hate the uk

Whenever I said something negative about living in England, somebody would ask why I didn’t go home. The question arrived in YouTube comments, direct messages and emails, sometimes with people telling me that I didn’t deserve to be here or that England didn’t want me. In my July 2021 account, after five years in the southeast, I answered it.

Why was I still here? Because I loved it. That didn’t mean I liked everything about my life in England, and I wasn’t going to stop talking about the things that bothered me. The positives far outweighed the negatives for me, but the negatives were still real.

A journal of what actually happened

When I started making videos, I wanted a digital journal of my time in England. Especially at the beginning, I didn’t know how long I would stay or what would happen, and everything felt temporary. Having a way to record what I was going through mattered to me.

I also disliked the travel and expat content that showed only the good parts. I found the exciting experiences and lovely, carefully chosen photos misleading when they were presented as the whole experience of living abroad. If somebody was watching because they were interested in moving to England, I didn’t want to tell them that everything here was wonderful and they would have no problems.

I wanted to include the exciting things and the boring things, the adventures and the naps. Talking about a difficult or confusing experience was part of that. Those were things that had actually happened to me, and leaving them out would have changed the picture I was giving people.

A summer complaint is still a summer complaint

There had been wonderful experiences here, and I felt I’d grown a lot as a person. There were also things that drove me crazy or were hard to deal with. I could talk about those things while still loving the country I was living in.

Air conditioning was one example. Each summer I complained about English homes not having it, but that complaint didn’t mean I hated my entire life here. Neither did complaining about football fans screaming in the streets at night when I was trying to sleep. Those particular things didn’t suit me.

For me, the good parts of living in England outweighed those frustrations by a long way. I knew somebody else might have a different balance, because an experience that suited me wouldn’t necessarily suit every other foreigner. I still couldn’t pretend the negatives weren’t there just because I was still living here.

What if somebody criticised Canada?

An email asked how I’d feel about watching a foreigner in Canada criticise Canada. My answer was good for them. Even just talking about everyday life, I didn’t think Canada was perfect, and I didn’t think it was fair to say a foreigner couldn’t express that opinion.

From some of the angry feedback I received, I got the impression that I was supposed to be grateful for living in England and therefore wasn’t allowed to say anything negative. It seemed as though British people could complain about the UK, while being foreign meant I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t agree with that, and I was going to keep saying what I thought.

The people telling me to leave were a minority

I knew that most of the British people watching my videos didn’t feel that way. The majority of people I’d interacted with on the channel had been funny, supportive and kind, and I appreciated them being there. The people telling me to go home were thankfully a small part of the response.

Those negative comments could still feel very loud, especially when somebody sent the message directly or emailed it to me. I thought it was worth saying that they existed alongside the lovely responses. I wasn’t going to cut all the difficult experiences out of my videos to avoid hearing from that minority.

Watch my original answer to the leave-the-UK question.