British culture is often met with polite horror in New York

Shopping for a wedding dress with her tragedy-obsessed mother, Holly Baxter is struck again by the US-UK cultural divide

There are more than a million Brits living in the US. That’s a lot of culture shock (Getty)

Last week, my mum decided to visit me for a few days from the UK. It was, ostensibly, a happy occasion: we were shopping for my wedding dress, something which she was determined to be present for even if we’re usually separated by the Atlantic. But, of course, she couldn’t help but be all British about it.

It started when I checked her into her East Village hotel, all the while trying to draw her attention to the skyscrapers, the yellow taxis, the little trattorias lining the brownstone streets. “Do you think that man was keeping me occupied while he copied my credit card?” she asked me, after a friendly concierge recommended her places to visit in the city for a little too long. “If you didn’t stay, someone might have clocked I was on my own and murdered me,” she added, as I squashed into a nook in her double bed beside her, torn away from my Brooklyn king-size because she was convinced someone might cut her down in her prime on the streets of Manhattan.

Then there were the bridal stores.

“Would you like to set your bags down in the changing room while we look through the dresses together?” an endless array of perfectly turned-out young women asked us in appointment-only bridal stores where soft gold and millennial pink walls sported Polaroids of bohemian brides frolicking in fields upstate.

“Absolutely not,” my mother muttered, clutching her backpack as she perused the rails. “That’s how they get you, Holly. You come back and everything you own is gone.”

When a twentysomething was fixing a veil on my head and asking me to stand on a platform and show off the train of my dress, my mum was happily recounting all the tragedies that had happened in the town since I left, plus a few more which happened when I was younger or which might happen any day now.

As my mother smilingly ticked off the number of people she knows who have died, divorced, suffered terrible tragedies or come to ruin, Americans looked on in polite horror, smiles fixed on their faces

“Did I tell you about the woman I once knew who got a fatal brain tumour and then her husband cruelly left her?” she said, as American moms regaled their daughters with stories of wedded bliss and happy-ever-afters in the next cubicle.

“How about the man who worked all his life and then collapsed and died of a heart attack in front of his two young children on Christmas Day?” she added, while an assistant tried to help me into a pair of ivory shoes which were the right length for the skirt.

“One woman your age I heard about got divorced after just one year with her husband,” she said as she placed a sparkling hairband on my head to complement an off-white satin gown. “And now her father is making her give all the wedding presents back. But that’s not as sad as her cousin, whose parents retired to a chalet in Mont Blanc because they loved to ski. Just a year later, that was it – gone! – they were both killed in an avalanche, together.”

As my mother smilingly ticked off the number of people she knows who have died, divorced, suffered terrible tragedies or come to ruin, Americans in shops called things like Happiest Day of Your Life looked on in polite horror, small smiles fixed on their faces. There are some parts of the British cultural experience they will never understand, and the propensity of northern mothers to gleefully update their kin about tragedy and horror is something I couldn’t even begin to try to explain to them.

“I hope the plane doesn’t crash and burn on the way back,” she said, when she got in the taxi to go back to JFK.

“Love you too, Mum!” I replied, as I waved her off. She was fine, of course. And I did say yes to the dress.