So you want to live in England

It all started, as so many things do, with a guy in a bar.

My friend Josh had invited me to meet him at the Empire Bar near the office for a quick drink. Josh and I work in different offices within the same company. We started at the same time so we went through the incredibly dull two-week training course together. Being very bored for a long period of time can really unite people in friendship.

We worked together for a year or so, then he moved over to the magazine and corporate publishing division, while I was transferred to the children’s division. I'm a woman so I must love kids, right?

Suffice it to say: his job was much more interesting than mine.

When I showed up that night, the Empire was crowded as usual, and the music was deafening. I spotted Josh's head of hopelessly wirey brown hair right away - he's nearly 6 foot 5, so he's hard to miss. He was sitting at the bar with a much shorter, skinny guy with a strange haircut of his own and absurd glasses. Josh introduced him as Jon, and explained that he was over from the London office.

Jon was jetlagged and small - no match for the Jack Daniels and Cokes he was knocking back. His glasses glittered in the bar lights as he told us how much he liked Seattle.

'It's just lovely!' he said, his creamy British accent standing out like a Maserati on a used car lot. 'So green. And the air's so fresh! London's pollution is enough to give anyone lung cancer.'

Five glasses of Syrah later, I was telling Jon I’d always wanted to live in England, and he was shouting over the music, earnestly urging me to move there. ‘We’re looking for staff!’ he yelled. ‘I really think you’d fit in!’

His eyes were slightly glazed and he exhaled bourbon on me enthusiastically. Through the alcohol haze I thought I felt thrilled.

London. I’d never been. I did the whole backpacking through Europe thing in my early 20s, but I’d skipped England because it was too expensive to get to and from. You couldn't get on a train in Amsterdam and be there in two hours for 30 bucks. But you could be in Luxembourg. So I went to Luxembourg. I thought England deserved a trip of its own. And I never made that trip.

But I felt like I already knew it. The rooftops from Mary Poppins, the hookers via Bob Hoskins films, royalty from a youth barraged by images of Princess Di – yeah, I knew it.

When Jon sobered up, of course, he wasn’t quite as absolute in his assurances that I would definitely have a job in England and it would be something great. However, he didn’t completely back off.

‘It is not our policy,’ he emailed me a few weeks later, ‘to get visas for foreign workers, or to sponsor them, or to do any of the necessary footwork. But if you can get yourself a visa and get over here, we would probably be able to find something for you to do. You come highly recommended, thanks to me.’

Well, it wasn’t exactly my dream offer of a corporate apartment at Marble Arch and lunch at the Ivy, but it also wasn’t editing kids’ books in Seattle either.

It took me three months to get a visa and six months to decide to go. Among my friends the support was universal. ‘Get out,’ my ex-housemate Shannon told me one day as we discussed it for the umpteenth time in a coffeeshop near my office. ‘You’re bored. Seattle isn’t going to change and neither are you. Just go. Try it. If you hate it – come home. We’ll be here.’

Even as I held the yard sale I wasn't entirely sure I was making the right decision. As I sold everything I didn’t like and plenty that I did, collecting the crumpled dollar bills in an old baseball hat, I worried.

It seemed so limiting. I figured I could take three suitcases on the plane, but nothing more. How can an adult own only what will fit into three suitcases? One for each decade of my life.

But I kept talking myself back into it. Then one day I got on a plane and Seattle wasn’t my home anymore.

Just like that.

It is a strange fact that we are all deeply associated with a place. Whereever it may be, your hometown defines you. We say 'I am' a Texan, a New Yorker, a Parisian... Not just 'I'm from' but 'I am.' I am the place where I live. But that identity changes the second you get in a car and drive away. Or get on a plane and take off.

Suddenly I am someplace else.

The flight wasn’t nearly as dramatic as I’d hoped. The food was dreadful, but the alcohol was free. I sat next to an actress who talked like a butterfly fluttering, her words dancing tremulously in the air. Her huge blue eyes glanced at me tentatively from behind the safety of long lashes. She was as thin as a whippet and as shy as a mouse, but the movie being shown was horrible and we had nothing but time, so by Quebec we were talking. And as we crossed the Atlantic we shared far more intimacies than I had exchanged with anybody for years.

She told me about her boyfriend cheating on her, the small part she was travelling to London for, the trauma of an ingénue turning 30.

I told her about my aimlessness, and the strange anchorless feeling of being jobless for the first time in 15 years, the spontaneity (as I saw the six-month period of agonising) of my decision to move.

The next day, as a preternaturally bright sunrise broke Heaven-like above the clouds, we descended towards London, drinking lukewearm tea and eating blueberry yoghurt.

After a disorienting walk from the gate that seemed to go on for miles - a sort of weary Gatwick Death March - Immigration was grimly lit in industrial fluorescence that illuminated the passengers' secrets for all to see. They use the same kind of lighting in prisons.

The agent who handled my case was a fragile looking, white haired man who appeared absolutely delighted to see me.

‘Oh you’ve got a visa, how wonderful,’ he exclaimed, pressing the last two words together happily, like hands clapping. ‘Well allow me to be the first to welcome you to your new home.’

With great pleasure he kept me at his desk for nearly 30 minutes, talking about where I would live, what I would do, how I'd got my visa. We were nearly done before I realised he was quizzing me for the record, not because he was really interested.

But, eventually he released me with fervent hopes that I would be happy and that all would be well in my new life.

As I walked dazed into the baggage department the actress passed me on her way out, ethereally pushing a cart loaded with an eclectic array of overstuffed suitcases teetering dangerously to one side. She waved at me with pleasant emptiness, as if she’d already begun forgetting who I was.

I had arrived.