Similar gaffes have occurred in the past. In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus landed in what he thought was India, but it was America. This case of mistaken identity caused the Italian navigator to call the local inhabitants ‘Indios’, Indians, an appellation that would be used for centuries to refer to indigenous Americans.
What I was wondering on the long ride from the airport to the city was where the dickens I’d landed. Because London seemed transformed by some wave of a Hogwarts wand into an ersatz America.
The sedate rows of semi-detached homes, like queues waiting in patient orderliness at bus stops for red double-deckers, had given way to a Manhattan manque, a grotesquerie of steel-and-glass and concrete.
If the western purlieu of Hammersmith had been rendered unrecognisable, the neighbourhood of Shepherd‘s Bush, once res very much des, has morphed into a mangled masquerade of a mid-town Chicago on the Thames. It was like a city gent toffed up in a black coat, with pinstripe trousers tucked into spur-jangling cowboy boots, his bowler hat replaced by a 10-gallon Stetson.
I went to my favourite pub in Camden Town, which I remembered as a bastion of Britishness, like the Changing of the Guard. A blonde hostess greeted me, ‘Hiya, watch can I getcha?’, Cockney suppressed by Kansas twang. Slow-cooked barbecue spare ribs. Corn bread. Ranch dressing? What happened to fish and chips, and don’t spare the vinegar? Where did steak & kidney pud go?I asked for a pint of bitter, cask-drawn English ale, deep nut-brown in colour and taste. What was on offer was Boston-style tap-drawn IPA, bright and fizzy-like soda pop disguised as a suitable libation for consulting adults in public.The transmigratory story of IPA, India Pale Ale, parallels the tale of how not-so-great Britain became the virtual 51st state of the American Republic, how the Union Jack was amicably hijacked by the Stars and Stripes, and the erstwhile Mother Country turned into the down-at-heel provincial cousin, duly grateful for crumbs of charity from its former offspring.
IPA was invented during the British Raj as a yeasty potation that could survive the long sea voyage to India and quench the nostalgic thirst of the expats there. In 1941, when it seemed inevitable that Hitler’s seemingly unstoppable juggernaut will crush a beleaguered Britain, Churchill made his impassioned plea to President Roosevelt: ‘Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job’, setting into motion the lend-lease arrangement by which the US supplied armaments and other materiel to the island nation so that an isolationist Uncle Sam could fight the good fight against fascism, by proxy.
Thanks to British luck, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, dragging a reluctant America into the war and bringing US servicemen to Britain (Overpaid, oversexed, and over here, as the envious locals begrudged their presence) and to British colonies, including India.
The returning troops took back with them a taste for IPA, which found harbour in the US, from where it got re-exported to Britain as a product as authentically American as Mom’s apple pie.
Over 50 years later, in a vainglorious attempt to reprise the Churchill-Roosevelt partnership, Tony Blair playing Sancho to George W Bush’s Quixote, joined battle against Saddam Hussein’s illusory weapons of mass destruction -or weapons of mass distraction, as critics lampooned them – in a double act evocative more of comedic duos like Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy than of the trans-Atlantic twosome who put paid to Hitler.
Today, when a Britain overwhelmed by an immigrant influx of Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, pre-Brexit Bulgarians, Poles and assorted East Europeans, is facing an invasion of ‘boat people’ from across the Channel who are fleeing their homes in Africa and Asia, to escape poverty and persecution, Westminster might well look to Washington for moral if not martial support, an affirmation of unity buttressed by the Harry-Meghan merger.
With its once-vaunted insularity swamped by the tides of multiculturalism, Britain could seek solace in America’s salad bowl of inclusive usness – or should that be US-ness?