It is amazing how much past you can accumulate without any effort at all, and I admit to being shocked when my publisher drew my attention to the fact that this year would be the 20th anniversary of Notes from a Small Island. When I wrote it my wife and I had just taken a rather abrupt decision to move to the States. It was never the intention to go permanently, but we thought five years or so would give our children the chance to experience another country and so the book was a kind of farewell to Britain, the country where I had made a very happy home for about 20 years. My journey would be a valedictory tour.

But simply organising that tour was not as easy as I had anticipated. For most countries there is an obvious route. In Australia you would go around the outside and then dart into the middle to get to Uluru. I don’t imagine anyone has ever done an equivalent book about the United States that doesn’t start on one coast and finish on the other. But in Britain there is no natural way to progress. Wherever you are you can go so many different directions. It seemed to me that Dover was the right place to start because that was where I first made landfall. From there I went naturally to London. But where next? Keep going west through Oxford and on to Cornwall? But then how do you get back to East Anglia? It is all kind of messy, and so the book has no logical progression other than being very generally from south to north.

Looking back, most people seem to remember Notes from a Small Island as a much more genial and affable survey than it actually is. To my great surprise readers are usually very forgiving and you can be pretty outspoken about their home towns – although that is not always the case. I do know that Manchester is a great place and I realise it is my fault, not its. But we never quite connected and I think Manchester has always been a little bit prickly about that despite most of my barbs being intended to be humorous.

If I had a model it was someone like Clive James who was doing his amusing travelogues for the Observer, but in general the convention was for travel books to be extremely serious and delivered with an air of omniscience. Not only did these authors know everything about the culture they were travelling in, they also gave the impression that they could actually speak Icelandic. My experience was not like that at all. Most of us going somewhere new spend a lot of our time confused, slightly unnerved and even worried. We’re not quite sure that we are on the right train, we’re slightly mystified by the menus and not entirely confident we’re going to enjoy eating what we’ve ordered. I tried to reflect what travel was really like for me and that’s where the comedy comes in as well as allowing people to recognise themselves not as supremely assured but more as slightly befuddled travellers.

The response to the book was very welcome, but also felt a little disproportionate and for a while quite overwhelming. I was treated as if I had an enormous fund of wisdom and for a time Britain decided I was the go-to American. Whether it was presidential election races or the Columbine high school shootings, I’d get a call from Newsnight or the Today programme. I tried not to become a spokesman for the United States, but as a result of my engagement with the UK I was invited to do other things which I was very pleased to do. Being approached to be the chancellor of Durham University was a huge honour. Being president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England was something very dear to my heart.

I hadn’t thought much about the book for most of the intervening two decades, and when it was suggested I write about the UK again I was a little dubious. But if I tried not to retrace my steps maybe I could avoid too much “it was so much better in the old days when Salisbury had second-hand bookshops” and so I set out. In The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island I generally managed to favour new places – I’d always wanted to go to Skegness – and it did give me a chance to compare then and now. In one sense there were differences, and not just that I was younger and slenderer first time round. Food and service are both much better than when I first came here. Attitudes have also changed mostly for the better, although not always. There is this paradox that Britain has never been so rich and the amount of money and possessions most people have cannot be compared with what people had when I first arrived. And yet the country behaves as if it has never been so poor. The refrain you constantly hear is “we can’t afford it”. It feels like we are permanently in this age of austerity in which we not only can’t afford large things – housing for all that need it, cottage hospitals in every town – but also small things such as flower beds on roundabouts. All these things the country had when I first came here, and when we were all much poorer.

My sincere hope is that those are just passing details that might change again, because my journeys mostly reveal that if you consider the fundamentals – the landscape, the countryside, the layout – then Britain is still essentially the same place. Equally, the culture and character is much the same in that the things that appealed to me about Britain when I first came here – the sense of humour, the orderliness, that the place is basically a decent, sane, well‑run and admirable society – are all by and large as intact, as they were when when I first set foot on these shores more than four decades back.