Things I Thought Were Normal Until I Moved to the UK

Where I grew up, life often happened in the evening. The heat made it non-negotiable. Shops buzzed until midnight, you could do your food shopping at 10pm, and the idea that you might run out of time to buy something was faintly ridiculous.

Then I arrived in the UK, wandered cheerfully towards a shop at 3:50pm on a Sunday, and watched a man lower a shutter directly onto my hopes and dreams like a villain in a silent film. Sunday, I learned, is not a shopping day. It is a day of quiet reflection on the things you should have bought on Saturday, preferably with a nice cup of tea and a sense of regret. I have now made peace with this. I have not, however, forgiven it.

For most of my life, the sun was simply there. Relentlessly. It was the ceiling. You planned your day around avoiding it, not chasing it like a long-lost lover.

In Britain, the sun is an event. The moment it appears, the entire country downs tools. Office productivity collapses faster than a soufflé in a draft. Grown adults roll their trousers up to the knee and lie on any available patch of grass like solar panels charging for winter. Someone, somewhere, immediately declares that it’s “actually too hot now.” The first time I witnessed a collective national mood lift because of fourteen degrees and a bit of blue sky, I genuinely thought something had happened. Something had happened. It was Tuesday, and it wasn’t raining. Miracles do occur.

This is the one that got me into trouble. I grew up in a place where a price was an opening suggestion – the beginning of a warm, slightly theatrical negotiation that both parties secretly enjoyed. Walking away was a bargaining tactic, not an insult. The whole thing was practically a performance.

So, imagine my confidence, marching into a British shop and cheerfully asking whether they could “do anything on the price.” The look I received could have frozen the Thames solid. In the UK, the price on the label is not an invitation to dance. It is, apparently, something you’re expected to accept without opening negotiations and questioning it marks you out as someone who was, quite clearly, not raised properly. I’ve since learned to admire the honesty of it. I do still miss the theatre.

That said, in some smaller shops (not supermarkets, obviously), an occasional “if I buy two, can I get a discount?” is greeted with a solid “yes.” Always worth a try – just perhaps not in M&S. My Dad learnt this one the hard way years ago, and I’m still not sure the shop assistant has recovered.

Middle Eastern hospitality is a competitive sport, and the winning move is to make sure no guest ever leaves your home hungry, or indeed fully mobile. You feed people. Then you feed them again. Refusing food is not modesty; it’s a challenge to be overcome with more food, preferably while someone says “just one more” in a tone that suggests your life depends on it.

British hospitality, I discovered, runs on a different and altogether more mysterious fuel: tea. “Cup of tea?” is the answer to arrival, departure, good news, bad news, mild inconvenience, and national tragedy alike. The offer will be made approximately every twenty minutes. It is genuinely kind, deeply comforting, – but the first time someone offered me “a quick cuppa” as though that were a complete meal, my mother felt a disturbance in the force from two thousand miles away – anyway – I only drink coffee – black!

I also NEVER have milk in the house – so it involves mild panic if anyone comes over. Offering tea without milk seems to be a national tragedy. (For reference: when I was small, we had no fresh milk – only powdered. Yeuch. I was once offered warm, frothy goat milk straight from the udder at age six. I was too polite to refuse. I still go green thinking about it. Britain, you think your tea customs are strange?)

Where I grew up, if you ask someone how they are, you’d better clear your afternoon, because they’re going to tell you. In detail. With subplots. Possibly a flashback sequence.

In the UK, “How are you?” is not a question. It is a greeting wearing a question’s clothing. The only acceptable answer is “Good thanks, you?” delivered while already in motion. I spent my first few weeks earnestly telling people how I actually was and watching their faces flicker with the quiet panic of someone who has accidentally started a real conversation in a lift. Now I understand: British small talk is a beautifully choreographed routine, and the steps are sacred. Deviate at your peril.

I thought I understood queuing. I did not understand queuing. In Britain, the queue is not a line – it is a moral structure, an invisible cathedral of fairness that everyone can see, and no one will mention. Push in, and nobody will shout. That’s the terrifying part. They will simply know, and the collective disappointment will follow you into the afterlife, where you will be made to queue for eternity behind someone who takes forever to decide what they want.

I have never respected a system I couldn’t see quite so much. I now instinctively form orderly lines in my own home. My family is concerned.

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect. Every one of these little collisions – the shuttered shops, the tea, the sacred queue – chipped away at the idea that there’s one “normal” and everyone else is doing a slightly wrong version of it. There isn’t. There’s just your normal, and it turns out to be far more local, and far more lovable, than you ever realised. Apparently, there’s a name for at least some of this: culture shock. I prefer to think of it as discovering that everyone has been quietly making up their own version of normal.

Moving abroad doesn’t just show you a new country. It hands you a mirror and says, “Oh, you thought that was universal? Adorable.” And slowly, without noticing, you stop keeping score. You start collecting normals instead – a bit of Middle Eastern hospitality here, a proper British queue there – until home stops being one place and becomes a patchwork of all of them, like a very well-travelled quilt.

At Eurogroup, we move people’s belongings for a living. But if there’s one thing five countries taught me, it’s that the furniture is the easy part. The real cargo is everything you didn’t know you were carrying – right up until a country politely (or sometimes with a shutter) points it out.

Simone has lived in five countries and been confused in all of them. She now knows better than to haggle in Boots. She also knows that if you stand still long enough in Britain, someone will eventually offer you tea and ask if you’re “alright,” to which the correct answer is “yes”.