A paean to bigness
On landing at SFO, my ridemate mused that the culture shock of coming to the US is greater than that of going to Europe despite their more different-seeming cultures (he is Scottish, I’m English11. Before my father disowns me, although I am half-Scottish by birth I am surely culturally English having grown up and lived there for almost my whole life.).
Everything is big. Our Uber takes us on the 101 north to I-80 East over the Bay Bridge. The road is huge, the cars considerably bigger than what we have in the UK, and driven much more aggressively (my pal is somewhat less stoic than I and flinches at a few last-minute merges). The billboards by the side of the road are without exception for AI startups, including one that helps detect who online is human and who is a robot.
We scythe through San Francisco while seeing essentially none of it, except the skyline and the large windows of a few converted lofts with tech workers tapping away at expensive keyboards.
“I always feel strange seeing people in office buildings,” he says. “Do they not know what’s about to happen?”
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This is not a new observation of course. Big cars, big roads. But the bigness, and a sense thereof, pervades everything here.
On the Lighthaven campus, where I have to publish 500 words a day for a month on penalty of eviction, everything is big too. The bathrooms contain enormous pump bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel the likes of which are simply unavailable in the UK. A huge roll of paper towel is usually within reach wherever you are, and so I use it liberally (the idea of using a dishcloth to dry one’s hands feels like barbarism).
The kitchen is stocked with every conceivable snack, vegan or otherwise. A huge urn of coffee sits at the ready at any hour of the day (which I discovered when I tried to top up my tea with it by mistake). Packs of bagels are piled a foot high on the counter and I have to stop myself from eating four of them one after the other. The peanut butter is billed as ‘no stir’ somehow; god knows what industrial emulsifiers are used to achieve that. Even cans of Coke are bigger here – 355ml (12 fl oz in American) to our pathetic Europoor 330ml. The land of plenty.
I sit at a couch, of which there are very many. This one has a monitor on a floating arm. I go to balance my tea on the armrest, a precarious but necessary move in any British home, and find there is a wooden Thing on it to put it on. There’s a square holder for cups but my too big mug won’t fit in it until I realise there is a notch cut into it for the handle. It’s 6am and I can’t sleep and I want the comfort of a blanket, which when I go to pull it over me I find is strangely heavy because of course it’s weighted.
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I got the address wrong and our Uber dropped us a few minutes’ walk away, so we rolled our suitcases along Telegraph Ave in the warmth. The air is sweet-smelling: eucalyptus (planted everywhere a century ago for timber and never cut down), Bay laurel, and jasmine.
A pretty girl walks past – young, I guess a student. UC Berkeley is just up the road. Its campus is also big in comparison to the inner-city campuses I’m used to. She glances at me; there’s a brief frisson. I feel something shift inside me, like I’m a teenager not sure where to look. London has plenty of beautiful people but there’s something new here too: American girls, even young ones, are confident.
Brits like to shit on Americans for their personality. We think that tall poppy syndrome and false modesty are less unbecoming, a sort of national suspiciousness of ambition. But what they see as loudness or brashness I see as self-assuredness about moving through the world. Something like poise.