My friends and I were rowing slowly down a narrow river into a dark forest, surrounded by murky water, beset by pesky insects, and ducking under overhanging branches, when we faced a truly British dilemma.

We didn’t have a corkscrew.

Suddenly, the horror of what lay ahead of us paled in comparison to the piece of hardware we had left behind. We were partaking in an activity that the English call ‘punting’ while studying abroad in Oxford last quarter. Though it sounds like something better suited for an undersized football player or a frat boy who has had too much to drink, the kind of punting that we were doing involves guiding yourself along a shallow river, using a long metal pole to push off the bottom.

It is a textbook British leisure activity. You lean back, consume alcoholic beverages and soak up the sun while floating down a river at a snail’s pace, ideally wearing deck shoes and scarves.

But we were not relaxed. Instead, we were desperately trying to use any means possible to get our bottle open. We asked every boat that we passed if they were carrying one, and received merely a continuous stream of grimaces and lines like “No, I’m afraid not.”

Finally, desperate for the sacred contents of our bottle — we needed to relax! — we decided to try and smash the neck open against a concrete wall along the river’s edge. We hit the bottle against the edge of the wall, delicately at first, gradually with more and more force, sending shards of cement flying. Eventually, we wedged it in a crevice, and I stepped on it as hard as I could, using all the pent-up frustration that from not being able to open it in the first place.

Predictably, the bottle exploded, sending wine and glass fragments into the bottom of the boat.

That was one of the many times I realized that relaxing in England is hard work. It is a time-honored skill, honed and refined over the generations. Pushing a boat down a river with a long stick is only calming once you know how to do it. In the hands of an inexperienced punter, the experience can be a disaster; running into other boats and getting caught under overhanging branches are commonplace.

On the surface, you couldn’t ask for a more calm, polite, thoughtful people. This is true of most British. But as often as not, under those bemused, seemingly untroubled expressions lies a twitching bundle of nerves.

Sometimes, you get the impression that their codes of behavior are more important than the situations they’re designed to prevent. An audience member’s cell phone started to ring in the middle of a play that we went to around the beginning of the term, and it seemed like everyone in the audience turned around to shush this person and mutter things about the indecency of leaving your cell phone on. Their attempts to silence the cell phone, of course, drowned out the actors.

I think it has something to do with the queen. The society deifies a few royals who are nothing if not polite. Is that a problem? I don’t think so. I enjoyed the British charm, as well as the fact that they value their leisure time so much, they go to great lengths to make sure that it everyone minds their manners and stays cool.

I found that, as a California kid, I could relate to their need for relaxation. There is a lot of common ground between Californians and the British on that front. We, too, have a leader who is allowed to occupy his position for reasons that have nothing to do with politics (in Arnold’s case, his ability to sum up big issues in simple, declarative sentences like “To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say, Don’t be economic girlie men!”)

Ninety-nine percent of the time, surfing is just as monotonous punting, except without the alcohol. And I’m not just saying that because people would sing the opening music to the OC to us, not knowing where in America we were from but hoping that it would be California.

(As a strange-but-true side point, one of the colleges in Oxford actually had a surf team that, as far as I could figure out, would go to the coast and talk about what it would be like if they had waves.)

We do, however, value relaxation for different reasons. English cities drip with history. Why don’t you do something that will last for 3,000 years? they seem to be saying. Under that kind of pressure, who wouldn’t give up and go for a punt instead?

In California, on the other hand, there is little that has lasted for longer than 50 years. The attitude here? There will always be time to make your mark. And besides, soon enough, someone with more money than you will buy your property, tear it down and build something better.

Maybe you don’t agree with me. Maybe you think that England and California are not all that similar. But I think we want to be, and that’s got to count for something.