What do you mean a vet’s cutting my hair?

I FIRST came to England at the other end of my life, when I was still quite young, just 20.

In those days, for a short but intensive period, a very high proportion of all in the world that was worth taking note of came out of Britain.

The Beatles, James Bond, Mary Quant and miniskirts, Twiggy and Justin de Villeneuve, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s love life, Princess Margaret’s love life, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, suit jackets without collars, TV series such as The Avengers and The Prisoner, spy novels by John le Carre and Len Deighton, Marianne Faithfull and Dusty Springfield, quirky movies starring David Hemmings and Terence Stamp that we didn’t quite get in Iowa, Harold Pinter plays that we didn’t get at all, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, That Was The Week That Was, the Profumo scandal — practically everything really.

Advertisements in magazines such as the New Yorker and Esquire were full of British products in a way they never would be again — Gilbey’s and Tanqueray gin, Harris tweeds, BOAC airliners, Aquascutum suits and Viyella shirts, Keens felted hats, Alan Paine sweaters, Daks trousers, MG and Austin Healey sports cars, a hundred varieties of Scotch whisky.

It was clear that if you wanted quality and suavity in your life, it was British goods that were in large part going to supply it.

Not all of this made a great deal of sense even then, it must be said. A popular cologne of the day was called Pub.

I am not at all sure what resonances that was supposed to evoke. I have been drinking in England for 40 years and I can’t say I have ever encountered anything in a pub that I would want to rub on my face.

Because of all the attention we gave Britain, I thought I knew a fair amount about the place, but I quickly discovered upon arriving that I was very wrong. I couldn’t even speak my own language here. In the first few days, I failed to distinguish between collar and colour, khaki and car key, letters and lettuce, bed and bared, karma and calmer.

Needing a haircut, I ventured into a unisex hairdresser’s in Oxford, where the proprietress, a large and vaguely forbidding woman, escorted me to a chair and there informed me crisply: ‘Your hair will be cut by a vet today.’

I was taken aback. ‘Like a person who treats sick animals?’ I said, quietly horrified.

‘No, her name is Yvette,’ she replied and with the briefest of gazes into my face made it clear that I was the most exhausting idiot that she had encountered in some time. In a pub I asked what kind of sandwiches they had. ‘Ham and cheese,’ the man said. ‘Oh, yes please,’ I said. ‘Yes please what?’ he said. ‘Yes please, ham and cheese,’ I said, but with less confidence.

‘ No, it’s ham or cheese,’ he explained.

‘ You don’t do them both together?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, surprised, then leaned towards him and in a low, confidential tone said: ‘Why not? Too flavourful?’ He stared at me. ‘I’ll have cheese then, please,’ I said contritely.

When the sandwich came, the cheese was extravagantly shredded — I had never seen a dairy product distressed before serving — and accompanied by what I now know was Branston pickle, but what looked to me then like what you find when you stick your hand into a clogged sump.

I nibbled it tentatively and was pleased to discover that it was delicious.

Gradually, it dawned on me that I had found a country that was wholly strange to me and yet somehow marvellous.

It is a feeling that has never left me.