Observations on the people of England, probably full of over-generalisations and not to be taken too seriously, no offence meant, honest, guv.

1. They love roundabouts. Or at least their traffic planners do, and nobody seems to have complained. In one 20-minute stretch between the M25 and Berkhampsted, we must have hit ten roundabouts, some of which had just one entry and one exit, with all the traffic going the same way. A simple bend in the road would have sufficed, but apparently they forgot about that possibility.

2. Skinny jeans, and leggings, and - heaven help us - jeggings, are in. Everyone is wearing them, and most of them are people who shouldn't. Maybe I'm just old and curmudgeonly and stuck in my bootlegged rut, but they look bad on about 85% of wearers, unless they're under 25 in which case they've about a 40% chance of looking okay. The only people who can almost always carry them off cutely are the under-11 set, and then you're teetering on the edge of children dressed as sexualised fashion plates, which looks wrong in a whole other way. Little girls seemed to be much more trendily dressed there in general.

3. Everyone is much more environmentally conscious than in the US. (By everyone, I mean the small sample of people we stayed with, so this might be biased by age, or class, or something; and by in the US I mean where I live and have lived, which is biased by not being in uber-hippy places like, um, Colorado or Seattle, to generalise some more, and in a non-z-using way at that.) In our stays at four different households, at least three compost as a matter of course, all carefully recycle a much bigger selection of things than we have the ability to here in our neighbourhood, and all grow some or a lot of their own food. One household even had actual chickens clucking and scratching around, much to the children's delight. Everyone dried their laundry outside on the line and kept their dryers for the winter. I resolve once again to get a washing line and start a compost bin at the new house.

4. They drink lots of tea and have good biscuits. But we knew that.

5. They have smaller, more streamlined strollers/pushchairs/buggies. Our BOB Revolution, which I love, is obscenely big in any other country, and gets in the way on buses and tubes. Sorry, everyone.

6. The word "pushchair", despite the fact that I used to sit and swing my legs in a stripy blue-and-white one of my very own, sounds extremely odd to me. As if it should be some sort of old-fashioned wheelchair device. Buggy sounds more or less the same, only with horses.