the whole canada will become the next american state thing has always been a load of crap. there's no way the americans would willingly take on what would amount to 11 (our 10 provinces & the NWT) democratic states. it would permanently shift the balance of power and the right wing element which runs the usa would never allow that to happen.

I agree with you about the Americanisation of England (even Liverpool and Manchester have succumbed to some extent) but from where I am in rural Wales things are pretty different. Many people here don't even speak English in their everyday lives; their English isn't much better than the average Englishman's French. It's a good way to get immunity from Americanisation, you have to admit..

i agree that the airport might feel american and maybe London for all it's chain coffee bars and the like. But below the surface you will find that people, views, outlook, lifestyle are completly different. Take a trip to Manchester or Liverpool and you'll experience a different Britain. I now live in London (originally from Liverpool), sometimes you need to get away to appreciate life beyond the M25 Motorway...

Snow in hawaii =P

http://www.hawaiisnowskiclub.com/Mk/

disconnect, I was being slightly snarky about daen's dual currency symbols in "A virtual $£50".

The UK might look like the US if you take Heathrow, or even some bits of central London as your gauge. But Brixton isn't the Bronx and Dakota isn't Dorset. In fact, you'll struggle to find people in Wales and Scotland sometimes who will admit that their country is like England, let alone the US.

No, it's near the end of "Time" (Dark Side of the Moon).

What's a dollar-pound? (Is it like a henweigh?)

daen, I know it's Pink Floyd, is it from "Comfortably Numb"?

So how do I get my 50 virtual dollar-pounds?

There's about half a dozen Prets in New York now. I have to say, I like seeing the reverse-invasion.

I've spent 1/2 my life in the UK and 1/2 in the US (though I am an American.) The last three comments pretty much say what I was going to. Please don't judge the old Blighty bu Heathrow, of all locales. True the UK is the most American foreign country and more that way everyday. But tradition dies hard there. There is still a wealth of unique UK culture to be found, and a lot of Euro influence along with the US.

Smithylad, I remember Pret a Manger being around back in the early 90s serving good coffee, better sarnies and the best desserts (mud pie ... chocolate cake ... yum).

You can't judge a country by it's airport, (and a crap airport at that): that's the worst sort of tourism.
Like all countries, the British look at what is going on in other places we visit (and it is remarkably cheap to travel by plane from the UK throughout Europe and the rest of the world, now) and we adopt new things where they would fill a gap in our way of doing things, or where we find them amusing.
To use the example of Starbucks: Starbucks is an American take on the Italian coffee shop, and in the UK high street, they sit alongside Costa Coffee, Pret a Manger, Coffee Republic and a host of other Italian-style coffee shops, (most of which are home-grown). Up until 5 years ago, it was a stupidly hard task to get a decent cup of coffee in a British street. It was coffee we wanted, and coffee we got.
The British are not fools who will follow the US anywhere. As Blair said recently, "Just because America wants to do something, it doesn't automatically mean it is wrong."

Remember that Heathrow is not part of Britain, it is a part of that far-flung nation, the United States of Airport. If it was at all representative of Britain, it would be easier to find somewhere to sit down and get a cup of tea. Still, it works both ways, in US airports I often seem to find myself buying a paper or magazine at WH Smith, a very familiar British company.

"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way".

A virtual $£50 to the first to identify that quote without the aid of Google or its ilk.

why should the brits conform to what they think they should be? sorry you are didapointed but isn't it up to them how they want to live?

I'm an Englishman that's lived in America for 6 years now, and my perspective on this keeps changing.

I grew up (as most Brits do) deeply opposed to the US and everything it stood for, mostly for aesthetic reasons (which includes the pre-packaging of ideas and people, the economic imperialism, the impatience with learning, the disregard for ideas for their own sake etc etc). It was a struggle to bring myself to come and live in what I felt was the place that was sucking the life out of the rest of the world.

After I moved to the US, the view back at Britain didn't improve either... I slowly started to believe that what was wrong with America was in there from the colonial start: that the roots were basically British and that the difference between the US and Britain is just that the US has money at the moment. McDonalds is just one manifestation of a general movement, not only towards homogeneity but also towards extracting the most money from everything in life, thereby reducing the value of things (of life) to the lowest possible level - a movement that is as British as it is American.

I can't say exactly what the problem is, or why it's the US and Britain that promulgate it; all I can say is, whenever I travel outside this axis, all the places I visit seem much more alive, more vital, more original and more valuable than what I left behind. Is this simple xenophilia? A sense of the grass being greener, a love of the exotic? I don't think so - I think the British are internationally recognised as leading lives of dull and quiet desperation and the Americans are well-known for being obsessed with status through consumption and profoundly incurious about the lives of others. If this is the "culture" that is spreading across the world it is not merely the loss of diversity we have to fear - it's the commoditisation of everything that once had real value, it's the draining of life, hope and imagination out of our human experience.

There have been attempts to pin all this on faceless corporations and say that it's not our collective fault - to identify an enemy we can hate and to insist that if we had our way we'd make a very different (and more interesting) world. I don't think it's that simple - we all vote with our wallets; the one thing you can say with certainty about a corporation is that if there's no demand for what it provides it doesn't grow. if corporations are powerful, it is we who have given them that power. If they take ove our national characters, they are also expressions of them.

...except, of course, for all you good people who are bursting with life, hope and imagination even if you don't agree with me at all :)

Regarding the 51st state, it wouldn't surprise me - I think it would be to Britain's economic advantage (and that's what matters, right?), but I think the US is smart enough not to formally declare an empire - it prefers to use other countries as resources rather than expanding to envelop them (that way you don't have to pay for their welfare or support them when they go through recessions). Back in the 16th century little England faced a choice between an alliance with powerful France against Spain or with powerful Spain against France. In either case it would be a very junior partner in the deal. Instead it carefully played the two off against each other, retained its independence and eventually emerged as the dominant world power. Now Britain is faced with a choice between the US and Europe, and somehow since WW2 has accepted a role as the junior partner to the US, while obeying all the European edicts. I would love to see some of that 16th century spirit come back...