I often wondered this past year how I would feel at the end of it, how I would sum up my first year living, as James Brown once famously remarked before Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago, in America. Would I be all Uncle Sammed and Spangled with Stars, or would I be all stewing with homesickness, huddled in front of the TV watching DVDs of British shows and following the BBC news with vigilance? Well, lately I’ve certainly been in the second category, and I doubt I’ll ever be in the first; trumpeting patriotism was never for me even back home. So I ask myself, how has a year in California changed me?

I began the year by throwing a pumpkin. This rite of passage allowed me to get into the minds of small-town ruralitarian America, and I’ve been in there ever since, in a way. Davis, with its middle-brow community and progressive-greenist outlook, is not necessarily a typical town, but it tries very hard to be how people imagine such places. I’ve become a cyclist, but haven’t yet succumbed to the American love of the automobile, and have as yet never had a driving lesson (something that sooner or later will have to be remedied, if we are to stay in the States for good). I haven’t gone organic, in fact I am sad to say I eat much more fast junk food here than in London, simply because it’s so readily available. Of course, I don’t go down the pub anywhere near like I did in London, mainly because my old (and greatly missed) friends are not here, but also because the culture here is too different. Buying alcohol is an ordeal in itself, but the relaxing local pub just isn’t there, it’s all sports bars or ‘bar and grill’. So this much has changed: I almost never go out to the pub. Which for one thing means no more falling asleep on the Night Bus and waking up in darkest Essex.

I feel lucky that I came to an interesting State. California has so many different landscapes and places to visit, and it’s the place eveyone always wants to come to from other places. It’s green, yellow, gold, blue; right now, in the wine country, it is orange and burgundy, as the Harvest season kicks in, and the smell of wine-grapes floats on the mist. I juts couldn’t imagine we’d have moved if it had been to somewhere like Nebraska or Idaho (I’m sure they have thier attractions, but give me California). But I still miss that proximity to the diversity of Europe; the languages, the cultures, the people, the cities. It took me a while to become a ‘European’, and I am loath to give that up readily. I am, as noted in the recent beer / safeway incident, still having trouble accepting the idiosyncracies of the culutre here, such as the very un-European parcity in holiday time. And don’t even mention the War. I find that my blood is made to boil every time I listen to Mr Bush and his buddies appear on the telescreen chipping away reality like the Ministers of Truth, a feeling that may be amplified because I’m in liberal peace-preferring California.

Nevertheless, I am not unhappy here. I have a good job, live in a nice friendly town and am lucky enough to have the most excellent and wonderful wife. I complain about most places I’ve lived. My love affair with London, the city I know intimately, whose history I have studied closely, whose streets I have guided camera-snappy tourists around in blistering rain and pouring sun, well, it soured gradually as I discovered that living in smaller places might be better than enduring the Underground, and when it attacked me and scarred me I felt I couldn’t stay; yet I came back, and though I found a new love for the city, I think I discovered I needed to be somewhere with several million fewer people; but London is a part of my family, and always will be. I complained about life in Aix, the red tape of the French, the lunchtime closing, but it remains one of the places I’d live again the most. I certaily complained about Charleroi, in Belgium, the endless grey sky, the doomed-to-failure shadow on every building, the rotten shells of a dying heavy industry, but it will always be in the heart of Pete, as will the taste of her beers and the warmth of her people. However much I complain about California, it is already a part of me, and whether we stay or whether we go, to Europe or Canada or anywhere, little corners of Davis will stay inside me forever.

So after a year, how do I feel? The breeze is picking up, the blue skies are slowly being peppered with invading October clouds, the summer heat is evaporating, and I’m already nostalgic for previous times in Davis, such as when I was jobless and sad, strumming my elctro-acoustic and drawing faces on eggs and potatoes. This past week has been probably the busiest and stressful of the past fifty-two, and I can’t pretend that a night in a London pub with my closest amigos would not have helped. But I know that, truthfully, my time here has just begun, that while part of my soul will always remain on Greenwich Mean Time, the rest of me, the part that is living and experiencing, is out here on the edge of America, in the land of my wife, and that’s good enough for me. I began the year by throwing a pumpkin; I’m absolutely not ending it by throwing in the towel.