"Do you take coffee? / I take tea, my dear" always struck this Anglophone ear as one of the worst lyrics ever stamped onto vinyl. That it was written by Sting, who went on to give us "Desert Rose," fabled marathon sex sessions with a just-okay-looking wifey, and arrogance to beat the band (which was more talented, anyway) -- all that came screaming back to me upon reading A.A. Gill's hilarious essay in Vanity Fair about Englishmen in New York:

If it were just you that the Brits annoyed, I wouldn't really care. What I mind is that they've re-created this Disney, Dick Van Dyke, um-diddle-diddle-um-diddle-I, merry Britain of childish grub and movie clichés, this Jeeves-and-Wooster place of mockery and snobbery, and I'm implicated, by mouth. Made complicit in this hideous retro-vintage place of Spam, Jam lyrics, bow ties, and buggery. These ex-Brits who have settled in the rent-stabilized margins of Manhattan aren't our brightest and our best—they are our remittance men, paid to leave. Not like the other immigrants, who made it here as the cleverest, most adventurous in the village. What you get are our failures and fantasists. The freshly redundant. The exposed and embittered. No matter how long they stay here, they don't mellow, their consonants don't soften. They don't relax into being another local. They become ever more English. Über-Brits. Spiteful, prickly things in worn tweed, clutching crossword puzzles, gritting their Elizabethan teeth, soup-spotted, tomb-breathed, loud and deaf. The most reprehensible and disgusting of all human things; the self-made, knowing English eccentric. Eccentricity is the last resort of the expat. The petit fou excuse for rudeness, hopelessness, self-obsession, failure, and never, ever picking up the check.

Then I remember all the rewarding chats I've had outside many a bar in Brooklyn Heights and Carroll Gardens with crumpled, be-jowled hacks who've told me to drink my beer before it got cold, and just like that -- whiff! -- my nativist pride is gone.