Moira Redmond moved back to England from the United States six months ago. She used to be the Fray editor at Slate. You can e-mail her at .

Today was not a London day, so I took my children to the bus stop. (They are surely unique in having walked to school in the United States and taking a school bus here—school buses are almost unknown at state elementary schools in the U.K.) The big change for them has been wearing a school uniform, which is quite strict even down to coats and shoes, and learning to call soccer "football." When we arrived in the United States, my daughter was learning to read and was given a book full of short sentences about baseball. As she slowly spelled out, "Chip hits zip" and, "It's a fly!" I had to tell her "No, I have no idea what this means either." I have slowly—and this is largely because of "The Fray"—learned about designated hitters and the infield fly rule and have gotten over the time when a friendly mother staged an intervention to stop me from sending my son to baseball camp inadequately outfitted: "No he cannot take a Velcro-ed glove from an old broken toddler's game, and if you won't buy him a proper catcher's mitt, I will." This same friend was horrified when I turned up at a campfire expedition with the wrong-shaped graham crackers (sticks) and some up-market bittersweet chocolate instead of Hershey's—she had to make an emergency run to the supermarket to make sure the s'mores (surely one of the most hideous foods ever) were more traditional. Being an immigrant is never easy.

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The children—who are 9 and 11—are practically immigrants coming this way, having spent more than half their lives in the United States, but they settled into their school very quickly. There is, as it happens, a newly arrived American in each of their classes, and my children relate proudly that teachers often ask the Americans if they have understood something very English but don't ask them. My daughter's worst experience was being offered waffles at school lunch: "They weren't proper waffles; they were made of potato." My son misses Frito pie, a food I refused to believe in when he first described it to me after having it at an American school. Both of them sound as though they have never been out of England. In the United States, they were bilingual, having American accents at school and with friends but sounding very British when at home with us.

Where I work at homeI did some work at home today. I also spent a lot of time cleaning up my desk before this photo was taken, and I think it shows. After school, my daughter and I went out for a walk. (Another difference—in the United States we went for "a hike" even if it was from the sandpit to the swings of the local park; for Brits anything short of Everest the hard way is always "a walk.") The big thing about Winchester is that it is very old, especially compared with where we lived in Kirkland outside Seattle—nothing there 150 years ago. Winchester has been here since Roman times and was once the capital of England. Our house was built around 1850, the church round the corner is mentioned in a Thomas Hardy novel, and Jane Austen died just down the road and is buried in the cathedral. There is a notable boys' school here, Winchester College, which took its first pupils in 1394. So we visited the local graveyard today, and in honor of the "Diary" tried to find the oldest grave, ready for a bit more showing off about how old everything is round here. We were a little put out to find that it doesn't actually go back further than late Victorian times.

Hanging out in the local graveyardI may never have shared a moisturizer with Timothy Noah, but he's a whiz when it comes to cultural references. Slate's Mr. Chatterbox was first off the mark, e-mailing a full list of explanations for the puzzling (to a Brit) items I mentioned yesterday. Plenty of Fray people weighed in, too, though I have to say that the explanations of shit-eating grin varied a bit. Naturally I'm going with Mr. Noah: "an insincere grin, usually to cover up embarrassment or humiliation." Next question for all of you: Why do U.S. cars have such funny names? I used to be very puzzled that there was a car called a Lebanon, and, OK, this turned out to be a misreading of Le Baron. (That curly writing on the trunk can be hard to make out.) But let's just say that in Britain, a Blazer is the hideous jacket that a Suburban person wears when he's visiting his Grandam in the retirement home, and all these things are the antithesis of cool—not anything you would ever call your car. Mr. Chatterbox? Anyone?

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