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 .

When I arrived in the USA another British expat said to me, "Were you Radio 4 at home?" and when I nodded said, "Then what you need is NPR, and the local station is KUOW, and this is the setting." I went home, tuned all my radios to KUOW, and didn't change them for six years. The BBC's Radio 4 and NPR are close cousins, and yet. ... Every morning now I wake up to the Today program on R4, and though it resembles Morning Edition—a serious mixture of news stories and features—there are three items on Today that you won't find on NPR. One is "Thought for the Day," a short spiritual message given by a religious leader. The thought it provokes in my house is "a good time to leave the room"—although I did once have to call up a fellow media junkie at 7:55 a.m. to say, "Did the rabbi really just out himself as gay on TFTD?" The second Today special is that very senior government ministers go on it, live, and get worked over by the presenters: "Minister, can you please answer the question?" Sometimes the presenters are unnecessarily aggressive, but on the whole it's a good thing. The third un-American activity is that at the end of the sports news they tell you the names of a couple of horses they think might win races today—possibly the most unlikely moment on British radio, bringing new meaning to "public service."

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A corner of the Guardian newsroomI was in London again today and found out how many Guardian people are Slate readers: They were the ones asking who it was who offered the moisturizer, as mentioned in Tuesday's entry. I had sent generous, fine-skinned, Mr. Moisturizer the URL of the piece so he could see his starring role, but he'd already read it—someone in America had e-mailed it to him hours before. Such is the power of the Internet.

When I told my friend InstaPundit what I was doing now he said, "The Guardian, eh? It's the paper that many American Webloggers love to hate—but it has the best Web presence of any paper in the U.K., by a very large margin." (He has just done a great piece for the Guardian on blogs but made his comments to me before that.) It is an enormous Web site: Although my job involves rootling round in it, I'm still finding bits I'd never seen before.

Guardian newsroom I'm doing a special project to help the newspaper (and Web site) make future plans, and I go round asking people about their jobs and how they see the future. I thought they might be reluctant to talk to me, or suspicious, and I mentally prepared some reassurances, a promise of confidentiality, and long lists of questions for when the taciturn dried up. None of this is remotely necessary: Everyone is dying to tell me about work, problems, management, colleagues, and anything else I could wish to know. I suppose I should have guessed: People think about their jobs a lot and don't get asked about them often. But it is a tribute to the Guardian management that staff are not suspicious of them. I've described my job to friends who say that where they work people would immediately think the worst and assume my researches were aimed at cutting jobs or catching them out. No one thinks that here. I love the job because I find it fascinating, and I also appreciate that the Guardian is extremely understanding of my need to work part-time. (This is because I love my children so much, and not, as unkind friends suggest, because I have a pathological fear of what normal working people put up with.) The project, the second one I've done for them, is short-term, and we have a fairly loose and convenient arrangement, which means that next week—when the children have half-term, the equivalent of mid-winter break—I won't work at all.

When I got back home the children both had playmates over, and I was able to cook dinner for all, then drive the guests home. I spent an hour or so catching up on e-mail and Fray postings—rather ironically I had had a problem getting into the Fray, which is why it took me a long time to answer some of you (look again now). A few people have questions about the British use of "liberal." To help out, here is one of my favorite ever Fray posts, from Temaj, which said, "Where I come from 'liberal' is not an insult. Well, actually, it is, but only because it means you're not left-wing enough."

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