When I was offered the dream job of Counsellor for Global Issues at the British Embassy in Washington DC, clearly I couldn’t refuse. It’s a dream job because of the range of issues my portfolio covers—diplomacy on trade, energy, the environment, transport, science and innovation—and because of the country and context, since the US is the UK’s most important ally.
But it certainly is a strange thing to move to both a brand new job (I previously ran the Sentencing Council, a UK governmental organisation) and a brand new city I’ve never been to before. As the taxi drove me and my civil partner Layla into the city we will call home for the next four years, we gazed out of the window, desperate to like it. And so far it has turned out to be very easy to like Washington, which seems to be full of clever people with boundless enthusiasm for discussing pretty much any subject, from the politics of the day, to whether scientists really have found the God Particle in the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, to whether the success of Durban could have been anticipated, to which parts of the US Layla and I should visit first (suggestions welcome!).
Of course, we have begun our US exploration closer to home, and have found that while we share a similar language and culture, there are important differences too. We’ve just learned that Trader Joe’s is not a hardware store—as it sounds to our British ears—but our local supermarket. Which is useful for buying milk; less so for getting our keys cut. We have learnt that being asked for ID in bars does not, alas, signify our youthful looks. And en route back from work, I’ve found that strolling down Massachusetts Avenue without a dog is definitely deemed unusual by the locals. So I must now choose whether to find a more culturally congruous mode of transport to and from work or to borrow a dog. Not that anyone has openly has pointed out these faux pas—indeed we’ve been struck by how welcoming people are here. In few other countries would Layla and I have been embraced and invited out to multiple dinner parties every night, much less to sample our first eggnog at a holiday party featuring the Whiffenpoofs, Yale’s famed a cappella group.
One really lovely thing about all of these events is that Layla is invited, (though she might dispute this on those evenings where I bring her to three events in a row). This is the rather odd feature of being a diplomat—families are seen as common property, and our past habit of attending our respective work events separately have been relegated to history. And as a newly arrived diplomat, enquiries about my family situation come up very regularly—which means that I find myself repeatedly outing myself. But how much easier I’ve found it to do it here, than pretty much anywhere else I’ve travelled or worked. Indeed, this seems to be something which the US and UK very much have in common. Of course, it’s not always been like this—it’s only 20 years since the FCO lifted the ban on gay people being allowed to serve in the diplomatic service and only reasonably recently that the US federal government agreed to officially recognise same-sex partners. Both countries have come a long way. And how glad I am that they have—otherwise I wouldn’t be here, at the start of a four-year adventure in my dream job.