In the vast pantheon of multinational corporations, few are more hell-bent on willfully causing international confusion and consternation than the Hershey’s empire.

Even after two years on the West Coast, as a Brit I am still not 100% sure what lies under any given tastefully-designed candy bar wrapper.

For example, let us take the American staples “Milky Way” and “Three Musketeers”. Both fine blends of sugar, fat and various unnatural syrups for sure. But for me, years of childhood wonder must be suppressed in order to remember that, in fact, what Americans call “Milky Way” is marketed in my homeland as a “Mars Bar”. Meanwhile the American “Three Musketeers” is, in the Land of Tea and Questionable Dentistry, a “Milky Way”.

(A note for the pedantic: “Three Musketeers” is not exactly the same as the British “Milky Way”. The British version has denser nougat, but there’s a definite shared design ethic going on.)

The transposition of these names is particularly, egregiously confusing, but they’re not the only Hershey’s confections to suffer from odd transatlantic translations.

I am convinced that somewhere in the Product Naming Department of Hershey’s there is a small and slightly odd little man by the name of J. Edgar Grosderriere. As a boy, J. Edgar had an unremarkable and perfectly happy early childhood; a close-knit group of young schoolfriends; loving and supportive parents. Unfortunately, around the age of 8, J. Edgar’s class began studying the French language. With a distressing inevitability, J. Edgar’s classmates quickly improved their French-to-English translation skills. In just a few short months, J. Edgar was forever re-christened “Hugeass” and his daily life plunged into a maelstrom of misery and torment.

Bereft of confidence in the face of his ridiculous moniker, J. Edgar has never known the love of a good woman, preferring to spend much of his time sequestered away in laboratories full of chocolate. As a result he’s developed a few eccentricities, the worst of which is the tendency for his sexual frustration to spill over into his work.

Hershey’s management have considered letting J. Edgar go. They’ve considered quietly rejecting all his suggestions for candy names. But he cuts such an odd figure that he evokes a real sense of pity in all who know him.

“The guy’s named Hugeass for God’s sake. How much harm can the odd strange candy name do?” they say to one another.

This, at least, is the only way I can plausibly explain the American names of my two favourite childhood chocolate products, known to me in those more innocent days as “Malteasers” and “Bounty”.

Not for the American market such benign and innocent names, oh no. Thanks to the sorry history of J. Edgar Grosderriere I must instead seek out the pleasures of “Whoppers” and “Mounds”.

Yes, “Whoppers” and “Mounds”. It is hard for me to eat these things with a straight face. Furthermore, I have discovered, it is hard to eat without a straight face – your teeth end up in weird places. Be that as it may, I have little choice if I wish to savour chocolate-coated malted biscuit or candied coconut. Because every single time as I’m opening the packaging, the product name emblazoned on the side, my head fills with bad 70s porn dialogue and “bowchikkabowbow” guitar lines.

“Oh wow. I can’t get enough of those Mounds. Now, honey, get ready to wrap your mouth around a Whopper…”

My earliest memories of America look like this. I must have been 4, and it would be another year before I’d actually visit the US on a holiday in Florida, but I had an overwhelmingly strong image of America that I’d picked up from the television.

Even though it was deeply American to its core, we got a lot of repeated 70′s episodes of Sesame Street on TV in the UK, and one of the features I remember most clearly were the filmed segments about aspects of the “real world” beyond a neighbourhood where the most esteemed resident was a freakishly gigantic talking canary.

I imagine that most of these segments must have been filmed in LA. The difference of it all from the semi-rural English “housing experiment” I grew up in was startling. I dreamed of big, chunky vans and beige garages. And the light (the thing that really made today a “Sesame Street day) – it was startlingly clear, almost painful, but somehow optimistic and beautiful.

My dad was always a big fan of America and all things American, and I think that some of his enthusiasm rubbed off on me. I never imagined though, right up until the moment the offer was presented, that I’d end up living here.

Like any society which is attempting to balance the prejudices, fears, hopes and dreams of millions of people, the US is far from perfect. Too much of the “culture” is based on conspicuous consumption (although the UK suffers from that malaise too); too many people talk of “making their peace with God” whilst failing to make their peace with themselves.

But somehow there’s space here. Space to be what you want to be; just a little more space than I ever found in London. It’s those “Sesame Street” days which really bring that home to me and marry my childhood dreams with my life as it is now. And they make me glad, at least for the time being, to call America (and San Francisco in particular) “home”.

I never get tired of watching the rush-hour drivers toiling in 3 lanes of traffic on 101.

Every day there is a sea of perplexedness, frustration and boredom stretching 40 miles, endless hands dangling out of their car windows or fingers drumming on the steering wheel.

I’ll admit, I’m a little smug, but then I’m habitually sitting on a bus or driving with a passenger and I’m in the relatively supersonic carpool lane. At least until I hit Redwood City.

One thing puzzles me about these drivers, more than almost any other puzzle of human behaviour I’ve ever encountered. Why the hell are they all there?

Commuting in the Bay Area is, let’s leave no doubt, a thoroughly dismal and distressing experience, and one which is necessary to a large number of people because of the very nature of the locale.

At the mouth of the Bay you have “the City”, San Francisco. This is where the majority of the fun is to be had. It’s where the best restaurants are, where the fun music venues and bars and clubs nestle happily in a network of streets which it’s actually possible to navigate on foot.

Most of the better jobs here, however, are in the South Bay towns, where space is cheaper; corporate taxes more lenient.

So whilst a lot of people do indeed live in the surrounding sprawl of Bay Area towns, a particular demographic (my demographic as it happens) is faced with a stark dilemma. You can live in the city and endure the commute, or you can live in the South Bay and die of boredom.

But with gas prices spiralling, and the 40 mile commute taking a lone car driver more than 2 hours on a bad day, why in hell do people travel alone?

I know that I’m fortunate – I work for one of the few companies large enough to lay on complimetary buses for their employees. I’m hugely grateful for that – it gives me a chance to relax, to catch up on work, or to write screeds like this in time that would otherwise be wasted.

But it’s not like there aren’t other commute alternatives. Caltrain runs through the entire South Bay; BART serves most of the East. And even if public transport doesn’t serve you well, how many people are honestly, hand-on-heart, in a situation where they are commuting on a route which isn’t largely (or wholly) shared by at least one neighbour?

I’m going to peg the answer at “a damn sight fewer than the poor miserable saps who are currently stuck at a standstill to my immediate right.”

It’s not that every single lone driver is in the wrong here. For various reasons, a small percentage of people will have occasional or regular reasons for needing to drive alone. But if we could convince the majority to double up in cars, to petition their employer for buses, to somehow forego the solo drive… how much better would life be? How much cleaner the air? How much faster the commute? How much less stressed the average commuter? “Quite a bit”, I’d guess.

So how can we convince these people to find a carpool buddy, or a bus, or a twice-weekly telecommute, or something?

Here’s where I piss off a lot of fellow commuters.

See, if we really want Bay Area commutes to improve we need to rethink freeways like 101. First off, extend carpool lanes for the entire length of the Bay Area. Then, remove the time restrictions – carpool is carpool 24/7. Finally, make the right-hand lane for buses and taxis only, and the lane next to that a “carpool”, leaving 2 lanes for sole drivers.

“But, but, that would make my commute impossible!”, you cry.

Exactly.

See, the interesting thing about “impossible” is that people generally find that, when forced, there are ways to make things “less impossible”. Ways like public transit or carpooling…

I’ve been hiding from your children.

For the last couple of nights, lights off, quietly extracting a baking frozen pizza from the oven, I’ve been living stealthily and ignoring knocks at the door.

I guess, much as I’d love to, I still just Don’t Quite Get Halloween.

I did make a brief effort, scouting the vast candy aisles in Walgreens (only in America: a “drugstore” which sells fattening confectionary and cigarettes), thinking about buying a selection of goodies for Trick or Treaters to ruin their teeth with. But I just couldn’t get my head round it – should I create a “lucky dip” assortment of sour fruity things, chocolate treats and dentist-horrifying gobstoppers? Or should I just buy a bag of “fun size” Mars Bars and have done?

And I couldn’t decide. I gave up in the end – I live in a restricted-access building anyway so it wasn’t like there would be hordes of ravenous kids with sheets over their heads queueing up. And the last thing I need is 117 fun-size mars bars left over after the pumpkins have been thrown away and the cobwebs torn down.

So I’m the guy skulking in the darkened apartment down the corridor because I don’t want to make your children cry through a lack of candy. Sorry.

Halloween has been growing in popularity in the UK for the last few years. Sure, quite a few people went trick-or-treating when I was a kid, but the shops maybe put out a token stand of cheap plastic witch masks and a bin full of sweets. There weren’t massive Halloween decorations everywhere, and adults didn’t tend to have blow-out Halloween parties.

But even though it’s grown in stature in the land of my birth, UK-style Halloween has nothing on the US. It is, quite simply, a mania over here, and my first experience of it has been… bewildering.

Pumpkin patches? Wow. Halloween decorations absolutely everywhere? More parties than you can shake a stick at? Blimey.

The UK only goes to town this much for Christmas (and, admittedly, without the commercial “buffer zones” of crazy-Halloween and Thanksgiving we start on “xmas” in October). It’s all been a bit too much for me.

I’m not really cut out for costume parties – I simply haven’t had much practice. I made it to one Halloween party this weekend, dressed as a rather lacklustre vampire (teeth, stage blood, long black coat – it worked for me). And on Saturday I was unfortunately in bed (pretending those weren’t knocks at the door) with the lurgee. Funny thing about me and American celebrations – they seem to cause virii to flock to me like flies to something unpleasant. I was ill on July 4th too.

Thing is, I find child-centric “events” like Halloween bewildering for a more fundamental reason than my faux-sartorial ineptitude. I’m really quite settled in a slightly haphazard bachelor lifestyle at present (cue a sharp intake of horrified breath from my mother), and dealing with other people’s rather demanding larvae is, well, a bit trying for my carefully cultivated inner curmudgeon.

But at the same time, seeing their excited little faces poking out from under a carefully-chosen (and clearly adored) costume awakens another part of me. The part that goes “awww”, and can readily imagine standing on strangers’ doorsteps with my own little offshoot one day, begging for sugary treats (cue a relieved exhalation from the aforementioned mother).

It is, as they say, an inner conflict.

But hey, it’s probably time I got into the spirit of these things lest I end up entertaining Marley’s Ghost sometime. Having suffered something of a Halloween culture-shock this year, I shall make amends in 2006.

I’ll be living in the city and I pledge that, in the interests of becoming one with American culture, I shall construct a fabulous costume (not as fabulous as Michelle’s; t’would be foolish to suggest otherwise, but fabulous nonetheless). And I shall buy a carefully-planned assortment of candy, bounding happily to my door and distributing it to your children with glee.

And, most importantly, I shall sit in the dark less. Unless, y’know, it counts as “mood lighting” at a party.

I’d followed the same patterns as I had at home – approximately one weekly supermarket shop to get all the basics in, and then maybe one more run to pick up specific needed items later on.

And the supermarkets are convenient: large, situated every half-mile or so in every direction, and (for the most part) open until 2am or later. So why my increasing reluctance to enter?

I finally worked it out a couple of days before Mark Morford wrote his piece Is Safeway Sucking Your Soul? in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In a nutshell, American supermarkets (and the food they stock) are a bizarre, freakish world of depressing clinical blandness interrupted only by day-glo “half price!” signs in the aisles. For all their convenience, they are not pleasant places to shop.

It’s difficult to articulate exactly why they’re so bad. Even with an entire newspaper column at his disposal, Morford can manage little more than a catalogue of some of the shelf-borne horrors that the average supermarket carries. But, for what it’s worth, here are the three things which currently most horrify me about my local food marts:

1) The Food Of The Living Dead

Bread-buying is a simple affair in Britain. Either you buy a fresh-baked loaf and expect it to last a day or two, or (for more mundane sandwich/toast type uses) you buy a mass-produced but acceptable loaf. Even wrapped in space-age “life prolonging” foil, this loaf will be showing signs of mould within 5-7 days. If there’s any left, it’s bird-food or trash. This is all well and good. It is dependable and comforting. It is not how American bread is.

American mass-produced bread does not die. Ever. I have yet to carry out an empirical study, but I’m convinced that archaeologists half a millenium from now will be digging edible loaves out of landfills.

Gone are the days when I could depend on the freshness of my bread because, well, if it wasn’t fresh it was mouldy. I’ve never seen mould on a shop-bought loaf here. I’ve thrown away perfect-looking ends of loaves because I suddenly remember that I bought them a month ago, and am faintly appalled by the concept.

It’s not just the bread which doesn’t die. Even store-bought vegetables are suspiciously long-lived. Anything in a packet or a tin has a shelf-life of aeons. And as for “juice”, you have to be damned careful.

Fairly early on I was suckered into buying a “strawberry and passionfruit juice blend” which sounded very nice. The six-week shelf life was vaguely suspicious (given I found it in a fridge next to organic juices), but I didn’t think much of it. It was only halfway through the carton that I looked at the nutrition panel and discovered that the primary ingredient after water was “corn syrup”. Flavoured syrup. Lovely.

All this nutritional longevity can only be achieved with the heavy use of preservatives (or syrup), and something just tells me that it can’t be that good for you. Still, at least anyone who’s eaten a supermarket diet will make a very handsome corpse when they finally move on to the next life…

2) Crop-spraying

If you don’t buy organic then you can pretty much guarantee that your vegetables have been sprayed with various things between germination and checkout. But in the wonderful world of American supermarketry they take it one stage further, and spray the stuff when it’s actually in the store.

No, really. Most supermarkets have overhead sprays built into the vegetable/salad counters which go off about once every five minutes coating everything in a fine mist. I presume that the intended effect is partly cosmetic – make everything look wholesome and fresh. But really, I’d rather the salad was slightly dry and I didn’t get coated with the same mist because I was reaching for some spinach when the damn things went off.

Furthermore, the whole area has a faint chlorine-like odour, which doesn’t instill much confidence in me.

3) “Let there be light!”

And the lord saith “Lo! I have given thee gasses which flouresce, that ye may create bare tube lighting which blindeth the patrons of thy super-markets. And they shall beg for most bountiful relief. I have also given thee Tylenol, on aisle 21, next to the antacids. Brighten thy lights and the Tylenol shall sell. This is my miracle to you.” (Shops 1:15)

Really, does everything have to be lit in quite such a stark, eye-watering manner? Any indoor location requiring sunglasses is too damn bright.

America is like a living Capitalist Handbook, so of course every mainstream innovation opens up a new niche where “things are done the traditional way.” Enter the whole food stores; in particular (in the Bay Area) Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.

I’m not saying for a moment that these places are perfect; Trader Joe’s is very reasonably priced, but has no loose fresh fruit and vegetables (it’s all pre-packaged). Whole Foods is more comprehensive, particularly with fresh produce, but is quite pricey on the whole.

Nonetheless, together with the weekly Farmers’ Market in Mountain View, they make for a useful alternative which has meant that I only really visit supermarkets these days when I can’t find an ATM anywhere else.

Sadly, smaller traditional food vendors (I’d kill for a good butcher locally) are still few and far between in the South Bay (there are a lot more about in San Francisco, which is another reason to move there – on which more later), but I’m actively hunting down the good ones.

And in the meantime, I shall revel in the simple food-based pleasures of life, like loaves which actually go mouldy.

I am speaking, of course, of the Great British White Van.

I was reminded of this precious tradition today by a photo taken by my friend Mark, and it caused a real pang of nostalgia in me.

You see, I have felt the blessed state of being known only as White Van Man.

The first time I ever drove a white van was three and a half years ago, when I moved into a shared house in Islington. As the only resident with any real driving experience (stop giggling at the back), I was in charge of shuttling everyone’s stuff from various parts of London. And boy, there was a lot of stuff. We worked for 2 straight days loading, unloading and driving.

The “change” from Dr “Nice Guy” Jekyll (no, really, I am nice) to Mr “White Van” Hyde was an imperceptible one, but it was there nevertheless. It’s the little things that do it – in an enclosed, large van you have a blind spot about eight feet long on either side of the vehicle. Drivers who insist on pulling into this spot whilst you’re indicating a lane change can quickly cause an air of righteous rage to suffuse your being.

Going to Ikea during the course of the weekend was probably a mistake too.

Still, I didn’t fully come to realise my deep state of White Van-ness until the Sunday evening, driving to Brixton with Tom to pick up his belongings. All I remember is that at some point during the drive I’d found it necessary to use the horn whilst negotiating a tricky junction, and Tom (who I barely knew at the time) turned to me and said quietly “wow. You’re actually scaring me.”

My transformation was complete. I had become White Van Man.

But all that is in the past now.

You see, White Van culture really hasn’t made it to the US. In part this is due to the fact that proper vans (of the good old Transit variety) are scarce – if you’re shifting stuff around, you’re either in a pickup truck, or you’re attempting to control an 18-wheeler so large it has its own gravitational field. Americans don’t pussy-foot around with middle-of-the-road stuff.

Sure, there are box-vans of the kind rented out by U-Haul, but somehow they lack the magical, testosterone-boosting power of the Transit and her sister vans.

Besides, there are other two other factors at work to break the spell:

1) People don’t drink tea

You might find a half-drunk styrofoam beaker of watery 7-11 coffee in a pickup cab, maybe. But it’ll probably be festering in the ubiquitous cup-holders. As every White Van driver knows, mouldering beverages should be wedged between the dash and the windscreen so they can dislodge and spill everywhere if you ever have to brake hard.

2) Tabloids aren’t really tabloids

Okay, so there are periodicals known as “tabloids” here. There’s even a “Sun”, produced by News International and carrying the same masthead as its British counterpart. But US tabloids are generally weekly affairs, and concern themselves with two topics:

1. Celebrity couple-du-jour’s breakup. At the time of writing it’s Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. The tabloids are also skirting around “Britney’s marriage doomed” pieces.
2. The second coming of Christ. This happens every two weeks, and is also predicted to be due at other times in the coming months. All I can say is that you should repent by September 11th this year, according to a Sun from last month.

Most importantly, tabloids here do not contain half-naked 19 year olds. Whilst this means they can be freely sold in Wal-Mart, it doesn’t help their status as an essential part of the hairy, smelly testosterone-filled world which is a proper White Van.

I truly believe that there’s a little White Van Man in all of us, waiting to emerge as soon as we grasp that keyfob which lovingly proclaims “Transit”. And it’s a great shame that so many Americans will never embrace this particular inner demon.

So, my advice for any Americans travelling to Britain – forego the usual 4-door saloon at the airport and ask for a Transit. Pick up one cup of tea from an airport cafe, and one tabloid (The Sun or The Star) from WHSmiths. Wedge both of these items firmly between the dashboard and the windscreen. Then simply drive around for a few days. You’ll never look at yourselves the same way again.

Admittedly, you may wind up looking at yourselves with permanent horror, but hey, that’s the price of experience.

My co-conversationalist in all this was a woman in, I would guess, her late 40s. She was the Godmother of my friend’s flatmate, which is how I came to be talking with her. Unfortunately, it was all a bit awkward.

You see, the royal family are one of the most embarassing things about being a Brit abroad. To illustrate, the conversation I’m describing began something like this:

Her: So, what do British people think about Prince Charles marrying Camilla?Me: (miming an exaggerated shrug) Meh.

And, well, there wasn’t much more to say.

I’m not suggesting that I speak for every one of the UK’s 60 million or so citizens here, but certainly the prevailing word on the street regarding the Windsor family these days seems to be “meh”. Or possibly “muh” depending on regional accent.

Take this recent voting panel from the BBC news website (which was appearing on this page at the time of writing).

That’s over half the respondents choosing “Don’t care”, the BBC’s politer equivalent of “meh”.

This indifference causes a bit of a communication problem here in the US, where people are a bit more interested in the royals. Magazines have more coverage of them, Princess Di is still spoken about… and as a Brit, of course, you’re expected to be intensely interested in your own royal family.

I think the problem is that, from afar, British royalty is still crowns, gold coaches and large palaces. The glamour surrounding Princess Diana, too, gave the family an air of sophistication reminiscent of that provided by Jackie Kennedy to 60s America.

America’s cultural memory doesn’t contain the reduction of the Civil List and the introduction of income tax for the Windsors, the embarassing gaffes of Prince Phillip, the aftermath of the Windsor Castle fire and the subsequent opening of Buckingham Palace as a tourist attraction…

In the last 15 years, the Royals have been through a lot of changes, nearly all of them unpleasant. I think that a lot of Brits now see them as normal people; flawed, and struggling through life like most of us. Stripped of much of its former ceremony and importance, the royal birthright seems increasingly like a curse to be endured.

We feel sorry for them, and pity is something which is distasteful to the British palate. Retreating from it, we’d rather leave them alone to get on with their lives.

Besides, I can say with all honesty that they’re at their best when helping others – initiatives like the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and the Prince’s Trust do make a real difference to peoples’ lives. Somehow, focussing on Charles’s private life seems tawdry in comparison.

In line with this, what you’ll find these days is that UK gossip magazines and newspapers spend more time examining the new Royalty imported from America – the ones with mansions in Beverley Hills.

None of which helps when you’re trying to explain all this to a slightly disappointed American who equated your Britishness with a sadly absent flag-waving fervour and a penchant for commemorative Royal Wedding mugs.

Still, it could have been worse. She could have asked what I thought of Tony Blair.

No, I’m afraid this is nothing but potty talk.

First, a touch of history.

The original flush toilet was invented in England by a watchmaker named Alexander Cummings (patent number 814, fact fans), and not in fact by the legendarily-named plumber Thomas Crapper.

In a strange twist of fate, however, the US managed to develop its own take on the idea in complete isolation (a fascinating story which is concisely told here)

Now, if European and American flush lavatories were two separate branches in the evolutionary tree of human waste disposal, then Europe defenitely ended up with the porcelain equivalent of the Neanderthals.

What’s strange is that toilets essentially work the same way on both sides of the Atlantic, using a siphon. It’s explained in intricate (but tasteful) detail at howstuffworks.

Somehow, though, the evolution of the American toilet perfected the method so that the siphonic effect is much, much stronger. When you press the flush handle over here, the bowl turns into a sort of whirlpool-o-death which sucks away just about anything from sight in seconds flat. You could drop a real log into the bowl (and I’m talking about hiding the evidence of some illegal amateur forestry here, not being peurile) and you probably wouldn’t have to worry…

Whereas in the UK, the toilet basically attempts to empty itself by, well, sort of half-heartedly pushing everything downwards with a bit of water. It’s achingly British in its operation (“I say old bean, would you mind, you know, sort of just disappearing into the bally sewage system for me? There’s a good chap…”), but not the most effective.

Of course, you win some you lose some. What America gains in flush toilets, it loses in electrical plugs. The flimsy excuses for conductors of power you get here are, well, comical compared to the no-nonsense, solid dependable type G plug found in the UK.

So, increased ability to remove bathroom waste vs. slight increased risk of electrocution via toytown electrics… I’m prepared to live with the trade-off, whilst being mildly cautious around wall-sockets.

And would you look at that. I managed to get through this entire piece without once directly referring to faeces.

Oh. Crap.

I say this because wherever I go; at almost every doorway, parking lot entrance, public building and so on, I’m confronted by these words:

bq. This area may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or reproductive harm.

It is, of course, the result of well-meaning State legislation (Proposition 65) which really wasn’t thought through. But underneath it all lies a couple of ugly American traits:

• Collective hypochondria on a near-hysteric level
• The fear of someone suing you, your children and your childrens’ children

The original purpose of Prop. 65 was to ensure that no-one was unwittingly exposed to hazardous chemicals during their daily lives. All well and good. But somewhere along the way, it got twisted.

To get some idea of how ridiculous the situation is, take a look at the list of chemicals (pdf) which require a Prop. 65 warning. There’s 18 pages there.

Because of the range of potential harm, these notices have to appear in all sorts of places. There are two big gotchas:

• Anywhere someone might conceivably ever be smoking (danger of passive fumes)
• Anywhere involving petrol/gasoline (so, gas stations, parking lots, roads…)

Just overlap these two in some kind of twisted Venn diagram (title: “I’m gonna die!”) and you’ve basically got “the entirety of the outdoors”.

The big problem is that the signs don’t say which chemicals any given area might contain. So they don’t help me assess whether I’m in danger of a couple of lungfuls of passive smoke, the fact that someone’s fuelling their car, or a massive slick of Cadmium emanating from a place that makes batteries. Perhaps I’m at risk of being sprayed with Mustard Gas, or perhaps someone is going to give me an Aspirin (no, really, it’s on the list). The whole thing is so vague as to be completely pointless.

The other problem is that many of these “hazards” have been established according to experiments which don’t reflect the real world. Sure, dunk a lab rat in a vat of petrol repeatedly for a month, and the poor sucker is going to feel ill. I, however, don’t habitually go down to my local Valero station for a quick swim in their storage tanks.

Proposition 65 is, in short, a weird combination of collective panic and State nannyism which is boggling to a foreigner. It’s enough to make you want to drown your sorrows with large amounts of booze.

Except, of course, that alcoholic beverages (when associated with alcohol abuse) are known to the State of California to cause cancer…

No, this is a post about an absolute fundamental of life. As Homer Simpson would say, Mmmmm. Beer.

After several well-spent years roaming the streets of London with a bunch of similarly-minded ne’er do wells, I had come to hone my appreciation for a fine beer to, well, a pretty sharp point.

It was one of the largest misgivings I had about moving to America: what the hell would I do when I really needed a good beer?

The trouble is that American beer really doesn’t have a good image abroad. The main contenders on the shelves of UK off-licences (that’s “Liquor Stores” in American) are Budweiser and Michelob (both Anheuser-Busch products), with Rolling Rock (which, to be fair, is the fault of the Latrobe Brewing Co.) along for the ride.

These are all, not to put too fine a point on it, awful beers. Truly, utterly appalling. The fact that they’re marketed as beers is an affront to the word “beer” itself.

The heavy marketing and widespread distribution of these taste-free, watery concoctions is the reason than many Europeans, faced with the words “American beer” can’t help but giggle uncontrollably.

Happily (for me, a beer-lover living in America), this reaction is in fact unjustified.

Since I arrived, I’ve found several things which gladden my heart.

Firstly, I should note in passing the British pubs present in a few places, which serve passable exports of various British ales (including Fullers’ ESB and London Pride).

Besides that, though, the real good news is that there are several American brews which are actually quite fantastic. In no particular order, my current favourites are:

• Fat Tire
• Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
• Anchor Steam

All of them have great texture and good flavour, and are generally a Very Good Thing. I hadn’t heard of any of them before I came out here.

A quick look at their provenance suggests why: Fat Tire is brewed in Colorado, Sierra Nevada in Chico, CA and Anchor Steam in San Francisco.

Good beer generally takes care – space, expertise and work. For breweries in Western states to produce beer for the west of America without sacrificing quality is relatively easy. Much harder to produce enough beer for the entire American market, and licence the same production method (or export the same beer) to foreign markets.

Get too large, and you end up with mass-produced fizzy water like Budweiser.

Not that this is an excuse for the likes of Anheuser-Busch. I suspect that, for these massive-scale breweries, the “brewing art” has degenerated into a method of producing something that’s just acceptable enough to the mass-market, as cheaply as possible.

The brewery which has perhaps managed to strike the best balance is the Boston Brewing Company, who produce the Samuel Adams range of beers. None of them is as good as the favourites listed above, but they’re not bad beers (certainly at least on-par with Europe’s more prolific brands), and they’re available US-wide and, I believe, abroad.

Unfortunately, their marketing muscle pales into insignificance alongside the relentless push of Budweiser into every corner of the globe already colonised by McDonalds and Starbucks.

In reality, however, Budweiser is no more typical of American beer than McDonalds is of true American hamburgers, or Starbucks of some of the good coffee you can get here. Having discovered that, I’m ashamed of having ever scoffed at American beer. My scorn for Messrs Busch, Anheuser and Latrobe continues unabated, however.