I sometimes confuse the history of others for my own

In one form or another, I’ve had America beamed into my living room nearly every day since I was a small child.

I know their history, their politics, their pop culture and their legal system (perhaps somewhat exaggerated in cheesy television dramas) better than any other country besides my own. Last year I followed the US presidential race with an almost obsessive interest. And I was not the only one; all over the world, the US presidential election is followed like an international sport, a form of political entertainment more glamorous and glossy than most.

When Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008 he might have been president of the world for all the jubilation that greeted his entry to the White House.

In fact, my favourite television series of all time, Mad Men, is an entirely metaphorical exploration of the collective American psyche during last century’s “most transformative decade”: the 1960s.

I follow that with even more insatiability. It’s a strange form of remembrance for a period I never even experienced myself.

In the latest season, History has intruded more heavily on Mad Men than ever before, the past few episodes cataloguing major news events of the late 1960s: the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, race riots in Chicago and New York.

And it made me realise that my nostalgia is not limited purely to that long past ten-year period of time, but an entire cultural identity, which, upon further reflection, seems completely misplaced on my part.

That’s their history; but is it mine?

If I think of the two countries to which I owe my dual heritage, England and South Africa, neither shared wholly in that American experience. Sure. They were not immune to the aesthetic excesses of the 1960s, such as fashion and music, both of which seem to have had global purchase. But did the individualistic, assertive identity politics of 1960’s liberal America spread as virally?

South Africa, politically at least, seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. And the United Kingdom was managing serious post-war decline — hardly an exuberant coming out period for either nation.

But then again, I am only informed of these grand narratives through historical recollection not direct experience.

Who do these grand historical narratives really belong to? The individual’s idiosyncratic accounts of life are always obscured in such sweeping, neatly packaged parcels of history.

I think of my own chronology. How I came to be here on this continent at this time.

In the late 1890s a middle class, brewer’s son from London, seeking adventure, joins the British merchant navy, sails halfway around the world and then jumps ship in Cape Town. He travels to Swaziland and meets my great, great grandmother. In the early 1960s, a young English man serving in the RAF meets a young Swazi woman. My grandmother. And I inch closer to existence.

A boy is born and decades later, as a man, meets a woman in the north of England. My parents. Then me. This is how I came to be here now, an invisible thread of history woven inextricably into the present day stretching much further back than memory can truly serve.

Do I subsume this smaller tale of individuals (more significant to me) into the larger one (less significant) of nations?

What is it that I watch Mad Men for? For tales of these lone persons and their struggles against time, age, failure, loss and eternity

So, I suppose, if the 1960s really was the decade of the individual then those seeds blew far beyond their American soil and after decades of dormancy in infertile soil have now sprouted green shoots.