One of the things I admire about Bill Bryson's work is his even handedness (oh no, is that a word?) in his opinions of both sides of the Atlantic - he manages to simultaneously enter both cultures and stand apart from them so he can see both worlds as an outsider sees them.

I have been arguing (mainly over large quantities of red wine) with a friend who swapped lives with me some years ago (she came to London, I went to New York) about the relative merits of Britain and the USA in the same vein as Bryson.

I think the conclusion we have come to is that the world as we know it at the age of 21 is pretty well it. It is an age of total certainty where a lot of one's self confidence comes from the knowing "the way things are done". She was convinced that the best ten restaurants in the world were in New York, I thought that Paris might have got a look in. I knew how to spell "colour", she didn't. I won't go into all the arguments we had - it had taken us the next nineteen years to realise that "different" does not necessarily mean "wrong" - perhaps that is what "maturity" means.

One of the good things about this group is that we are interested to find out more about different uses of language, and grown up enough (I think) to recognise the value of knowing more about other ways of doing things.

It was fascinating to read Bill Bryson's account of travelling back to America, having been a foreigner abroad to find that on returning he had become a foreigner in his own country.