Blighty

“It was my first time away from home with veritably just a meagre bindle on my back. I was way out of my comfort zone and flung into the deep end on the other side of the pond. I floundered but eventually found my water legs and learned to love dear ol’ Blighty.”

The contrast he sought to draw with a gloomy Blighty was not subtle.

His 80,000-word account of the experience was found in an online auction won by amateur social-historian David Wilkins, who has now published it under the title Blighty or Bust.

Not far away is an earlier housing development that is even more redolent of Blighty: Foxhall Village.

Many folks come here from Blighty to break into America and give up if it doesn’t happen in a year or two.