My friend Joe has become a life coach. “It’s about setting goals and achieving them,” he says as we sit in a cheap Mexican dive in Manhattan. “You make a list of things you want to do, and we meet once or twice a week — or over the phone —to see if you’re any closer to fulfilling them.”

A life coach is considered – usually by the coach himself — to be an expert in “self-actualization”, a creature designed to aid you in attaining contentment, personal fulfilment and lots of money. All of this, I’m thinking, leads to that elusive place called happiness. I can tell it’s working for Joe, because he’s happy telling me about it. Now he’s telling me about “assessing negative behaviours”, the kind that create “obstacles for success”.

I know Joe means well, but I want to throw him into the river. He can clearly tell I’m a miserable little man, a perfect inaugural client for his fledgling business.

I guess I’m miserable because of work, where I can see the end of my noisy career looming. My contract for my overpaid position in magazine publishing is coming up in a month and my interest in continuing there has already evaporated. I have a dream job, I suppose — working on a magazine whose primary focus is Carmen Electra’s breasts and beer. If you lose interest in that, you know something is wrong.

My life in New York has run its natural course. I have done all the drugs, drunk all the booze, slept with all the women, yelled at all the cabbies and kicked all the rats along 43rd Street. I have used all of Manhattan up. And vice versa.

Later I head to the gym where I perform 45 minutes on a lumbering stair-climber. So, one life coach and a gym session later, life still sucks. Thing is, on the stair climber I think I realise where my unhappiness is coming from. Constantly moving forward, seemingly on the way up and never stopping, I am heading absolutely nowhere.

But forget the stair climber, it’s happiness, I think, that’s making me unhappy. Or rather, the thought of happiness, the pursuit of happiness, and those who claim to possess the tools to find happiness — all this happiness baloney is making me unhappy. Happiness is a myth but, worse than that, it’s one I keep believing to be true. I am a 39-year-old man still believing in Sant Claus.

Leaning on the windowsill of my stifling apartment, 34 floors up, I stare down at the belching orifice that is the Lincoln Tunnel. From my window, every day, I watch the cars stacking up to get in. Even as high up as I am, I can taste the exhaust. I need to get the hell out of here.

I get a call from a friend in London, informing me that a job has opened up at a struggling men’s magazine: “You up for it?” he asks.

In the US, most of the stuff I’ve heard about England is pretty bad, usually told to me by people who happen to be English and are now living among New Yorkers. I know it can’t be all that bad. Ugly women? Bad food? Violent drunks? You just described a wedding reception in New Jersey. I’ve seen it.

I get a call from a British man named Bruce, and the deal is done. I’m off to London.

KERIN is the managing director of the company I am about to work for, and he’s the most British person I’ve ever met. He doesn’t talk so much as smother words with a pillow. On my first day in London he asks the fateful question: “Do you know what black pudding is?”

I say no, and Kerin smiles. “I know just the place.”

We walk from his flat in Paddington into Hyde Park, along by the Serpentine and past all the Arabs in their burkhas, sunning themselves on deckchairs, having picnics, surrounded by Harrods shopping bags. This might be the strangest thing I’ve seen in London so far, but I suppose they’re not allowed thongs.

We head through Green Park, swing into St James’s Park and down to a pub next to Horse Guards Parade. I am weak with hunger, and could eat anything – which I guess has been Kerin’s strategy all along.

I order the full breakfast, as Kerin suggests, because it has black pudding. “Black pudding is sausage, but it’s really just cooked pigs’ blood,” he says. “It might have oatmeal in it.”

The meal arrives promptly, these two dark discs nestled next to a mountain of beans, toast, mushrooms and ham. I stick a fork in the black puck and chew. Kerin seems to be studying my face, waiting for me to spit it out so he can have a laugh. At first, my taste buds are disoriented, then rewarded – the equivalent of your eyes seeing porn for the first time. I think I’ve fallen in love.

“This is awesome,” I say. And wolf it down. Kerin seems disappointed — he had hoped to disgust me. I eat mine, and his. It looks like crap, and probably should be illegal, but damn it’s good!

My new flat is in a beautiful neighbourhood. A local tells me it’s called Fitzrovia because it was known for gatherings of writers and scholarly types at the Fitzroy Tavern. Fitzrovia is also home to the Telecom Tower, which looks like a giant vibrator.

I’ve discovered that the embassy of Turkmenistan is just down the road, near a gay bondage store with blacked-out windows that I sometimes walk past when I’m not doing anything around midnight on a Sunday.

I live across from a delightful pub, and around the corner, another. If I do a zigzag at the corner of Wells Street and go up Riding House Street, I’ll hit Great Titchfield Street, which is a cobbled carpet of shops, many of which do not remain open longer than maybe three months. My favourite — a Japanese florist and cafe combination — had a going-out-of-business sale simultaneously with its grand opening.

I am beginning to like this neighbourhood. It reminds me of one place that, as a child, I loved so much. Disneyland. In fact, England — and London, primarily — feels closer to Disneyland than Disneyland does. True, both places feature idyllic village settings, their streets brimming with people. But for Yanks like me, England exists only as a facsimile of England; we see versions of it at country fairs, amusement parks or in movies starring Terry-Thomas. We know the country only by its charming imitations. So I suppose visiting London itself is akin to visiting an authentic recreation of London. But with real junkies and wheelie bins.

I am acclimating, using pounds instead of dollars and buying curries instead of burgers. I have become friends with the nice gentleman who runs Olive’s, the Indian restaurant on Cleveland Street. Every night I stop in to pick up my chicken tikka masala, and normally I am one of his only patrons. But perhaps that’s because the ratio of Indian restaurants in my area is one per person. I have no idea how these places stay open. My only guess is they’re all just part of one giant Indian restaurant, connected by underground tunnels, pipes drawing food from huge singular vats of curry located in the centre of the earth.

Today is my first day of my new job, and I am walking to my new office — a plain white building in Cleveland Street, just a few blocks south from my flat.

I head upstairs to the conference room to meet the staff and explain my role as their new boss. My goal, of course, is to energise them — to rally them behind me: a new editor from across the pond, here to turn the ship around.

I enter the room and find a dozen or so faces – sullen, unsmiling. It’s very quiet. My new boss, Bruce, awkwardly introduces me to the staff, and hands me the floor. I begin with a joke. I wait for the laugh, but there is none. I look around the room and begin explaining my strategy for the future, which is never fun. I deliver my spiel, and feel nothing in return but smirking ambivalence. I am not even sure they’re listening. I think I hear a giggle.

I go home that night, turn on the television and see this fellow, smirking as he conducts an interview. The interview subject is a politician, and he tries to make a joke. It’s not a bad one, but it comes out feebly. The broadcaster, Jeremy Paxman, remains expressionless, then dismissive. I’m beginning to sense a trend. I wonder if this is how it’s going to be all the time. The British cannot be impressed. Every man is this Paxman — sardonic, quietly mocking and thinking he’s smarter than you.

At that moment, I have a thought. The moment you try, the British sense that you’re trying. And trying is wrong. Not trying — that’s the way to go, I tell myself. I vow not to give a f***. It’s one way to fit in, right?

I meet Donna. That might not be her name, I can’t remember, but Donna works as an assistant or something and, frankly, I’m not listening when she tells me because she is so unbelievably hot – although not in the way I am used to. Unlike American girls, she doesn’t have straight teeth – in fact hers are graveyard crooked. She doesn’t have the typical Yankee bod, sculpted by Stairmaster with an ass harder than asphalt. Instead it is curved in every appropriate direction. Here is a body naturally built, untainted by the bland hand of physical fitness. Her nose is bent. In America crooked noses don’t make it past the age of 16, for every girl with one gets it fixed as a birthday gift from dad. Donna has everything wrong with her, by American standards, but to me she is drop-dead gorgeous.

We shake hands and she walks away. I stare at her for about an hour, and then it’s already twelve noon and “the lads” invite me to my first pub lunch.

In the US, editors who run big magazines are treated like celebrities. They get lots of expensive stuff for free, invitations to cool parties, easy access to top restaurants and exclusive bars, as well as junkets to faraway places where you can buy ten-year-old gymnasts named Liang for a dollar.

In the UK, it’s different. Editors are treated like everyone else with crap jobs. Actually, they’re treated worse. And we deserve it. Basically, all we do all day is sit at our desks surfing the internet, chatting on the phone and, when no one is looking, smelling our fingers. Then around noon, we go to the pub for lunch.

In America, employees rarely go to lunch together. Moreover, the boss wouldn’t think of eating with his underlings. And he certainly wouldn’t get drunk as a goat with them in the middle of the day like I am about to do now.

Eight of us grab a big table at the King and Queen, and begin with a pint. What’s challenging about the pub lunch isn’t the food, which I have learned may cause diarrhoea if you don’t eat around the “bad chip”. The real challenge is returning to work afterwards. If you’re like me, you return in a haze of numbed drunkenness, with a head buzzing like a bag of wasps.

How do people do this every day? I’m ready to collapse. I realise now that the pub lunch is never really over after lunch is eaten. It pushes its influence into the late afternoon, then towards the evening, when I find myself at the same pub I had my lunch in, gulping “lager tops” and then heaving said “lager tops” into the toilet. My superiors would fire me, if they weren’t next to me doing the same thing.

I can get used to this work ethic. I suppose there are similar competitive machinations at work here in London as there are in New York, but it is better camouflaged in the fog of inebriation. Meaning, we’re all too drunk to try anything devious. I think, thanks to the pub, that none of us here really knows what we’re doing. We really only fill in pockets of time around the pub lunch.

I’M in my job barely a week when my boss Bruce informs me that I have to attend an editorial conference taking place at a sunny resort in Portugal called the Algarve. There, I have to make a presentation to other editors, all of them foreign types. I hate presentations but I’ve never been to Portugal. I’m pretty sure it’s in Mexico.

At the hotel bar I sit drink pints of lager with Kerin, Bruce, Simon and Richard – my new “mates”. It surprises me how many people consider me their mate. Bartenders. Labourers. Security guards. Bouncers at clubs telling me I’m not allowed in because I’m not on the list. Friendly strangers who want to sell me the Big Issue. Groups of youths trying to steal my sunglasses. The realization hits: mates aren’t friends. Mate can mean anything to anyone, and I’ve learned never to trust a man who says it too much.

After a few pints, I see a good-looking couple walking across the hotel pavilion. Assuming they are husband and wife I ignore them. But as we walk past each other, the man speaks: “Grek Gutfelt!”

He is Sasha, a Russian editor, and the woman is Elena, his photo-editor. She has striking brown eyes and black hair resting comfortably on a model’s physique. She is so out of my league, my left brain tells the right. She smiles, and I smile back.

I make my way to the bar, where I find the Brits. They sense something has happened to me. It’s the first time I experience, intimately, Britain’s passion for the underdog. I know I want this girl, but my new friends want me to get her too. And they won’t let me forget it.

“There she is,” Kerin says, pointing over to her at the bar. She’s sitting across from a gentleman with the Italian publishing clique. I sit at the bar, yards away, staring at Elena as he buys her a drink. The Brits start buying me drinks. They offer support, advice and more alcohol – and they push me forward. They do this, of course, knowing I am clearly a hopeless case that will no doubt crash and burn.

For the next few days in Portugal I wander the grounds, desperately trying to get Elena to notice me. My attempts at conversation fall flat, every joke met with awkward silence. Her being Russian probably means she doesn’t get my attempts at wit, but at least she knows I’m trying. The Brits find this funny, but they’re still behind me.

And here’s another lesson about British men. My new “mates” come to my aid because they love a losing cause. If the losing cause wins, it’s gigantic. If the losing cause loses, it’s to be expected. You really can’t fail with that kind of attitude to life, can you?

There could be a darker side to this enthusiasm for the underdog: sadism. Brits may love losers, but only if they can point them in the direction of defeat. This is what makes Brits especially friendly. They’re extremely helpful when they know you aren’t going anywhere better. But, thanks in part to my newly found mates, I work up the nerve to ask Elena out on a date. She says yes, we exchange numbers, and I am a hero.

I have just bought my first scarf ever in the UK, at Selfridges for £38. It’s black, with thin grey stripes. In America, every person owns a car, possibly two. In the UK, every person owns a scarf, possibly 20. By wearing a scarf, I have become instantly 432% more stylish than before.

And more trustworthy. Scarves, for some reason, make you look like someone who “cares’. In America, when I was at parties, no one trusted me to hold their babies. If anything, they kept their children away from me. But now that I wear scarves, people are literally hurling their infants at me.

In America if you wear a scarf you are assumed to be a homosexual, especially if you happen to be wearing the scarf while having sex with another man. In England it doesn’t matter if a scarf makes you “look gay”, because most British men in the city “look gay” already.

I feel bad for gay men in London, because you really have to act gay to stand out. British men dress so stylishly, with their lowslung jeans, perfect trainers, tight T-shirts and pointy waxed hair, it’s sad to see gay men get lost in the mix. I believe this is why most gay Brits must overcompensate with campness, or their sexual identity loses cachet.

This assumption of gayness, represented by the scarf, is also why straight Brits get laid so much in the US. American women assume these little dandies are gay and invite them home to help them choose sofa patterns. Then those little dandies have horrible regretful sex with them. Bastards.

I should mention that things with Elena are good. After dating for five months, we get married. Elena wants me to take the bus and see the city. Without her to egg me on, I’d choose instead to simply sit at home and watch Big Brother, my new favourite show.

So now we’re getting off the bus in St John’s Wood. Standing on a corner, I look up and down the street – one that is peppered with quaint shops. Everything around here, it seems, is quaint. Except for a man’s voice, loud, throaty, yet inarticulate, coming at me from across the street. I see a well-dressed man standing and staring at us, nodding as he screams at me. He is holding two shopping bags. I don’t recognise him.

“Tosser!” he yells, so loud that shopkeepers come out to see the target of abuse. I walk toward him.

“You OK?” I ask.

“F*** off, tosser,” comes his reply.

“What’s the problem?” I try once more.

“You’re the f****** problem, mate! Tosser!”

His eyes are bloodshot and watery, and he seems on the verge of laughing, but at the same time he appears genuinely angry with me. I don’t get it.

Elena pulls my arm and says, “Let’s go, honey.”

A small crowd forms along the street and, being a guy, I feel I can’t leave now.

“What . . . do you want to fight?” I ask.

“Yes, tosser,” comes his quick response. I look at his hands. He is holding his grocery shopping. I can see tomatoes, a loaf of bread, and eggs.

“You can’t fight holding your groceries.”

“Yes I can, you tosser. Let’s go!” he says, nodding.

His eyes are gently closing. A man in front of his shop stops sweeping, now genuinely interested.

“Let’s go then,” I say. As I clench my fists, the man appears to have fallen asleep, standing, holding his groceries.

“I can’t hit a man holding shopping bags,” I tell him.

“That’s cos you’re a tosser,” he replies, eyes closed.

I look over at the people milling about and decide it’s better to smile and leave. As I turn and walk away, the man with the bags leaves me with, “That’s right! Go on, tosser!”

This is the first time I’ve been accosted by a drunken man in England, in the middle of the day. But it illustrates a key point: outdoor drunkenness may not be unique to the UK, but it’s definitely far more entertaining. The drunks are far more selfless – they happily perform for you without asking. They are like the Royal Shakespeare Company, but with slightly more projectile vomiting.

I can’t make my mind up if I love UK drunks or hate them. I can say they make for an adventurous evening. Your drunks are “unpredictable”. A smile can mean anything, from “Have a seat” to “I will kill you”. It’s why when I walk into a pub for the first time I feel a little like the Dustin Hoffman character in Straw Dogs.

This brings me to a theory. In New York, people are assholes when they’re sober, and become nice when they’re drunk. In England, it’s the opposite. People are nice when they’re sober – softspoken, kind, helpful — but turn into monsters when they’re drunk.

It’s why every day and night the streets of London play out like a zombie flick. In the daytime everything’s fine, and then right around 9pm or so, when the pubs overflow, the glazed-eyed monsters rise up and roam the city, still dressed in their estate agent suits, puking and pissing up and down the street. On my road, I always find one sitting in the gutter with his head between his knees, his hair still spiky from that morning’s bout with the styling gel. His mobile is still in his left hand, and he’s trying to make a call to some girl he just met, while getting sick on his shoes. He’s adorable.

So, I am surrounded by delightful young men who are mostly shy and dependable. Few raise their voices beyond a careful whisper. Pour three pints into them and that quiet reserve unravels. If I were a psychiatrist I would say that alcohol provides a conduit to allow repressed emotions to gush forth — and all the pent-up rage the Brits carry under a veneer of pleasantry breaks through. This explains my friend Jimi, who is in the pub as I write this, picking a fight with a sink.

But I am not a psychiatrist. I mean, I’m not even bald or addicted to porn. In fact, I am a drunk. And as a drunk, I know that drinking in England has less to do with being drunk and more to do with getting drunk. Getting drunk is the Brits” only method of real communication — a chance to talk about their bands, their bosses, their favourite teams, without polite restraint.

In America we drink to escape from our own intrusiveness. Conversely, the sober Brit gets drunk to approximate the intrusiveness of the sober Yank. This is the backbone of my other British drinking theory, that drunken obnoxiousness is inversely proportional to gentleness of character. The problems arise when, once you’ve got drunk, what do you do next?

WHEN you get up in the morning and you stare at your jeans on the floor, and then you look at your sweatpants on the chair, and you choose to put on your sweatpants, then you are officially a fat person. Wearing sweatpants is an avoidance of belt notches, and belt notches are the real barometer of how truly fat you have become. Full-length mirrors in the bedroom only make it worse; I can see my ass, which resembles the face of the Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko, after the poisoning. I cover it immediately to keep it from shocking Elena.

I used to be so fit. But that was a year and a half ago, and the accumulation of beer, bread and chips has turned me into little more than connective tissue stretched over a pub bin. I have become British, at least in personal habits.

I’m off to the gym, then. I need to “lose a stone”, or that’s what the doctor has told me. I just joined Fitness Exchange, hidden off the main drag of Tottenham Court Road. In the locker room there’s a man posing naked, inspecting every shred of cleaved muscle, every bulging tendon popping out between his hopeless, circa-1994 barbed-wire tattoos. It’s so unnerving that I put away my camera phone. I realise then that I used to be this guy in the mirror. Consumed by my own image, I used to inspect every rope of muscle, convinced that unless I devoted hours a day to honing the mass, it all would decline into mush. What a horrible, horrible way to live.

How I look is now far less important than what I’m looking at. I attribute this mainly to England, because there’s so much to look at: the architecture, the girls and, of course, the clouds.

I’ve stopped weighing myself. I used to do it constantly. I was always in constant competition, not with anyone but myself – or rather who I was a few weeks ago when I was fitter. I probably looked great on the outside but I felt like crap on the inside. Life is all about enjoying what’s available to you, and you can’t enjoy this planet if you’re consumed by consumption.

So now I’m fatter, slower and sweatier, surrounded by Brits who look pretty much the same way. I think, in England, men come to the gym not to build great bodies, but to allow themselves the right to get drunk afterwards.

Maybe in America, it’s the pursuit of happiness that infects everything with competition. You can’t go to the gym unless you match the efforts of everyone else. It’s a good thing — it’s why we have such great-looking aerobic instructors, cheerleaders and serial killers. But Christ, it’s boring.

I prefer to avoid that and live large. To me, that’s a far healthier mentality than my old life in NYC, where the pursuit of fitness only made the pursuit longer and more arduous. The harder I worked out, the harder I had to work out. In London, I think I’v found out where I want to be, and it’s the pub and not the gym. The only thing I’ll be lifting there is a pint. I better put one in each hand to get a balanced workout.

It’s actually impossible, I have found, to consider spending an hour or two on a stair climber after watching a large group of young people smiling and laughing in the street, standing in circles, staring at their shoes and holding their pints. The Brits don’t take fitness seriously, but they do care about having fun. I can’t think of a better thing to do right now in my life than standing outside the King and Queen, holding an ice-cold pint, talking about nothing in particular.

Back in a previous life as editor of Men’s Health, a fitness nut told me that for every minute you spend in the gym, you add a minute to your life. It always sounded like a pretty good deal, especially if your life at that point was a crashing bore. But living in London, I realise how bankrupt that idea is. The fact is, in London, life is good right now. And that minute you spend exercising is a minute you are taking from NOW and tacking it on to the part of life later one might call hell — those last few years when you’re peeing into a clear plastic bag and mistaking your children for spiders.

The fact is, it’s far better to be careful with your minutes while you’re young and careless, when you’re still able to pull drunken secretaries at the pub and sneak dope on to an aeroplane. The trade-off from “now” to “later” is wholly unnecessary and wrong; you won’t want that extra time when it’s spent straddling a steel bed pan, straining after every nugget of undigested bran. No. As the world moves on without you, you’ll be praying for a quick death, one denied to you by your former self — the guy pumping relentlessly up and down on a stair climber.

I have sacrificed the gym for the pub, and my biceps have withered while my liver has expanded. And the rest of my body is turning to mush. The suit I purchased at Gieves and Hawkes can no longer be buttoned up without excruciating pain. In it, I look like a tightly wrapped sausage. My body is appearing to go puffy and soft; the Yankee sinew sinking below the flab. I am turning British, acquiring the muscle tone of the leads in a Merchant Ivory film. The female leads.

HERE are some things I know by now:

Men love to play up their sexual achievements in the US.

Men usually play down their achievements in the UK.

I admire the low expectations of British women.

In America, I see bumper stickers on the backs of cars belonging to proud parents, proclaiming how smart their child is. Crap like, “Grade A Student” or “Member of the Honor Roll”. I never see these in the UK. But I wonder what they’d be like if they existed.

Given the British nature for downplay, I think they would read: “I Have the Fattest Child in Town” and “My Daughter’s a Slag’.

It’s Monday, and I’m at my desk. Slowly each staffer wanders in from the tiny elevator, past the copy machine and the reception desk, to take their place in front of their messy workstations. In front of their computers are empty bottles of beer, still there from the final hours of Friday. They remind everyone how short and unremarkable the weekend really is.

The heads of the employees quietly bob as they make their way to the desks. They drop their backpacks or manbags, disengage their iPods and then bring their screens to life. Words are not spoken. I look at Martin, the tall skinny one. Then here comes Nick, the shy one. Then Jimi, the young one. And Dave, the sickly one. They appear to be spent vessels, shaky from two nights of bad pills and dodgy coke, broke from two nights of crawling from pub to club desperately trying to get numbers from girls wearing thick belts and not much else.

But someone says, “So, how was your weekend?” and the fun begins. It starts with, “We went to the pub’, then moves to, “I made a phone call’, followed by, “We headed back to my place’, and ends with, “She threw up in the bin’.

David is telling a horrible tale. “And I woke up and she’s on top of me . . . and she’s big. I felt like I was raped by an oompa loompa.”

All these stories of sex end in some sort of catastrophe. And as revolting as the details may be, they serve to illustrate the true charm of the British male. Here is a creature that stumbles through his sex life, wreaking havoc on women and furniture alike, yet is still able to pull a new girl every weekend. I assume there’s a connection here: the ability to reveal their own imperfections makes them instantly more appealing to women than the man on a mission to impress. It’s a secret British strategy: the more you play down your luck, the more likely you’ll get lucky. This is why, whenever British males come to America, they get laid like crazy. Women find them fallible, and more easily approachable.

ON the morning of 7 July 2005 I have a meeting with my boss and a few other serious men in suits at the Cleveland Street building. As we are looking at numbers on a wall (our declining sales), we get word from an arriving co-worker that the tube has been hit by madmen with bombs. I feel a cold sweat coming over me, and then the inevitable memory of 9/11. That morning in 2001 I was hung over and passed out in my Hell’s Kitchen apartment when I heard the sirens. I had no idea what was going on, because I was too wasted to investigate.

Now, in my office in London, work resumes. We continue with our charts and spreadsheets. I think it strange that people can do this: act as though nothing has happened. Of course, no one is pretending that nothing’s happened – they’re just “getting on with it”, a phrase I hear over and over again in England.

“Getting on with it” is the refusal to let horrible things stop you from doing what you’re supposed to do. It’s something the Brits are very good at, along with drinking. Which begins, in earnest, after the meeting ends.

After accounting for everyone on the team, we return to our desks while the rest of the staff gather around a television in the newsroom to hear the worst from an awful day. It seems only appropriate that I send people home, but no one leaves – mainly because all the train lines are down and we have lots of beer in the fridge.

So now I am back at my desk, drinking lager from India. We got a case sent to us from some PR company, and we’re all drinking it. Here’s the strange thing: With the exception of the bombs and the carnage, everything is fine here. Bombs go off around the corner and the Brits do what they do best: they go to the pub and get drunk and make the best of it. Even better, the cricket is still going on. My managing editor, Eoin – who has “Millwall” tattooed on the inside of his lower lip – says, “We fought Hitler! It’ll take a bit more than some shits with carrier-bag bombs on a tube to put us off. It was a bit of a piss-poor effort. Shall we have another pint then?”

You Brits are obviously used to this terrorist crap, what with the IRA, and I suppose you pride yourselves on carrying on as if nothing has happened. It’s actually very cool. Everyone here is scared, but no one shows any fear. That’s a British thing. You are tough little bastards. There’s no question that everyone feels bad about what’s happened, but no one is letting that interfere with their resolve, or their drinking. They figure the enemy should be the ones who are scared, not them, which is always the way to think, I reckon. I love these people. They aren’t like the Spanish.

After draining the fridge of beer, we head out to the King and Queen, which is packed to the gills. Mel, the excitable landlord, is frantically busy.

“I hate to say it,” he says, cradling a mass of just-emptied pint glasses, “but this is great for business.”

All around the area, the pubs are packed and everyone is getting shit-faced. We left the office around noon, and now it’s about 10 pm and there’s still no tube service. Most of my staff have left to get drunker or to get laid.

I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said that youth is wasted on the young. Well, so is hair. I am now closing in on 41 already losing some of my precious locks. I’m just another step closer to becoming a fat, balding Brit.

When a British man hits a certain age, let’s say 28, it starts to happen . . . he loses his hair and his face gets fat. I have noticed this in my office. Every man at work under 28 has pointy hair, plastered by gels and creams. Every man over 28 has a bald or freshly shaved head and puffy cheeks.

No one is attempting to preserve what they’ve got. Once the hair starts going, the men shave it off. I admire this practice. In America, most men refuse to go bald. They wear baseball caps or hairpieces, get hairplugs, or smear regenerative goop into their scalps. Once a hairline recedes in England, though, the British seem to embrace it. It’s this kind of thinking that helps explain why most Brits aren’t that stressed.

It’s the same deal with being fat. You should see my belly now. I’m looking at it as I type. It’s not hard to because the laptop is teetering on it. I look pregnant. Pregnant with ale.

The average British male has a belly but that belly is different from the American one. When the American male gets fat, the weight expands sideways and also settles on the rear, resembling a pear on two legs. In the UK, the belly is slim at its sides. In fact, if you’re standing behind a British male, you wouldn’t know he has a belly because he has no flabby love handles. It’s only when he turns and you see his profile that you see his pot.

I attribute this to the fact that Yankee fat comes from the immense volume of food we shove down our swollen faces. We are served larger portions of great-tasting food, and we force ourselves to eat everything until we puke, like geese bred for foie gras. British fat is purely alcohol-derived. You drink everything in sight until, of course, you can’t see. Coupled with the fact that most British food defies eating in mass quantity, and that creates an entirely different kind of belly. It’s not pretty, but no one seems to care.

I don’t. Back in the States, I fretted about my weight. I exercised every morning for two hours. I also ran after work, skipped meals and did crunches until my abs cried. I was obsessed with my body, intent on winning a war that was pointless to fight. Now I realise I was an idiot.

Brits also seem pretty content with having imperfect teeth. Americans spend a crap load on straightening their teeth. I had braces for three years and my sister wore an elaborate piece of metal headgear that wrapped around her jawline — not unusual for girls, for they all seemed imprisoned in scaffolding.

Talk to any American, and they’ll tell you how their most common nightmare is losing their teeth. It’s inexplicable, much like a British man’s need to wear black socks with shorts. In the UK, I suppose, there is an implicit understanding that straight teeth do not make you happy. So why straighten them? They add character! They can open beer bottles!

Maybe the state of your teeth reflects the British mind. Brits don’t pay too much attention to their weathered enamel, and a slight to moderate state of disrepair is perfectly acceptable. I think Brits hold the same attitude about their houses, jobs, spouses, pop stars and government. You don’t need perfect teeth and you certainly don’t need perfect pop stars. That would be boring. Flaws are what make this country great. Flaws are the secret to enjoying good parts of an agreeable life.

NO matter what happens in British life, you can count on one thing: someone offering you a cup of tea. It’s the pause button that simply doesn’t exist in America. And it makes everything better.

For example, my boss just offered me tea. And now he’s telling me the company won’t renew my contract. I came in this morning for my job review and I knew it wasn’t going to be good. The numbers are bad, and when the numbers are bad, somebody has to take the fall. Still, the boss was nice enough to offer me tea first.

I suppose if I were back in Manhattan, I would be feeling pretty awful. The last time I got fired was in New York, and I didn’t take it well. But back then I never drank tea. Here I drink it constantly. I don’t know this for a fact, but I am assuming that’s why, now I’m being fired, it really doesn’t matter.

“I’m afraid we won’t be renewing your contract,” Bruce tells me, as I sip. Fine, I think. I am staring out of the window, it’s raining, and the tea is fantastic.

Buzzed and excited, I am living in London and now unemployed. Just like many other people living in London, I suppose. At least I still have my teeth.

When you’re fired, they put you on “gardening leave” for the remaining part of your contract. It’s a perfectly British face-saving thing, not for the person fired but the person doing the firing. Instead of saying you’re fired, the boss can say, “Can you please leave, and we’ll give you some money and please don’t return with a hatchet and cut me to pieces.” And that’s how it turned out. I don’t own a hatchet.

I have no garden so, as an unemployed and pretty much unemployable man, I’ve done what one can only do: sleep in and then head to the pub. No matter how industrious I try to be, I usually end up in the pub by four. I’ve come to realise that if there’s any city to be unemployed in, it’s London.

Once a boss, and now not a boss — I guess this is what it feels like to be English. No longer in power, you can pretty much do what you want. There is no pressure to perform, and you’re out of the spotlight.

After a few interviews in the States, however, I’m offered a new job in television, hosting my own show. There’s just one hitch: the show is in New York City. I won’t be enjoying my serene decline much longer. I have to get back in the game.

I somehow can’t bring myself to the thought of leaving England. It’s scary. I may be goin broke and expanding to the size of a small town, but on the whole that’s not so bad. If New York is the “city that never sleeps’, then London is the “city that prefers to lie around all day’. And that’s me all over. I would rather embrace the warm fuzzy pillow that is a former empire, than the cold remote reality of Manhattan.

New York, New York. Fourth of July, 2007. I’ve been back in Manhattan for five months. From my office space, I am watching the news of the attempted car bombings in London, and wishing I was there.

My British mate Dave, who’s in a London pub, smashed, says I have “terror jealousy’. But I know why I’m sad, and it’s not terror jealousy. You know you love a place that, when it’s in the midst of chaos and threatened with annihilation, you really wish you were there. And I do.

I just miss that damn place, and wish that one day I’ll be able to return. If it’ll have me, of course.

© Greg Gutfeld

Extracted from Lessons from the Land of Pork Scratchings by Greg Gutfeld to be published by Simon & Schuster on January 21 at £9.99. Copies can be ordered for £9.49 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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