Well, it’s been a month since I’ve returned from the Sceptered/Sceptred Isle, and although I miss it, I’ve had time to reappreciate (is that a word? Spellcheck thinks not) the glories of this place I call home. Here are a few things which spring to my fertile mind:

1)  The beautiful, blessed, wide roads. I love them. I love the clear yellow dividing lines, and the Bots Dots, and the wide black shoulders. I know that if I see a road that looks narrow enough to admit only one car, it is a driveway, and not the main street through town.  Sometimes, when I’m driving down one of the super-wide roads in my hometown, I swerve around a bit just for fun, and gloat in the fact that I still have room to spare, and I probably will make it to the grocery store alive.

2)  My refrigerator.  It is,  by English standards, Stonehengian in its proportions.  It is massive.  It is mammoth.  It can fit enough food to feed our family, assuming we can afford food, for two weeks.  It is AMERICAN.

3)  Speaking of food, I’m grateful to buy milk in gallon jugs.  I realize, of course, that English people must buy pints or quarts of milk in order to conserve space in their micro-fridges, and also because a gallon of milk in England costs about as much as a pub lunch for three.  But whopping huge gallons of milk are BEAUTIFUL.  I buy three at a time, and drink it with abandon.  BECAUSE I CAN.

4) SeaBreeze. Don’t know what that is?  I’ll enlighten you: SeaBreeze is the magical liquid that keeps my pores clean and my face young(ish). It’s my friend, my loyal sidekick, my wing man, my Significant Other. It’s been with me since high school, through thick and thin (or though thin and thick, if you want to stick with a more realistic progression). And it only exists HERE.  HERE!  HERE!  HERE!

5) Target.  ’Nuf said.

6)  Top Burger in Camas, Washington. I love a steak and kidney pie as much as the next bloke, but by golly, give me a Jr. Top Burger (no sauce), small fries, and Tillamook Oregon Strawberry ice-cream cone for dessert, and that’s my little slice of cholesterol-induced coma.

7) Outdoor swimming.  We have a local outdoor swimming pool – where I am about to take my daughter for swimming lessons – and there’s nothing more soul-satisfying than floating on your back under pine trees and a soft blue sky. Maybe you can do that in England, but you can’t do this:  Swim in the mighty Columbia River.  On the weekends, we grab a picnic basket and a blanket and put on our swimsuits and head for Cottonwood Beach.  We splash into the deep green, gold-flecked, sun-warmed but still deliciously cool water, and feel ourselves become part of the current that flows from British Columbia down through Washington State and all the way to the Pacific.  The Columbia is indeed mighty, with a drainage basin roughly the size of France.  Take THAT, England, with your little trickle that you call the Thames.

OK, Derek and you other Limeys, whadda ya got?  I’ve thrown down the guantlet.  (Wait – is that an English thing?  Never mind, then – I’ve thrown down the – uh, whip and spurs.)