My son brought his girlfriend home last month and we really wanted to make things nice for her. We started with a shame-fuelled whirlwind clean, but were instantly betrayed the second our son stepped inside and exclaimed: “It’s so tidy! I’ve never seen it this clean!” (It got worse when he showed her my office, the portrait in the attic to the rest of the house’s Dorian Gray.)
She is from the US, which added an extra set of anxieties about how we live, specifically around ice and water. I have watched enough TikTok videos of shocked, disgusted Americans complaining about European hospitality’s inadequate water service and ice meanness to know that we are notoriously bad at providing sufficient, and sufficiently chilled, hydration for US visitors. Keen to do better, we scrambled to the supermarket to panic-buy bags of ice to fill the freezer, then affected a casual, offhand familiarity with this cold, watery way of life. Would you like iced water? Yes, we’re always offering each other giant glasses of cold fluid brimming with ice cubes, extremely normal behaviour here!
They have gone now and we are back to cosy squalor, with one truly disturbing exception. After faking it for a while, iced water has become normal to me. I hate water – I once went on the radio to defend my water-hating stance and was forced to drink a glass live on air and “react” – and ice is just colder, worse water. Usually, if hydration becomes imperative, I will force down a grudging, tepid thimbleful, as my Yorkshire heritage and poor dentistry dictate.
But now I can’t get enough of the cold stuff. It’s an out-of-body experience to see myself walk to the fridge, fill a glass with ice, top it up with water and drink it. I am currently crunching the cubes with the reckless abandon of a person with perfect tooth enamel – and I am going to do it again. We have got through a whole bag of ice since they left. What is happening? Am I American now? I’ve never been so hydrated – or lost – in my life.