‘I want to know Jubilee, Piccadilly, Northern, I want to know Edgware … Your system here is exquisite.” That is Sarah Jessica Parker raving about the tube. “Goodge” she added, in wonderment, rolling the word around in her mouth like a mint humbug. She is in London, appearing in Plaza Suite at the Savoy theatre, having the time of her life and appreciating breakfast foods. “There’s these eggs here … that I go mad for, they’re called Burford, they have those orange yolks … oh my God … I love your rashers here,” she told the chef Ruth Rogers on Rogers’ podcast. Her Instagram features black cabs, graffiti and her learning which bus “gets me where I need to go. On time.”
Meanwhile, Zendaya has been “spotted patiently queueing for a Gail’s coffee and pastry” and doing a big shop in New Malden Waitrose; Vogue has declared her “one sausage roll away” from honorary Briton status.
They join an august canon of Americans seduced by meal deals, tea and scones and non-mixer taps. Remember Taylor Swift’s London Boy era, when everyone was baffled by her nightmarish Shoreditch–Brixton-Highgate itinerary and her claim to “enjoy” afternoons in Camden market? Madonna’s tweed, flat cap and mockney phase is, of course, the stuff of celeb infamy.
And it’s not just women. There is Stanley Tucci, raving about Quo Vadis and Lina Stores. Timothée Chalamet loves a “sexy” Hull accent and Tom Cruise is always (OK, very occasionally) in North Yorkshire because he can’t get enough of fat rascals, or something.
What do they see that we don’t in this island where ecologically dead rivers run with sewage, three in 10 children live in poverty and 1 million experience destitution? A Ukrainian woman returned to her “very dangerous” war-torn home town to access adequate dental treatment. It’s not like our problems are well-hidden. Surely Parker read the New Yorker’s depressingly comprehensive recent piece about 2024 Britain: the “worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic wars”; stalled life expectancy; the return of rickets. How can you be “deeply in love” with that?
It’s easy to be charmed by difference, I suppose. When my American friend visited, she got the full baptism of British fire: LNER trains, weather, heart-in-mouth driving on rough, single-lane roads, a bizarre encounter with some Richard III, erm, eccentrics and unwelcoming pubs peopled with ominously silent men. She loved it (except our road…
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