When I moved from Brussels to London, my then secretary gave me a dictionary, a British-American, American-British dictionary. The most interesting thing about this dictionary was its size; it was something like 150 pages long. In some ways that book has served as a convenient metaphor of my experience of living in England: the extent of the differences are often surprising.
For a some time I've been thinking about writing about my 25 odd years of living in England. I first came here to live in 1976 and since then have had three breaks with moves to Venezuela, California and North Carolina and always returning to Britain. My intention is to describe life in the country, particularly for American friends and family, to comment on events here and talk about some of the good and bad stuff.
A little history is in order. My first visit to England was on a vacation in 1966. I landed at London Heathrow airport and took a bus into central London and found hotel. The next morning, I picked up a pre-purchased Sunbeam Alpine, my first sports car, from a dealer in Piccadilly. The plan was to drive the new car around Europe for three weeks then ship it back to the States, thus it was configured with left-hand controls. Driving the new car out into London traffic with the wheel on the wrong side was something of an adventure for me and for the policeman I nearly hit in the first couple of minutes. Anyway, I was able to get the car back to the hotel and eventually down to the ferry at Dover, a hundred miles away. The rest of the trip is for another day or another blog.
My next encounter with The country was in 1969 on a trip in the middle of my two-year MBA program. I was luck to get one of three fellowships that year from the University of Washington called Journey for Perspective. Along with MBA students from four other West coast business schools and a few faculty, we were sent around the world to study and compare economic and business systems in countries from Japan to the UK and quite a few in between. When we got to London, we met with former Prime Minister Alec to Douglas Hume in the House of Lords and J. Paul Getty, then one of the world's richest men, at his country estate outside of London. Phew, talk about pissing with the tall dogs!
During the next few years, I made a fair number of business trips to London while working for Boise Cascade's International Finance department in Boise, ID, and Paris, France, and Chase Manhattan in Brussels. In 1976 I was managing a small consulting company, a subsidiary of Chase in Brussels when the bank decided to move the operation to London and me with it. Working abroad for an American bank has a big advantage, subsidized housing. Because of this I was able to live in a comfortable, four-story town house near Holland Park in Kensington. I worked first in the City of London, England's equivalent of Wall Street and later in Berkeley Square in the West End.7. Nice!
I should say that my partner at this time, and my wife now, is English. From 1978 to 1982, I had the good fortune to work as the corporate Treasurer of Cerveceria Polar in Caracas, Venezuela. The job was terrific but the life style, especially for my partner was pretty difficult. So, we moved back to England.
In Caracas I had been contacted by representatives of the University of Aston in Birmingham, England, who were recruiting for their doctoral programs in business. I was able to reach an arrangement with the Venezuelan company to carry on as an advisor/consultant in financial management, particularly investment strategy for the pension fund. with this source of income secured we bought a five-hundred-year-old house in a village near Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, and I signed up for the doctoral program at Aston, a half hour train commute. It was in this village that I discovered for the first time that there was a good deal of prejudice against Americans in rural England.
After a couple of years, the program at Aston proved to be less than expected and later an opportunity came up to start up a new consulting company in Los Angeles with an old friend from my Caracas days. So, it was off to sunny Southern California in 1988. It turned out that the only work we got was my own clients from before and |I was just splitting my fees with somebody else. So, after 18 months, back to England we go, this time to a another small village not too far from Stratford. This place was in the North Cotswold hills in the county of Gloucestershire and another old house. We had an idyllic life here; the house was great, the village pretty and very friendly and the pub had good beer. We could have stayed here forever. In fact we stayed for ten years 'till we ran out of money.
Hoping that the vigorous US economy would provide some job opportunities for a n older guy, we moved back to the States, this time to North Carolina where I had some family. It turned out that we were wrong about the job scene, but one of my sons wanted to start a dude ranch in the Great Smoky mountains so I agreed to help out with the planning and financial side. We worked on the ranch for four years, but without our own capital, we could'n't pull it off. What now? Back to England of course.
We decided to take over a country pub in Herefordshire.
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