Why I love the British

Perhaps in my deepest, I am fundamentally a tropical girl--given to sentimentality, fussiness, shameless hedonism, clingy neediness and unbridled passions. I cry and laugh with utter transparency and express my love with food.

And perhaps forever on, I will be on all functioning accounts an American girl--fiercely ambitious, equally earnest, gruesomely optimistic, stimulation junkie, self absorbed, individualistic and given to expressing all affection couched in the language of legal consent.

But somewhere in between, i would like to think that weaving the distance in continents and oceans, is the cheerful work of the british, who were always so exquisitely polite when endeavoring to wipe out your civilization and grow tea plantations on top of it.

Their infamous stiff upper lip, lined always with a comical handlebar mustache, smelling vaguely of tobacco, bacon and bureaucracy, these men and women provide models of grace and sly dowdiness, be they faced with armies of disgruntled heathens, the demise of their empire, tropical weather ruining their tweed suit, or that final Tea Cup in the Sky--mortality.


Someday i will question what the English language has made of my brain, and write it out, in this language that has colonized me--and I who have colonized it.