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 .

The birthday cakeToday is my husband's birthday. He might prefer not to celebrate it, but with two children in the house that is not an option. Piles of presents are produced in the morning to the sound of loud singing, then after school there is a special dinner, more presents, and a large chocolate cake. My son gave him a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad which is considered a great joke, as my husband is always bemoaning our perceived headlong rush to bankruptcy, and the rest of us refuse to take him seriously. I remember that in our early days in the United States some new friends asked what we were giving him for his birthday: "Oh, the children and I have chosen him a nice stripy jumper," I said (it means a sweater over here). There was quite a long silence. It was probably around the same time that we cheerfully asked the man in the hardware store where the torches were: "We just need something simple for the children to play around with." (English torch=American flashlight.)

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Winchester's main shopping street: not a mall yetOur broadband connection failed today for about 15 hours. I didn't have a phone backup set up, so dashed into town first thing to get a CD for an Internet service (which is free—here with a phone Internet connection you pay for the call and not the ISP) and buy a phone cable. Oh joy, the shop is opening half an hour late for staff training. When we first got back we used to say, "Well that's England for you," when this kind of thing happened, very unfairly. In fact hookups and connections are time-wasting nightmares everywhere. Shopping, however—oh, shopping is one of the things that the USA does so much better than the U.K. I'm neutral on the question of malls (we have a few here now, but there's no real mall culture as there is in the States), but I'm not neutral on the subject of service. Many Americans complain about the insincerity of clerks being fake-friendly and saying, "Have a nice day," but I found it a nice change after the austerity years of English shop assistants—imagine Basil Fawlty behind a toy counter and you might be close—and I prefer insincerity to overt hostility. When I took English visitors shopping in Seattle, I had to explain to them that when the clerks say, "Howya doing?" they're being friendly, they don't mean (as they would in England) "Are you a shoplifter? Would you please either buy something or leave?" And you don't want to start me on supermarkets. When first visiting the USA with two toddlers I couldn't believe that the staff unloaded the cart, packed the shopping into bags, then wheeled it out to the car for me. It won't sound much to Americans, but oh, the difference to me. No, they didn't do those things in England. (That has changed a little, and a limited service is there if you ask for it now.)

People (on both sides of the ocean) ask me what is better in each place. On the U.S. side I would put the shopping experience, anything made of cotton, and family restaurants. Customer service everywhere is better. Driving, and parking, are much easier. In the U.K. I like the Indian food (the thing Brits miss most), the wonderful ready meals available in every supermarket (never found anything to match them in Seattle), and the cream (sooo much better—you do bad things to it in the USA in the search for a long shelf-life). We do old houses better, but you have much better new houses. The newspapers here are more entertaining and more diverse. (The people may be less diverse: You never meet anyone who doesn't believe in evolution and gun control.) This is going to be unpopular but I love what Americans call the "socialized medicine" here: It's cheaper, better, and fairer.

I asked my husband today if he feels older, but I suppose what I really want to know is whether he feels like a grown-up yet. We are both proper respectable people, in our 40s, working, raising children, and paying our taxes, and yet somehow that doesn't describe us at all. How do other people know it's time to start buying real furniture ("I'm too old for IKEA," said a much younger friend recently) or to get a serious car or to live in a tidy house? Other people seem to have a life plan that I don't know about. Still, perhaps our lack of a life plan made it easier for us to move to America and back: an experience that was total benefit for all of us. And there may be continuing political differences, and you can call me anti-Bush, but none of my family will ever be anti-American.

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