.

I use it at work too

Microsoft’s Copilot is now built into many of the Office applications I use every day. I love Copilot. It’s a superb productivity tool for anyone using MS Office.

I can give it a document and ask for the beginnings of a PowerPoint presentation. It can help pull a to-do list out of emails and calendar commitments, find possible meeting times for people scattered across several time zones, or produce a translation of a set of operating instructions.

The results usually need work. but that’s fine. If it can do 70 or 80 percent of a tedious job in a few seconds, leaving me to check it and fix the other 20 percent, I’ll take that deal. And this is where things start getting more complicated, because the same thing that makes AI so useful also worries me.

What happens to the people at the bottom of the ladder?

I’m much less worried about some science-fiction scenario in which a super-intelligent computer decides it doesn’t need us anymore than I am about something much more mundane. Entry-level jobs.

For most of my working life, people have entered professions by doing relatively basic work. That’s partly how you learn. You make mistakes, watch people who know more than you do, gradually acquire judgment and eventually become one of the experienced people yourself.

Unfortunately, AI is getting rather good at some of the work we’ve traditionally given to those beginners.

Suppose ten experienced employees, with AI helping them, can now do the work that previously required those ten people plus five juniors. The productivity argument is obvious.

What’s less obvious is where the next generation of experienced employees comes from if they don’t have an entry level to go through. I don’t know the answer to that, and I’m not convinced anyone else does either.

And then there are the computers behind the computer

When you have a conversation with an AI model, it’s easy to think that there is just a single entity chatting right back at you. You type a few words and an answer appears. It’s difficult to reconcile that experience with the enormous physical infrastructure sitting behind it. Enter the spectre of the data centers.

Data centers need land, electricity, cooling and a great deal of expensive equipment. Communities are already arguing about whether the economic benefits are worth the pressure they can put on electricity supplies, water and the surrounding environment.

Back in Edinburgh, there was no hiding the fact that computing required machinery. The computer occupied a substantial part of a building. Now the machinery has disappeared from sight, but there’s vastly more of it.

Where so we go from here?

This is where I’m reluctant to make predictions. AI can already interpret photographs, diagrams, documents and speech as well as text. Connect those abilities to the robots now being developed and it’s not difficult to imagine a machine that can see what’s around it, understand what you ask it to do and then physically do something about it.

Will that be commonplace in five years? Twenty? It’s really a question of just how long it will take to get the technology sorted out. If phones can replace computers for many of us, what physical devices will be the face of AI in the future?

Having watched people confidently predict the future of computing for more than 50 years, I’ve become rather suspicious of confident predictions about computing. What I do know is how unlikely the present would have seemed when I started.

More than half a century ago, I was sitting in my student flat in Birmingham with a borrowed FORTRAN manual, wondering whether I could persuade a computer I’d never actually seen to simulate the development of a living organism.

Since then I’ve watched computers move from special air-conditioned rooms onto our desks, then our laps, into our pockets and finally onto our wrists.

For most of that time, however sophisticated they became, they were still recognizably machines. We learned how to operate them and they did what we told them to do. This feels different.

I’m now talking to a computer. I ask questions. I disagree with its answers. I show it photographs. I ask it to explain itself. Occasionally I tell it that it’s completely misunderstood me and we start again. I’m impressed by it, excited by it and, yes, a little worried by it.

If you’d shown ChatGPT to that biology student in Birmingham, I’m quite certain he wouldn’t have believed you.

And if I’m fortunate enough to make it to 90, I suspect the technology I’ll encounter then will seem equally improbable to the person writing this today. Let’s see what the future brings!

I’m a thirty-something-year-old lecturer at a British university. I’ve published some articles and a couple of books. I have a scientific reputation. I’ve traveled to the US and various European countries to do research and give seminars at conferences.

All is great, right?

Except that somewhere along the way I’d developed a passion for computers.

The 1980s were the heady days of personal computing. New machines seemed to appear constantly—the BBC Micro in Britain, Commodore computers, the IBM PC and, most importantly for me, the Apple Macintosh in 1984.

I’d always had a deep connection with biological research, but computers gradually took over my working life. The Macintosh took center stage, and I started writing educational software.

Eventually I left my university job and started a small software company.

It didn’t get much traction in Britain, but one of my early projects, Dictionary of the Living World, attracted attention from Apple Computer in the United States. The American market began opening doors that simply weren’t opening for me at home.

It became increasingly obvious that if I wanted to make a serious attempt at becoming a software author and publisher, America was the place to do it.

So in 1993, I moved to California with my family and started again.

That sounds rather more straightforward written down today than it felt at the time.

Starting again in California

There was something about America -California in particular - that seemed to encourage the idea that starting a company was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

I’m not sure Britain actively discouraged entrepreneurship, but it certainly didn’t celebrate it in quite the same way. In America, telling somebody you were starting a business generally produced interest rather than raised eyebrows.

For me, that difference in attitude mattered far more than the mechanics of setting up a company.

And America immediately offered other attractions.

It was SO easy to lease a car, and at what seemed to me an extraordinarily reasonable price—although why I chose a purple Honda Civic as my first American car I still can’t fathom.

The grocery stores seemed enormous. And in those early years, American malls were genuinely exciting places to visit. Internet shopping has rather destroyed the wonder of trudging through miles of glittery storefronts, but in 1993 they still seemed impressive.

Then there was California itself.

I’d come from a country of green fields, hedgerows, cows and sheep. Suddenly we had the Pacific Ocean in one direction and mountains and desert in the other.

Not long after we arrived, I took my two boys out into the desert near Borrego Springs. I still have a photograph of the three of us standing there.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the photograph. It’s just a father and his two sons posing beside a road in 1993.

But when I look at it now, the landscape behind us still strikes me. Dry scrub, mountains, enormous blue sky—about as far removed from the England I’d left behind as I could imagine.

America felt big. Not simply geographically big, but full of possibilities.

And everyday life often seemed wonderfully convenient.

When I first arrived, I was amazed that many stores were open seven days a week. Grocery stores in California might be open from six in the morning until eleven or midnight. That was very different from the Britain I’d left.

I was busy trying to establish a business, so discovering that I could wander into a store whenever I happened to have some free time was wonderfully liberating.

Then came Easter.

My first American Easter

I remember trying to go shopping on my first Easter Sunday and being greeted by deserted car parks and shuttered malls.

Everything had come to a screeching halt.

So even the most capitalistic free-market economy in the world apparently closed down for one day a year.

But there was a much more serious Easter problem.

Chocolate.

I am an admitted chocoholic, and to my horror I discovered that America didn’t seem to have the enormous chocolate Easter eggs I’d grown up with in Britain.

British children learn about this particular form of excess at an early age. Parents give you an Easter egg. Grandparents give you one. Aunts and uncles give you one. Before long a small child can accumulate an unhealthy mountain of chocolate.

I sorely missed this tradition.

Easter was my first introduction to the fact that American holidays weren’t necessarily going to work the way I expected.

Celebrating Britain’s defeat

Then came the Fourth of July.

My first few Independence Days were tinged with a peculiar sense of guilt.

How could I join the festivities celebrating an American victory over the British Army?

This concern didn’t last long.

Once I discovered that Independence Day was largely an excuse for endless barbecues and fireworks, I managed to overcome my patriotic misgivings remarkably quickly.

Halloween was another adjustment. Britain in the early 1990s didn’t celebrate Halloween on anything like the American scale. The costumes, parties and trick-or-treating were all relatively new to me.

I’ve never been particularly enamored with dressing up, so Halloween has never been quite the delight for me that it seems to be for many of my American friends and family.

But there was one American holiday I came to love.

The Thanksgiving phone call

Thanksgiving has always been special to me.

I’d spent about 18 months going through the process of applying for permanent residency in the United States.

Then, on the evening before Thanksgiving in November 1994, my immigration attorney called.

I’d been approved.

I can still remember what an extraordinary moment that was. After the forms, interviews, biometric scans, background checks and waiting, we finally knew that we could stay.

I became a US citizen a few years later, but that Thanksgiving phone call is the moment I associate with America becoming home.

I’ve often thought Thanksgiving is one American tradition Britain really ought to steal.

It arrives at exactly the right time of year, when the days are getting shorter and winter is beginning to feel rather too real. It’s about family, food and taking a moment to appreciate the good things in life.

And I’ve always been a big turkey lover, so having two legitimate excuses for turkey every year—Thanksgiving and Christmas—seems entirely sensible.

I can even almost forgive some of the truly gruesome American Thanksgiving side dishes.

Sweet salads made with Jell-O. Sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. Mushy green bean casserole.

Almost.

But Christmas was different

If I had to name one thing I still miss about Britain, it would probably be Christmas.

Christmas was the big holiday of my British year. The anticipation seemed to build for weeks as the days grew shorter and December approached.

My first Christmas in California was an utter disappointment.

In Britain, I’d been accustomed to work winding down during the week before Christmas and not really getting going again until the first week of January.

You know the song about the Twelve Days of Christmas?

Well, that was much closer to how Christmas felt.

California in 1993 was rather different.

People might finish work a little early on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day itself was a holiday. And then, remarkably, they went back to work.

Where were the extended visits to friends and family?

The parties?

The sense that normal life had temporarily been suspended?

The joy of the whole season?

Over the years I’ve learned that there isn’t one American Christmas anyway. America absorbs traditions from everywhere.

I remember one year when my son had a Latin American girlfriend and we were invited to her family’s home on Christmas Eve for Christmas tamales.

I loved it.

It was a reminder that leaving one country doesn’t mean simply exchanging one collection of traditions for another. You keep some things, lose some things and acquire completely new ones along the way.

I’ve now spent more than three decades in America.

There are things about American life I prefer enormously. There are things Britain still does better. And there are things about both countries that have changed so much since 1993 that comparisons with the countries I originally knew aren’t always particularly useful.

But I don’t regret making the move.

America gave me the opportunity to reinvent my working life. It gave me a second country to call home. It gave my family experiences we would never otherwise have had.

And it gave me Thanksgiving.

I still think Britain should do something about that.

The marshmallows on the sweet potatoes, though?

America can keep those.

Ah, Britain! The land of rolling green fields, stately homes, white cliffs and The Beatles. The place where people are either upper-class and speak like the late Queen, or working class and sound vaguely like Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.

At least, that sometimes seems to be the Britain Americans have in mind.

I recognize that country. I’m just not sure I recognize it as the whole country I grew up in.

I spent most of the first 40 years of my life in Britain before eventually moving to the United States. Living on both sides of the Atlantic has given me an interesting perspective on the way Americans see Britain - and the way we Brits see ourselves.

Some of the stereotypes have a grain of truth in them. Others are decades out of date. And a few are just plain funny.

London Isn’t Britain

To many Americans, visiting Britain seems to be synonymous with visiting London.

Ask someone where they went on vacation and you’ll often hear, “We went to London,” even if much of the trip was spent hundreds of miles away.

I understand why. Heathrow is the principal gateway for millions of American visitors, and London has Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and most of the other British landmarks that appear in American movies and television shows.

But London isn’t Britain any more than New York City is America.

I grew up in Britain, but London was never the center of my universe. And the farther you travel from the capital, the more obvious it becomes that Britain is a collection of remarkably different places squeezed into a relatively small island.

Scotland isn’t England. Wales isn’t England. Northern England isn’t southern England. Cornwall sometimes seems to regard itself as a separate country altogether.

Which brings us to accents.

There Is No Such Thing as a “British Accent”

Americans frequently refer to someone having a “British accent.”

But which one?

British people have an ear for accent subtleties akin to the way a dog can sniff the air and tell that a poodle walked past twenty minutes ago.

We can often tell not only which part of the country someone comes from, but sometimes their social background as well, after hearing them speak only a few sentences.

Accent and class have traditionally gone hand in hand in Britain.

When I was a college student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most television and radio broadcasters spoke what we thought of as “BBC English”—the carefully enunciated speech associated with the educated classes of southern England.

Thankfully, things are much more egalitarian now. Turn on British television today and you’ll hear accents from all over the country.

Sometimes rather challenging ones.

I frequently watch British television shows with my American wife, and we often end up turning on the subtitles. This becomes almost mandatory when the drama ventures much farther north than London.

And sometimes the problem isn’t the accent at all. It’s the words.

When I first moved to San Diego in the early 1990s, my then-wife, who was Scottish, was driving around town when she realized the car was almost out of gas.

She stopped at a shopping center and called out, in a heavy Scottish accent:

“Can anyone tell me where the nearest petrol garage is?”

Blank looks.

A few people simply ignored her, perhaps assuming she was some sort of crazy foreigner.

Eventually someone who had recently visited Britain understood what she wanted and directed her to a gas station a few blocks away.

Petrol. Gas.

Garage. Gas station.

Two countries separated by a common language, as the old saying goes.

No, It Doesn’t Rain All the Time

Then there’s the British weather.

“Foggy old England” still seems embedded in the American imagination, perhaps thanks to Sherlock Holmes, Victorian London and countless movies involving cobblestones, gas lamps and mysterious figures emerging from the mist.

There was once some truth behind the image. The infamous Great Smog of London in 1952 was a genuine catastrophe and helped lead to Britain’s Clean Air Act a few years later.

But modern Britain isn’t permanently shrouded in fog.

Nor does it rain every day.

British weather is certainly unpredictable, and winter can be cold, damp and depressingly grey. But summers can be beautiful. Temperatures are generally less extreme than in much of the United States, although increasingly hot European summers are making air conditioning considerably more attractive than it was when I lived there.

When I was growing up, air conditioning in a British house would have seemed absurd.

These days, perhaps not so much.

Snow is another misconception. Much of Britain gets relatively little of it. A few inches can bring parts of the country to a standstill, which provides endless amusement to Americans accustomed to winters in places like Minnesota, Michigan or upstate New York.

All Right, Let’s Talk About British Teeth

We knew we were going to get here eventually.

Americans seem fascinated by British teeth.

The stereotype isn’t really that British people don’t look after their teeth. It’s that they don’t necessarily expect teeth to look the way Americans do.

The United States places enormous cultural emphasis on the perfect smile: straight, even and impressively white.

Britain traditionally put rather less emphasis on the cosmetic side of things. Orthodontics certainly exists, and British attitudes are changing, but the pursuit of the dazzling Hollywood smile has never been quite as deeply embedded in the culture.

When you’ve lived in America for a long time, you notice the difference.

So yes, you may encounter more imperfect smiles in Britain.

But Austin Powers was perhaps exaggerating.

And Yes, British Food Used to Be Pretty Awful

This one is harder for me to defend.

When I was growing up, much British food really was awful.

Vegetables could be boiled until they had surrendered both their texture and any lingering hope of nutritional value. Meat was often cooked until there was no possibility whatsoever that it might still be alive.

Things have changed enormously.

Modern Britain has excellent restaurants and an extraordinarily diverse food culture. Indian food in particular has become so thoroughly absorbed into British life that curry regularly competes for the unofficial title of the country’s favorite food.

And a good Sunday roast—roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, vegetables and gravy—is still one of my favorite meals.

Notice that I said a good Sunday roast.

On a recent trip to Scotland with my wife, I enthusiastically explained what a treat she was in for when we ordered one at a restaurant.

What arrived was a tasteless, chewy hunk of beef.

Maybe some things never change.

“Have You Met the Queen?”

I’ve been asked this by Americans more than once.

Britain has around 70 million people, so the statistical likelihood that every British person is personally acquainted with the Royal Family is fairly low.

But I have to admit that my own answer is slightly more complicated.

No, I never met Queen Elizabeth II.

But she once walked across a hallway just a few feet in front of me when she visited the university where I was teaching.

There was no eye contact, no royal conversation and, sadly, no invitation to Buckingham Palace.

My main impression was how surprisingly small she seemed.

I can do slightly better with King Charles.

When I was at college, I shared an apartment with a Romanian princess who had apparently been a childhood playmate of the then Prince Charles.

So I suppose that puts me only a couple of degrees of separation away from actually knowing a royal.

Perhaps the Americans who asked me weren’t so far off after all.

Britain Is Small. Getting Around It Isn’t Always Quick.

Americans sometimes underestimate Britain because it looks so small on a map.

And by American standards, it is.

You can drive from southern England to Scotland in the time it takes to cross a couple of large American states.

But that doesn’t mean every journey is quick.

Britain has an excellent network of motorways—the British term for freeways—but once you leave them, distances become deceptive. Head into rural Scotland, Wales, Cornwall or parts of northern England and a relatively short distance on the map can involve hours on narrower, slower roads.

Try driving from the far southwest of England to the north of Scotland and you’ll discover that Britain doesn’t feel quite so small after all.

The compensation is the scenery.

Once you get into the Scottish Highlands in particular, you can find yourself traveling slowly through some of the most awe-inspiring landscapes anywhere in the world.

Sometimes crawling along isn’t such a bad thing.

The Britain I Remember Isn’t Quite There Either

There’s another side to all this.

I’ve lived in America for more than three decades now, which means something rather strange has happened.

Britain changed while I was away.

So did I.

When I go back, I’m still unmistakably British. I recognize the humor, the language, the places and the little cultural signals that are almost impossible to explain to someone who didn’t grow up there.

But I’m also now looking at Britain partly through American eyes.

Things that once seemed completely normal can suddenly seem peculiar. Things I once complained about can seem rather wonderful.

And sometimes I find myself remembering a Britain that doesn’t really exist anymore.

Perhaps that’s the most interesting thing about leaving the country where you grew up.

You don’t simply leave a place behind.

The place moves on without you.

And after enough years have passed, you discover that you’re not quite the person who left it either.

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