Mild knobby faces, bad teeth and gentle manners

My last hour in Jeddah was spent in complete panic. The family's office mistakenly cancelled my outward journey instead of my return journey (which had been arranged before I quit) and I had to queue up to buy a new ticket. This took ages, and I left a wake of disgruntled tuts as Airport staff rushed me to the front of all the queues and on to the plane. The last Saudis I saw would have seen me as a disorganized, self-important infidel, sweating quite a lot and mispronouncing the Arabic word for 'sorry'.

It's good to be back in the UK, although slightly punishing. I was reunited with alcohol (and friends) on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, and by Easter Sunday my perma-hangover and acute sleep deprivation combined to make a full-on cold. Nevertheless, I'd arranged to meet a guy living in the Surrey Downs who was going to sell me a new bike, and so at about midday my Dad and I set off on a journey into the leafy heart of the homeliest county.

Before we left, I happened to look at Simon Reynold's Energy Flash blog (I've just started reading his book of the same name) and saw this incredibly timely post quoting George Orwell on returning to England after being in a foreign country. I read Imagined Communities when I was in my first year of University and have since blocked all nationalist/patriotic thought from my mind with liberal zeal, but in the face of a beautiful spring day and a village like Shere, how could this be maintained?

Shere: 'classic'

I'm not saying I'm going to start going to the last night of the proms, or even that I think 'Englishness' is a particularly meaningful quality that has any value, but it's hard not to see the avalanche of differences between Jeddah and Surrey as forming what could be described as national characters. My mind links the smooth curve of the sword on the ever-present Saudi flag with palm leaves and Arabic numbers, forming an aesthetic that's wholly distinct from the untidy verdancy of English lemonade-bottle countryside. Unforgiving desert seems to match Islamic asceticism and self-sacrifice in the same way that grey drizzle feels appropriate to a nation of sarcastic grumblers and introverts.

If you start thinking about it enough (too much), the animals of England even seem to 'belong' (in a non-biological sense) and share in this nebulous, half-defined character. Clearly, a childhood spent watching The Animals of Farthing Wood and Watership Down has permanently infected the way I think about the wildlife of the English countryside, but even this doesn't explain away the spectre of Englishness - these were programmes written and produced in English television studios and shown on English television while I was a child in England. The fact that I think of foxes and rabbits as speaking amongst themselves with polite English accents is itself a result of a style of anthropomorphism peculiar to English kids' TV programmes that I was exposed to.

Differences in climate, wildlife, clothing, religion, infrastructure, architecture, history and language hit you hard after even a relatively short absence. It would, of course, be impossible to build an accurate and coherent narrative from the infinite differences between Saudi Arabia and England. And yet your mind can't resist the temptation of giving your experience a name, or even of feeling some kind of affection towards the country that you've just created in your head.