One of us is a forgettable 50-something son of an air force officer who settled in the Midwest after marrying his college sweetheart. The other is an ivy-league educated Gen X’er who grew up in the shadows of Manhattan. We met a number of years ago working for an early stage technology company in New York and after losing touch for the better part of 10 years, reunited in London of all places.

Though we have deep affection and admiration for each other, our preoccupations couldn’t be any more different. One’s kids are in college while the other’s is in grammar school. The younger uses every spare minute to savor London’s cultural delicacies while the other seldom ventures beyond a ¼ mile radius of his flat. One is long and lean, snacking on dried seaweed – the other is corpulent and showing his years.

The young one wears only white shirts and black suits though he accents both with technicolor socks. The old one wears pinstripes, bankers cuffs and collars, and – always, always, always – black hose.

Espresso. Filter coffee. Box sushi. Tuna sandwich. French wine. Whiskey. Yankees. Cubs.

Two paths: one leads home in a year and the other hasn’t been completely charted. But one thing is shared: we both feel the distance between ourselves and America and we find comfort in picking through the scuttlebutt that continually blows in from the West.

Here, three thousand miles away and liberated from the cacophony of US Media sources, we’re able to develop our opinions over days and weeks as the Pavlovian response mechanism to immediately vomit up an impression is suppressed by both distance and local culture.

Give a Brit a couple of pints and he’ll blather about Obama, Bush, Donald Trump, and America’s obsession with guns. But separated from the libations by 8 hours of sleep, that same bloke really doesn’t care.

It’s contagious. Two years into our respective sojourns, we find ourselves going weeks without peeking at the Journal, the New York Times, and espn.com; we might glimpse Russia Today or BBC News even while CNN and Fox are piped in. And neither of us has felt the need to touch base at the new Five Guys in Covent Garden.

We’re ambivalently in exile.