‘I’m a loud New Yorker – here’s why I love living in the UK’

The news is full of “Donald Dashers” – the Americans who have decided to make their home in the UK because of their controversial new president. A record 6100 Americans applied to become British citizens last year – an annual rise of 26 per cent, according to the Home Office. They are set to join the 170,000 American expats already residing in the UK, who cite the lure of better education or a country cottage.

As JD Vance himself as admitted today, Trump himself loves the UK, loved the Queen and admires the King, adding, “But I think it’s much deeper than that. There’s a real cultural affinity. And of course, fundamentally America is an Anglo country.”

But for one midlife American, the move to British shores has nothing to do with Royals, politics, fancy schools or a home in the Cotswolds.

Jeremy Kareken, 55, is a playwright and actor from upstate New York. He has just become engaged to journalist Miranda Levy, 56, who is originally from Essex but now lives in north London. After six years of a transatlantic relationship, the couple is planning to set up home in the UK rather than the US.

Jeremy says:

While I’m certainly happy to be swerving Mr Trump, I also hope to be dodging the more difficult and annoying Donald Dashers over here, who include the media wokerati and their children: the self-righteous, pink-haired, keffiyeh-clad, campus bullhorn-jockeys.

Political discourse in the United States has become so tedious, and frankly, it’s your fault, England. If you people hadn’t embarked on the Great Ejection of 1662, the Puritans would never have alighted on North America, and we needn’t have endured endless self-satisfied finger-pointing from McCarthyism or its other evil twin, cancel culture.

I’m through with thinking about politics like an American. So if you’re Donald dashing too, do not approach me. And if you must approach, please, let’s talk about something else than Trump for once.

And really, I’m not here avoiding anyone. I came here because I fell in love, twice. But half a lifetime before I fell in love with Telegraph journalist Miranda Levy, I fell in love with England – at least the England that was deemed suitable for export to a middle class American.

As a 10-year-old in Rochester, New York, my older brother David introduced me to British culture. This started with Monty Python sketches and went on to include Dr Who in the era of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. The Doctor would fight the weekly monster, usually a RADA graduate dressed in bubble wrap.

My schoolboy crush on England grew into love, as my reading list graduated from PG Wodehouse to PD James. Later on, I got into panel shows such as Would I Lie to You, The Unbelievable Truth, QI – basically, anything with David Mitchell. These were to keep me sane during the pandemic.

Around this time, I began a social media exchange with Miranda, who was as witty and conversational as I would expect from the English. Miranda was a combination of two qualities that were new to me: Essex girl and jolly hockey sticks. While she doesn’t entirely fit into either cultural stereotype, she has the devil-may-care attitude of the former, and the leadership and teamwork of the latter. I love the phrase “jolly hockey sticks”, it conjures something more collaborative than our American “rugged individualism”.

I don’t know if these sticks were forged during a thousand years of British monarchy or they were found lying around in shelters during the Blitz, but I adore your jolly hockey sticks. They speak of long memory, endurance, and even though you’re sometimes loath to admit it, enthusiasm.

So, Miranda and I fell in love and, as our relationship progressed to a traditional real life one, she began to teach me about more English things I knew little about: Wags, chipolatas and how to tell a Dec from an Ant.

Now, I’m in the process of moving here. I love living in the UK. My friends ask me if there’s ever any culture clash. I don’t think so: I’m a loud New Yorker, and you people apologise all the time, so I think we’ll get along great. When I’m on the wrong side of the station stairs and I bump into one of you, you’re invariably the one who apologises.

As I’ve gotten to know England a little better, I have rid myself of many of my American preconceptions: you’re not all posh, your villages are not plagued with murders only a puzzle-setter can solve, and your food and dentistry are better than I’d feared. But I do wish many of you (Geordies, especially) came with subtitles.

I don’t yet understand a blessed thing about your Christmas: wrapping pork in more pork, truly awful cracker jokes and those ridiculous funny paper hats. Like many of your traditions, they continue long past any utility or even meaning: the monarchy, Fortnum’s, the way you keep trying to win at international soccer. Stick to those, lose the Christmas jokes.

I’ve learnt all sorts of interesting things. Did you know that London is officially classified as a forest by the United Nations? I didn’t. It’s one of those things you don’t find out unless you live here.

I love how British cities are so unpredictable, the streets so twisty. Our American towns were measured and manufactured by German-American utilitarian, brutalist engineers – the buildings planned along straight lines, stacked onto numbered streets, and arranged along grids.

But much as I celebrate the differences, there are disturbing signs of Americanisation creeping into British life. I overhear kids say “sure” instead of “yes” and “like” instead of anything at all. Your chocolate has become revolting, like ours: worst of all, waiters are starting to tell me to “enjoy!”

Let me tell you, England, it’s important to fight the Americanisation and your latest foray into self-improvement. We wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, and there’s nothing in it. Forget it: quit the Peloton, don’t call raising children “parenting,” you don’t need to “duolingo a language,” or “decolonise your narrative”, whatever those mean. You’re fine.

On a June day last year, we went to the Trooping the Color/Colour, or however you spell the King’s birthday party over here. Was it his actual birthday? No, that’s in November. Why June? Because England, that’s why. Way back in the Restoration, Charles II wanted nice weather for his birthday parade, so he picked the second Saturday in June and forgot to tell the next Charles in 2024, so we all got rained on. Because England. To an American, it’s all very adorable when you choose tradition over sense.

Long Island native Billy Joel said it best: Don’t go changing; I love you just the way you are. I’m here for you and all your nonsense, the Marmite and the steamed puddings, God save the King and God save me from CrossFit and pointless optimism.

Miranda says:

As Jeremy is American, he does nothing quietly. He likes to drive around with the theme tune of The A-Team blasting out of the car stereo, wears Hawaiian shirts unironically, and still buys Spider-Man comics. In the genteel area of north London where we live, Jeremy bellows: “HELLO, DAWG!” at every four-legged friend passing by, making their owners jump.

He carries his citizenship proudly. How do you pronounce your surname, people ask? “Kareken, rhymes with American,” he says.

Jeremy and I are delighted to have recently got engaged – it’s second time around for both of us. We met on social media, where in the early days of our acquaintance, we bonded over the Fawlty Towers episode where the hard-of-hearing Mrs Richards is disappointed about the view. (“May I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window… Sydney Opera House? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?”)

My fiancé’s tastes are quite old-fashioned, even by English standards. Jeremy astonishes me with his knowledge of Radio 4 panel shows: even now, he mutters “hooray”, whenever we go past Mornington Crescent tube station, in homage to I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. On recent car journeys, I’ve been forced to listen to large swathes of the audiobook of The Last Lion – the biography of Winston Churchill, and Jeremy’s new obsession (it’s 130 hours long).

Mostly, things are very amenable. Jeremy likes to tease me on 4th July about his country’s independence from England, and is met with a blank, am-I-bothered? stare. Our disputes are mostly down to matters of pronunciation. “What do you mean, you pronounce it controVERSy? It’s TRAY-chea, not truck-ia.”

Yes, Jeremy loves British things, but is frequently disappointed in his quest for the perfect gin martini and he misses the weak filter coffee that waitresses pour out from those big glass pots in American diners. (I do love the way he says “cwarfee”, however.) Hence, we spend several weeks a year in the US.

America: the place where they make you feel mean for tipping at 20 per cent – they even expect it at Starbucks – and where people have their “own” doctor, annual top-to-toe health checks, and regular colonoscopies.

Jeremy has a house in an outer borough of New York City – which many Americans would say “isn’t really America”, but it does have certain things in common with the rest of the continent. I’ll never cease to be astonished by the size of diner breakfasts – those pancakes flopping off the plate and onto the table! – and cannot believe that everyone isn’t the size of a condo building. They put sugar in their bread, for God’s sake.

If, in earlier life, you’d told me I was destined for an American husband, I’d have exploded in excitement. America was everything: Grease, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Dukes of Hazzard, Disneyland. In the Nineties, I fancied myself as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. Even today, my heart skips a beat when I exit the Midtown Tunnel on the ride from JFK and see the Manhattan skyline soaring in front of me.

There is still much to love about the US: the excellent service (I guess that’s what the tips get you), glamorous cocktail bars, the Korean food in Queens and my growing appreciation for Country and Western music.

For now, however, we’ve decided to stay in the UK – Jeremy’s work is more “portable” and New York is becoming ever grimier. Then there is the political situation – I haven’t been back to the US since Trump’s election, but it’s clear the atmosphere there is feverish and unhappy.

Instead, I have my own slice of America here: confident, friendly and a little bit “out-there”. Being with Jeremy reminds me of the optimism of the 1990s, when America – the UK, too, as it happens – really was great.