"You know the thing that shocks me repeatedly?" asks writer Isabel Fonseca of the difficulties of speaking to the English.
"It's how you think you are communicating with them and at the end of a conversation you discover you have not communicated at all."
"There is an illusion of a common culture," adds Fonseca, who has lived in Britain for 20 years, not least with husband Martin Amis.
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"But there is a cultural difference that's masked by appearing to have the language in common."
It is the understanding thing between Britons and Americans -- closest of allies, friends and sometimes baffled collaborators. Next week, however, the understanding, and the frequent lack of it, that comprises the "Special Relationship" will be put to its sternest test when an unpopular president from the country Britons love best is welcomed here on the first state visit in decades.
What is certain is that US President George W. Bush will be greeted with a public upsurge of anti-Americanism not seen since the Vietnam War. And what is also certain is that, for all the anger that will be piled on Bush over the war in Iraq, it will not affect the enthusiasm the vast majority of Britons retain for most things American -- if not its foreign policy. The relationship between Britain and the US -- or rather Britons and Americans -- has not been this complicated in a long time.
Yet while the special relationship is easy to define in its specifics -- the close connection between the two countries' intelligence and military infrastructures and the exchanges of political ideas, although that has been largely from Washington to London in recent years -- the wider connection between the two societies is more challenging and sometimes uncomfortable.
Britons -- as Matt Wolf, the London theater critic of Variety observes -- now shop enthusiastically in malls populated by Starbucks, The Gap and McDonald's, while younger British urban residents dream of living in lofts modelled on the Manhattan lifestyle. If they go to see a film this weekend, it will almost certainly be American, whether it's Tarantino's Kill Bill or Finding Nemo. British television is crowded with American shows.
There is a mutual fascination that drives Hollywood stars to flock to the West End stage and British musicians to America's urban landscapes and vast open places. It is the same fascination that fuels a steady flow of Rhodes scholars to our universities and a reverse flow of Britons to Yale, Stanford and Harvard.
For one group, in particular -- Americans resident in the UK -- it is not where the cultures meet but where they differ that stands out.
David Schwartz, a stock market historian who has lived in Britain for 20 years, believes it is a mistake to focus on high-street phenomena and Hollywood's ascendancy, arguing that they represent not a merging of cultures but simply the assertion of the brands of the world's most powerful economic power. He sees the differences in the way the two nations go about their business.
Bob Worcester, founder of the polling company Mori and an American resident in Britain for 34 years, has been one of the most forensic analysts of relations between the two countries, collating not only his own polls but also those of other organizations, on how the two peoples view each other. And what surprises him is how "brittle" that relationship is at present.
For while Britons by and large are enthusiastic admirers of most things American, from its technology, films, music and get-up-and-go, and while a quarter of Britons would like to live and work in the US, Worcester has been surprised by how fragile British approval of America on the whole has been during the period of the Iraq war, which saw a trebling of those who are "somewhat or very unfavorable" to the US as sampled by a series of polls.
For all that increase of those unfavorable, the polls show a confusing picture, with an approval of America in summer last year of 75 percent that dropped to just 48 percent immediately before the Iraq war and picked up again by May this year to 70 percent. But it is the rise in the "don't approves" since last year that surprises Worcester, with many coming to the anti-camp from the "don't knows."
"I was shocked," he said. "I had thought that the strength of good fellowship was stronger than it is. It seems to be a battle between an established good feeling towards America and a reservation about the US as a country at the moment and about its direction over Iraq."
But the evidence Worcester has collected also reflects the fundamental contradiction in UK attitudes to the US, not least a sharp increase in the past 10 years in those who believe the relationship with the US is more important than with Europe, from around 16 percent to 34 percent.
It is a contradiction summed up in a single line: 80 percent of Britons, says Worcester, like Americans but also have reservations about America as a country. Like all those we interviewed, he singles out crucial differences that underscore the tensions between ordinary Americans and Britons, not least in their political cultures, for all the efforts by successive leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to join them up.
Most critical is how Americans and Europeans, including Britons, face up as communities to problems. A trait first noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America of 1835, Worcester believes it still has a currency.
"De Tocqueville put his finger on it. If there is a problem, Americans will get together and say what should we do about it.
"Europeans will say someone should do something about it."
Worcester believes it is a function of the two countries' contrasting histories. America was a place where people fled to for adventure and a new future, while Britain exported its adventurers.
"It did leave something rather chinless behind for a long time, though I should say I mean that in the most loving way."
Fonseca was struck by the difference between how Americans do business, even within her own relationship.
"Martin [Amis] has said himself that when his father was ill it was his wife who wanted a second opinion, when he did not even want a first one. In America you would throw your life's savings at a problem like that. I think, too, that Americans are more prepared to thrash things out. They are less embarrassed about emotion. It is just not a British thing."
But if there is a greater tension between American and British values -- outside the political elites -- it resides, believe most of those we interviewed, in a suspicion that the way Americans and Britons "believe" in issues is fundamentally different.
"Americans do not have time for skepticism," says Wolf, "they want to be believers. The British could do with a little more fervor, but Americans do not brook dissent." While some suggest that America's continued habit of widespread religious observance is crucial to this difference, others are sceptical. For his part, Schwartz thinks experience of history plays a crucial part in separating Europeans -- for that, read Britons too -- from the American mindset.
"The difference is that America has never really been attacked and conquered. You only have to look around the European towns to see the statues in every square marking massacres and slaughter to understand why it is that there is reticence about going to war, a willingness to turn the other cheek and to accept pragmatic solutions.
"America has the heritage of the victorious battlefield and, whether the image is correct or not, it is connected to a power that is omnipresent, all powerful and morally right."
It is in this area of belief and moral certainty that Fonseca believes British Prime Minister Tony Blair connects most powerfully with the rituals of US political life, in which religious observance is a necessity.
"He talks all the time about how he believes deeply in this and how he believes deeply in that. It is a way American politicians talk, a kind of political piety that is in the American tradition."
And as George W. Bush prepares to visit, Fonseca, too, has noted a recent rise in anti-Americanism in Britain: "For a lot of Americans, it is a shock. They don't get it. They are quite innocent and can't credit that people don't like them."
It is a contradiction that has been noted by Jamie Rubin, a former spokesman for former US president Bill Clinton, who moved to London in 2000. Rubin remembers how struck he was at the huge outpouring of sympathy towards America after Sept. 11 while he was in Britain.
The change that has happened following the war against Iraq, he believes, has not been towards a general hatred of Americans but towards a frustration at a nation that Britons feel closer to than any other.
"I would not have wanted to be in any other city outside of the US when Sept. 11 happened. Because I had been on television a lot, I guess, and people recognized me, they would come up in the street and tell me how sorry they were. British people wanted to show solidarity," Rubin said.
"That has changed. That warmth and trust has been replaced by a feeling that a country they love so much is pursuing policies they do not agree with. It is a frustration," Rubin said.
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