As you look back on life, there are key points that you didn't recognize at the time because, of course, you can't know their significance on what is to come. This episode and the year of 1995 is, for me, such a moment of great personal change. You'll hear this in the stories and an accompanying soundtrack from both sides of the Atlantic.
I started the year in Dudley in the British West Midlands but took a temporary work assignment in Chicago, in the American Mid West. My work permit only allowed a 3-month stay so I had to return for the summer back in the UK.
My company opened an office in New Jersey (in the American North East) so it was back state-side in the fall. But, having to go where the work was, I was hustled off to my next assignment on the west coast, just north of Los Angeles. I was flying back to New Jersey every other week, getting myself an appartment and a life sorted out. To give you an idea of scale, that internal American flight from west coast to east coast is further than from America to England! I still returned to the UK for Christmas and to hang out with friends and family.
I was 29 so still young enough to see all of the travel as exciting and an adventure. I was getting to see the real America, not just suggestions from a tourist guide-book. But, in hindsight, I developed an identity crisis. I was absorbing American culture, trying to grasp stories about celebrities I'd never heard of, often regarding sports I didn't understand, while getting to know people well enough to comprehend the impact of events such as the Oklahoma City bombing and the trial of OJ Simpson. I would watch a movie at the theater in America, travel back to the UK to find it hadn't been released and no-one had seen it yet. My visits back to the UK either coincided with key events or cultural change, or missed them completely so I witnessed them as an outsider. I was living between two places, with neither feeling like home.
