'Richard and Judy are still insipid. Tony Blair is still irritating.'

After more than 2 years away Helen Angove returns for a holiday in the UK and finds that for better or for worse some things don't change.

Well, I say holiday - with four (yes, four) sets of parents to visit, innumerable friends and relatives to catch up with, a wedding at which we were (between us) giving the address and being best man, visas to renew, and for my husband, a conference and meetings in Cambridge and Preston to attend - it felt less like a holiday and more like some kind of sadistic reality TV show. But we survived, we are back, though we are still wrestling with the jet-lag - and I still find myself waking in the middle of the night wondering where on the planet I am.

But no matter where we went, the questions were the same. What do you miss from the UK? What has changed since you’ve been away?

In many ways little has changed. Politicians are still getting into trouble and having to resign. Richard and Judy are still insipid. Tony Blair is still irritating.

But many things struck me afresh. The astonishing beauty of the English countryside for example. We got off the plane at Heathrow, and were whisked away by relatives to East Sussex through the amazing verdancy of England on a sunny autumn day - past ancient village churches, fields of cows and sheep, village greens and picturesque old cottages. And pubs. Don’t get me started about the pubs. How I have missed being able to go for a walk in the country and end up in a pub for a ploughman’s and a pint of bitter in the garden.

When I mention this to American friends they invariably tell me 'but there’s an English pub a couple of blocks away' (one such 'local' advertises itself with the tagline 'warm beer and bad food') - entirely missing the point that the English country pub is nothing without the English countryside to go with it, no matter how much fake half-timbering it may be clad with.

California has its own beauty - I have raved before about the magnificence of the mountains - but it is so parched and, well lets face it, beige, in comparison to the UK, and it has nothing comparable to an English village. Around LA, either one is in the city or one is in the wilderness (no in-betweens), and the buildings are all so - how can I put this - recent.

There is a brashness, also, to American urban life that I did not notice quite so much when I first came out here. Shop signs and adverts can be pretty brash in the UK, but are thankfully restrained by planning restrictions from being 20ft high neon monstrosities pestering you to visit Cholesterol Fried Chicken or Heart Attack Inna Bun.

Driving seemed very different indeed. British motorways are so sedate. Being a seasoned veteran of the M25 it had not occurred to me that there would be any road system in the developed world that could give me pause - until I came across LA freeways. On British motorways drivers practice lane discipline, the slow lane is slower than the fast lane, and they signal before changing lanes (I can hear you laughing hollowly here, but compared to LA it’s true). Here, on the other hand, the lanes are narrow, the junctions badly designed and traffic swerves in front of you from all directions with no warning.

Urban driving is another thing altogether. Here it is the US which is often more sedate. Perhaps the ubiquity of the automatic transmission has something to do with this - you simply cannot accelerate as fast in an automatic as you can with a manual, and driving tends to be a little smoother and calmer as a result. But American towns also have wide, straight grid-formation roads and frequent intersections keeping the speed down. And they don’t have our convoluted junctions with confusing roundabouts sprouting tentacles off every which way, and they don’t have our narrow winding streets where you play endless games of chicken between the parked cars and the oncoming traffic.

And finally, two gripes to report on. The first gripe to mention is about the cost of petrol - that’s people here in the US doing the griping, despite the fact that here it costs fully half of what it does in the UK. It makes Americans complaining about the price of petrol very hard to take seriously.

And the second gripe is one we’ve heard often in the UK - about the dumbing-down of television. Well, even so - and even if you have only the five terrestrial channels to choose from - believe me when I say that UK television is still vastly superior to anything you are likely to have the chance to watch in the USA. You don’t know how lucky you are.

Helen Angove is a former Anglican priest from the UK who moved to California in July 2003.

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