GUEST VOCALS: JL Williams on nationality

GROWING up in America, my notion of Britain had to do with policemen being called "bobbies" and double-decker buses. I dwelled on romantic images of TE Lawrence riding his motorbike through roads lined with towering hedges and of Sherlock Holmes traipsing about misty fields with a magnifying glass.

Newsnight and EastEnders fascinated me when I first arrived in the United Kingdom. I'd never seen a TV news programme where people talked so intelligently, objectively and with such varied opinions before, and I'd never seen a soap opera where everyone wasn't beautiful and fake.

It was recently revealed that the number of foreign nationals who became British this year is up 7% on the previous 12 months - I'm one of them .But why did I want to become British?

So much in American life, under the guise of freedom, is geared toward institutionalising the American dream, in repressing people's individuality and independent voices until the culture is forced to split between good and evil; the well-off and the down-trodden; the religious and the doomed; the gun-toters and the freedom fighters; the educated and the dispossessed.

I love the shock I still experience when I hear British people expressing their opinions in public. The other night as I was celebrating my new status as a British citizen with an Irishman and a Scotsman, an Englishman at the next table joined the conversation and added his tuppence-worth about Scottish independence.

In coming to Britain my own status for years as a self-exiled person, as an "other" in Britain, felt wonderfully freeing.

Now that I am not only an American citizen who grew up pledging allegiance to the American flag every morning but a British citizen who has promised to faithfully support the monarch and sworn loyalty to the United Kingdom, is it a divided allegiance I bear or a doubled allegiance?

We live in a world where borders are increasingly restricted and the sense of real freedom I have to live, work in and explore not only the United States and Britain but the European Union is extraordinary though having finally become British I have no plans to move just yet.

JL Williams is a British American poet who runs a cabaret called Neue Liebe which is on tonight at the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh