Wise move

I had my half-brother Pericles staying here in London for the first time in four years. Pericles, who is my father’s son by his third wife, Moorea, went to live in America when I was about 14. It was a very brave move at the time, as he was only 18 and had no qualifications, but it has turned out to be a remarkably wise one.

He and his precariously pretty wife now run an extraordinarily successful RV park/ waterworld in Arizona. In the winter it takes 500 motor homes of up to 40-ft long and in the summer, when the weather is too hot for campers, it becomes a park with whirly water slides. During the winter my brother goes to work at four in the morning, gives cooking demonstrations, arranges line dances and other entertainments, before going to bed around nine.

He now has an American accent, which always comes as a slight shock, given that our father’s was straight plum. I asked him if he would ever move back to England and he said no. Most of his friends were in America and he found it very congenial. It seemed that most people he had encountered in his 20 years there had been friendly, accommodating and helpful, much more so than in Britain. Moreover, the life is healthy – he rides with Olympic cyclists and is as wiry as a whippet – and the cost of living relatively cheap.

America is still a benign country of opportunities, despite all the sniping by the press. Admittedly, this sniping is against the ruling elite not the people at large, as hostile critics are at pains to point out, but it cleverly adds to the general anti-Americanism that they are trying to fan.