American man sparks debate after arguing that ‘all of England is near London'
There are few things more likely to spark a debate on the internet than an American offering up an opinion on the UK.
It wasn't so long ago that we were going through that whole thing about takeaways where Americans were complaining about delicious dishes.
Now there's been another transatlantic kerfuffle which has got the keyboard warriors heading for the trenches after an American said 'all of England is just a suburb of London' on TikTok.
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Let's hop over the whole debate around the gravitational pull London exerts on the rest of England as that's not what's on the table here.
Instead this is a discussion about distance as an American TikToker stitched part of a video from a Brit saying that Americans always ask if where you're from is 'near London'.
Melody Snook's video said she was from Bournemouth and it wasn't near London, but another American hopped in to say 'it is though' and started making merry with the maps.
He argued that since Bournemouth is little over two hours drive from London it's close, and said this was because he was from Florida and it would take about 13 hours for someone to drive all the way across it.
Calculating that it'd take about half this time just to get from London to Berwick-upon-Tweed, he concluded that the 'whole country is near London' and declared that 'all of England is just a suburb of London'.
His comments, much like the creation of the universe, have made a lot of people angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Brits were lining up to tell him how wrong he was, and many others pointed out that a sense of closeness was 'relative to the size of the country'.
One said that the US perspective on distance might be a bit skewed by their country being 'the size of a continent'.
Someone else said that the US was 'bigger, emptier and everything is more spread out' in a way you just don't see in England, which helped fuel people's notions of how far a distance had to be for it to be a long way away.
"By that standard Paris is a suburb of London. It's closer than Berwick," a third commented.
Another chipped in with the saying: "In America, 100 years is a lot but a hundred miles is nothing. In England, 100 years is nothing but 100 miles is a lot."
While the Brits were defending their definition of distance and pointing out that the Americans had a country a continent-wide, folks on the other side of the pond were declaring that 'all of the UK is a quick weekend trip'.
Joe Harker