The other day I was wearing my winter coat buttoned up to my neck when I walked past a girl in orange fake tan, a vest and flip-flops. We gave each other a look which said, “Seriously?”.

Indeed, the thing that has most publicly betrayed my recent expat status in the last few weeks has been my attachment to my coat while other Brits strip off, desperately keen to use their summer clothes for whatever limited period of availability there may be.

So while newspapers have screamed about heat waves, I’ve been the one walking around in at least two extra layers.

I know it's unBritish to ooze enthusiasm for your surroundings but I can't help it

I didn’t find the recent spell of warmth hot. Hot to me is now 40 degree heat and 80 percent humidity.

Hot is having to have rugby training drills explained indoors in the air conditioning before going outdoors to complete them to save people from standing in the heat and running the risk of hyperthermia.

Hot is having to wait inside in the air conditioning while you sacrifice someone to man the barbecue outside.

Hot is leaving your office at 10pm at night and being hit by a mist of delicious warm, clammy air as you hear the cicadas clattering and start working out how soon you can locate a glass of gin and tonic to enjoy outside.

A friend who moved to England after spending his early childhood in Hong Kong told me that he needed a hot water bottle every night for his first year.

I moved back in November and a lot of people said, “What a shame you’re arriving back in the winter”. It may have seemed a bad time, but if you are moving back from China I can’t recommend it enough.

For a start, it didn’t feel like Britain really had a winter now that I’m used to what Shanghai gets thrown at it-  temperatures around 0 degrees and humidity which makes it feel much colder. It doesn’t really feel like we get weather here at all to be honest now, just middling clement temperatures with the odd bit of extra drizzle or extra sun here and there.

It doesn’t even rain properly. I asked a friend of mine to send me a poncho from Shanghai for riding my bike in the rain but I haven’t yet had cause to break it out. We are technically in a drought- a world away from the plum season in Shanghai when it can rain torrentially every day for weeks and you don’t leave the house without wellies and a poncho.

I spent the winter wearing my thick Shanghai duvet coat on the days it was closest to 0 degrees while Brits wore thin coats and jackets and complained of being cold. I revelled in the fact that my office and home had central heating- most Shanghai buildings do not. And I felt the warmest I have in the winter for years, recalling days when I went to bed in Shanghai in a woolly hat and gloves and with heat patches imported from Korea stuck to my pyjamas.

I am enjoying the spring with a renewed appreciation. I don’t think I ever truly took on board how beautiful London looks with its blossoms. In Shanghai, people take day trips out of town to line up and look at the spring flowers alongside thousands of others, posing Romantically next to blooms. Here, they are on every street and every corner and people just walk past them. I have taken pictures of them as a tourist would.

I can’t help it. I know it’s weird to appreciate your home town. I also know it will be weird if I don’t lose my winter coat at some stage this summer. After all, nothing says “outsider” in Britain more than being positive and  keeping your clothes on when the sun comes out.

“How are you adjusting?” is something I am being asked a lot at the moment. I’m four months into my re-entry in England and approaching the psychologically critical six-month point expats talk of. Tales of repatriation meltdowns always tend to begin, “Well, she was fine for the first six months and then she…”

a) Realised she had changed too much to ever be able to live in England again,

b) Realised England hadn’t changed at all

or

c) Remembered she had left the gas on.

I tell people that I was lucky I started a new job two days after I came back. I tell them I am loving the job and that I am enjoying the simple pleasure of not having to miss my oldest friends and my family.

Oddly, I have felt the most vindicated in my decision to return home when moments come around that are now everyday.

When I was in Shanghai last summer on a warm evening sitting on my balcony 25 storeys up chatting to my friends about my reasons for leaving, I never could have pinpointed the moments that would truly reward my decision.

I knew that Shanghai and I had reached the type of juncture that you come to with a man when you have to decide to either get married or break up. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with Shanghai, but I still love it.

I knew that I wanted to put down roots for a while in England, be near my loved ones and move on to better career prospects.

But since I have been home, I have been made acutely aware of what I was missing. When you have a one-hour Skype call home each week, you miss spending a few post-dinner hours chatting about what your grandparents did during the war or your mother’s first boyfriend. You miss teaching your sister how to perform a London emergency three-point turn ahead of her driving test. You miss the afternoon you spend trying on hats for a wedding you will actually be able to attend. And you weren’t even aware these moments were there to be missed.

There are things I miss about Shanghai but they are not serious enough for me to feel that I will need to run away in two months’ time. Perhaps your first few months home are the most precious, when you have a unique new perspective on things you previously took for granted. Perhaps I’m just still blinkered by the range of lunch options I now have and the fact that shoes in England actually fit me. Who knows? But at the moment I may be the only person in London who can safely say they feel well-adjusted.

Life at the age of 32 seems to revolve around who’s trying, who’s tried, who’s succeeded and who’s failed. It’s all pretty trying in itself for a single girl, even more so as such talk is often accompanied by martyr-like sobriety.

When a British girl refuses a drink there’s only one explanation, and it isn’t antibiotics or Weight Watchers. 

So while three months ago I moved countries- from China to Britain- it feels at the moment as if I swapped planets.

When I used to meet up with girlfriends for dinner four years ago before I left, we would put the world to rights over a bottle or two talking about things that made our waiter blush. Talk was about who was doing what, how often and with whom, with a side serving of career ambition and holiday gossip.

Now, they nurse glasses of water, talk in weeks and speak of flexi-time and career breaks. It feels like a seismic shift.

But why? It isn’t as if I don’t have friends in Shanghai with children. But the difference is that in my expat life I had a range of friends of all ages- an assortment of people from 18-year-old students to high-powered executives in their 40s who I could have fun with. We all had in common the fact that we were living abroad and having the time of our lives.

“What do you miss most about China?” is something I am being asked quite often. And, if I’m honest it’s not so much the great standard of living or the satisfaction of living in a country that’s an international success story, it’s the unique group of friends I had of different ages and races who I got to see on a weekly basis.

In Shanghai it was much easier to meet with people. The same people tended to go the same places and enjoy being a big gang. It was also much more convenient to travel in the city and most people could afford to live centrally. On top of that, most of my friends were connected with the rugby club. In the early days we would throw barbecues that 40 people came to with one night’s notice. In London, the style is to meet small pockets of people separately and have meetings scheduled in weeks beforehand. People rarely stray out of their groups and a week’s notice for an event suddenly seems spontaneous.

It’s a big social adjustment that I’m encountering, swapping pints for pregnancy tests, nightclubs for nurseries and boat races for breast pumps.

Still, I’ve learnt more about the female anatomy in the last few weeks than I ever thought I could.

…. any more than Scotland is the UK. It’s part of it, with similar customs and cultures, but that’s it. There is far more to China than Hong Kong.

“How do you say ‘Happy New Year again in Chinese?’”, I heard someone say last week. After mimicking a supposedly Chinese accent, someone replied, “Kung hei fat choy”.

I could feel my blood start to simmer. ‘No, that’s Cantonese. It’s xin nian kuai le which the billion mainlanders say,’ I said to myself. I wasn’t in the mood to play the ex-China expat card. Hey, it’s good enough, isn’t it, that someone knew how to say it in at least one of the languages and dialects that make up the People’s Republic of China and its Special Administrative Regions, of which Hong Kong is one?

Not really. It feels to me that the average educated Chinese person knows far more about the UK than the average educated British person does about China. This was borne out by the number of times I was challenged on the definitions of Great Britain and the UK while living in China. “Scotland isn’t a country though,” a colleague would always argue when I tried to explain how our “nations” were united. “It’s complicated,” I said. “A bit like you and Taiwan”.

It doesn’t help that the cultural references beamed into people’s living rooms come via American or Australian-born Chinese chefs plying food of southern Chinese or vaguely southeast Asian descent. It feels to me that they have watered down the cuisine the mainland offers to completely unauthentic stir fries with lemon grass and coconut.

When will people get taught about the potato and aubergine dishes from north-east China, the beautifully spicy food from Sichuan and the lamb kebab and noodle dishes of the north-west? That’s just for starters. When will people stop thinking Chinese food is sweet and sour gloop? I wasn’t served a prawn cracker once on the Chinese mainland.

Of course, there are people in the UK who are extremely well informed, but by and large the ignorance frustrates me.

With Hong Kong being a former British colony, it’s unsurprising that its culture has become an entry point for people to understand the vast republic, but I hope that as China plays a bigger part in the UK’s economy, people learn it’s only a fraction of the full story.