Culture Shock- Being Back in Britain

I'm getting culture shock from being back in Britain for a visit. The supermarkets are full of a miscellany of body types and shapes decked out in clothes that range from the vulgar to the extravagant, the streets are deserted after six in the evening and the bars are filled with young women with fat legs in short skirts that cover too little. Their boyfriends stand in mannish groups swearing unimaginatively about the football.

England smells damp. You notice it as soon as you get off the aeroplane. And Somerset has a rich, damp cow manure odour that drifts into Taunton town centre, where it competes with diesel fumes, fried food and cheap deodorant.

As a naive young man in New York in the eighties I scoffed at my American friends' notion that the English were still getting over the loss of Empire only to be struck by the layers of division and snobbery when I returned after a year. Now, coming back from Spain, I am struck again by how stratified society is here. There is a much greater diversity of dress and manners, and young people have a litany of terms that pigeon-hole the different groups: Yah, Toff, Hooray Henry at the upper end and the abusive chav and yob at the lower end, with a whole range of types the anonymous middle classes adopt to attempt to differentiate themselves.

In England people wear clothes as a badge of their difference. 'You're not going to wear those chavvy trainers?' I am asked. They are far too white and new.

Money can't get you up a social notch. I catch myself scoffing at a young man bragging about his 'brand new lotis (Lotus)'. Posh car; common accent.

The plebs shop at Asda's or Tesco's (always adding the vulgar possessive) filling their enormous trolleys with ready meals and cheap alcohol. The upper crust go to Sainsbury's for the variety or County Stores, which is the one remaining grocery store in the centre of town. There I see well-scrubbed senior in blazers and cravats looking out a crappy wine they will pass off as quality whilst their powdered spouses peruse the preserves and pickles.

A brief drive in the country shows that the villages have been taken over by professionals who maintain houses that would have been knocked down in Spain. There are trees that have been planted because they look good and everyone has a flower garden. This is almost the reverse of Spain: the hoi polloi in the villages the shabbily dressed proles in the towns, whereas in Spain the village is full of culture-less country types and the educated aspire to live in modernity in cities.

John Major's desire for a classless society is seen most clearly where the town joins the country, in the garden centres, DIY superstores and trading estates which are the common ground of the Englishman. If you were to put all the social classes into a pot and boil them down for a couple of decades you would come up with some sludge resembling this: Classic FM on the tannoy and pseudo-classical garden statuary cast in cement; a shopping trolley culture masquerading as self-improvement.

Oh to be in England again!