Being an international woman of mystery never required so little effort

When I land in the UK now, I’m a novelty as much as I am in New York, reveals Holly Baxter

Moving to a new city is strange: going home is stranger (Getty)

Moving to a different country is strange, but you know what’s even stranger? Coming back. Every time I come home to the UK from New York, I start noticing things that Americans find strange about English people. I’m currently en route back for the Christmas holidays (I’m treating myself by spending 10 days traipsing in between my mum’s house, my dad’s house and my fiance’s parents’ house, who all live at completely different corners of the country) and I’m preparing myself for an odd kind of reverse culture shock I know I should expect.

During my first month in New York City, a friend of a friend kindly took me out for a drink in a nice area of Manhattan. She was also a British expat, but she’d been living in the US for five years by then, and was considering whether she would ever go home. “I miss so many things about England,” she told me. “The TV shows, the familiarity, the proximity to family. But I’ve become so weirdly removed from it. I tried to listen to a UK podcast the other day and I found the accents so overpowering that I had to switch it off.”

When I hear another English person in a bar or walking down the streets of NYC, I bristle. I hear them how Americans hear them: over-formal, with drawn-out vowels and a propensity to speak in a much lower tone