RACHEL NEWMAN IS A TALL, BEAUTIFUL DOCTOR. She grew up in a Jewish family, in the affluent Chicago suburb where they filmed and set Home Alone. Although she originally attended the local state school (the filming location for both Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club, I believe), she didn’t find it ‘intellectually challenging’ enough and lobbied her parents to send her to the East Coast boarding school where the Kennedys were educated. They obliged and she later went on to Georgetown University before transferring to Wellesley College in her junior year. She graduated with a degree in art history before going to medical school at Tufts in Boston. She is now an OBGYN resident in Los Angeles…

The fact that I, a bog standard comp-educated two-bit hack from the North of England, consider this woman one of my friends never stops being equally hilarious and ridiculous.

But, as I like to remind her, Rachel picked me.

While I was indulging my obsession with all things American by studying abroad at Wellesley College in the mid-noughties, Rachel was nursing a similar crush on all things ‘British’. I remember being flattered that the girl with the Chanel sunglasses and yoga pants who ate quinoa salads in the canteen wanted to socialise with me, hungover in my pajamas, mashing crisps, American cheese and two slices of bread together while shouting a self-congratulatory ‘Yes!’ at my own efforts.

But it was only when we were somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, driving through a thunderstorm on the way to her family home in June of 2007, when my life story came tumbling out, that I think Rachel first realised that there was not only a British working class, but that I was quite clearly of it. Her Pride and Prejudice fantasy of her new friend evaporated in the storm clouds over the Appalachian mountains.

Nevertheless, Rachel’s loyalty far outweighed her snobbery. Even after I moved back to the UK, graduated into a global recession and the days of Wellesley College had become a long-distance memory, I could count on bi-annual emails from Rachel. They described perfunctory details about how every member of her family was doing with an American precociousness I’ll never master at any age. This was coupled with questions about my career prospects with that quintessentially American, unabashed intrusiveness. She’d always round them off with a slightly self-deprecating anecdote and an old in-joke about our shared love of hip-hop lyrics or one of our old professors.

In the summer of 2013, I lost my job two weeks before the man I had been sleeping with for two years – who had only once called me his girlfriend in the context of asking a bouncer to let him outside to chase me up the street after an argument – decided he wanted to be with someone else. London was unbearably hot and claustrophobic and I felt like my lungs were being crushed by a humid, inescapable sadness. I took my meagre redundancy money and went back to America. I had always heard the cliche that you can’t run away from your problems. It’s not true. You can and I did. But unfortunately, my visa only lasted till the first week of December. Sometimes you can only run away for so long.

So when Rachel invited me to spend Thanksgiving in John Hughes land with her family, I hungrily accepted one last opportunity to drink in twee American culture and smother the dread of my looming repatriation. I hadn’t seen her since I was 21. When I look back on the difference between 21 and 26 now, they seem virtually indistinguishable. But at 26, depression had left me feeling so very old that 21 was a veritable lifetime ago. A mythical bygone era of youth and confidence. God, I hope I’ll never be as old as I was at 26.

I got the Amtrak to Chicago from DC, which took a day and a night. I was to meet Rachel’s father at his office in Northwestern Hospital, where he worked as an oncologist, and he would drive me to O’Hare Airport to collect Rachel before returning to the family home.

I hadn’t given the logistics of this plan much thought until the second I was stood in a hospital that looked like some odd combination of an investment bank and a hotel waiting for Dr. Steven Newman’s secretary to go and get him for me. Suddenly, in that very instant, the whole thing seemed like a bad idea. It had been too long, Rachel was just being polite. I looked down at how scruffy I looked post-long distance train in my cheap parka, jeans and backpack combo.

I’d like to say I need not have worried, as Steven greeted me like a long-lost daughter but, as I quickly remembered, Steven Newman is a man of few words, most of them startlingly blunt and offensive, who is completely unrattled by long awkward silences.

“Elle, I’m going to be about ten minutes, take a seat,” he said in his trademark monotone by way of greeting as I was ushered into his office. He has an uncanny ability to speak without punctuation. Like a child reading aloud.

In my American pop culture universe, he is Rachel Green’s dad, Cher Horowitz’s shouty lawyer father, the upper middle class overbearing patriarch so far removed from my own experiences. He is a Republican. He is rich. I’m pretty sure he is, at best, baffled by his daughter’s friendship with me.

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Catch the rest of this Americana slice in Sheriff Nottingham XV: Black Friday – coming out November 23rd!

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