Season 3 of Ted Lasso was airing back in the spring of 2023 when I was flat-hunting online and researching the many London neighborhoods on offer. For the uninitiated, the Apple TV+ series stars Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso, an American college football coach hired to helm an English football (i.e., soccer) team in outer London: AFC Richmond. It seemed uncanny, then, that Richmond showed up at the top of several search results for the safest neighborhood in England’s capital. Richmond also ranked first on a list of the happiest places to live in Great Britain. For better or worse, I’ve been a believer of signs and omens for as far back as I can remember, and this was all the nudge I needed to solidify my plan to break from life as I knew it and enjoy a sneaky year in London. By then, I was an unapologetic disciple of Coach Lasso, a folksy, virtuous can-do peddler who defies staggering odds and leads his team, and everyone else around him, to heart-swelling growth and success. Full of his positive mindset, I admitted to my husband of 28 years that I wanted to leave San Francisco and live in London for a year while our daughter attended graduate school there. In keeping with Ted Lasso’s theme of the ultimate generosity of the human spirit, he supported what he took to calling my midlife-plus crisis.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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My Irish citizenship allows me to live and work in the U.K., and after only the requisite credit vetting, I was able to secure a one-year lease on a two-bedroom flat in Richmond that was, serendipitously, just a 15-minute walk from Ted Lasso Land. The lease began a month earlier than suited my daughter, and so I gleefully flew ahead to Richmond solo, the hostile, bone-shaking turbulence notwithstanding. I spent those first nights in my southwest London dream destination, a.k.a. an empty, somewhat dilapidated flat, battling a spiteful air bed that refused to stay inflated. Those early days, I focused on sourcing furniture and other necessities from charity shops and moving sales, upcycling much of what I found with paint, knobs, and contact paper—makeovers that I discovered I thoroughly enjoyed. On the sixth day, I awoke feeling freer of jet lag, the toil of unpacking and furnishing, and my angst about the costly, possibly reckless transatlantic move. After a rushed breakfast of buttered rye toast, scrambled eggs, baked beans, and greasy pork sausages (when in England), I eagerly prepared to set out for the cobblestoned alleyway that houses Ted Lasso’s fictional abode at 91/2 Paved Court, just steps away from his fictional local pub, the Crown & Anchor.
I exited the flat, almost colliding with my upstairs neighbors, an understated family of six, and breezily announced my plan, which was met with blank expressions.
“We haven’t seen it,” Anna, the fresh-faced mother of four, said, taking some of my air out and recalling my flattened, willful air bed.
I would later find that few of the locals I encountered had watched Ted Lasso. Some hadn’t even heard of the show, despite the daily flocking of largely American tourists (converts I called Lassoites) to the area now enshrined by the series. I pressed on, recovering my high spirits and speed-walking along Kew Road. Almost at my destination, I passed Little Green Richmond, the redbrick Richmond Theatre, and Richmond Green proper, where a cricket match was underway—my first-ever live experience of the sport. I might have dallied longer with the bat-swinging players if I hadn’t been hell-bent on fictional pursuits. Despite my eagerness to visit Ted’s home and drinking establishment (the former is in reality 11 Paved Court, and the pub is named the Prince’s Head), the first sights I felt pulled to were the two red phone boxes in front of the 18th-century dual-named public house, still-working booths of telecommunication that would be readily familiar to Ted Lasso fans. Beneath lazy sunshine and a half-hearted azure sky, I smiled knowingly at the brightly clad fortysomething trio snapping photos in front of the currant-red landmarks. I offered to take a shot of them together, and they gushed thanks, their accents and Tic Tac–white teeth betraying their nationality. The three Chicagoans sang out “Believe” as I captured them, their grins strings of jubilant candy. The verb “Believe” is the core Ted Lasso tenet—believe in ourselves, in one another, and in the best of love and life.
“Are you Canadian?” the man with the gray-spliced beard asked in response to my hybrid Dublin-California accent.
“How long are you here for?” the woman in the enthusiastic gold-yellow dress asked.
“I’ve just moved here,” I said, still with a sense of the surreal.
“We’re so jealous,” said their companion with bloodshot eyes below a baseball cap the blue of an AFC Richmond jersey.
In their wake, I entered the closest phone box and lifted the black plastic receiver. “Hello? Hello?”
In that heady moment, the possibilities for who or what, over the next 12 months, might answer my elated salutation seemed manifold.
During my first sticky days in London (the humidity, the challenges of an international move), the Tube’s safety warning for those entering and exiting the train—to “mind the gap”—only amplified my newcomer’s anxiety. The cautionary recording nipped at my lingering fears around having carved a year out of my life to trade the United States for the United Kingdom, mostly to indulge my inner Anglophile. Had I been foolish, selfish, in exchanging San Francisco for Richmond, this highly desirable nature-and-architecture-drenched borough steeped in British monarchical history and further iconized by Ted Lasso? A show that I didn’t readily admit had influenced my move, one that would put a sizable dent in our family savings? But I’d reasoned that if my husband and I were going to fork out the money for our daughter to study in London, why not pay the relatively modest extra amount to allow me to join her and satisfy my long-held desire to, if not live, at least stay for a spell in London? I hoped the returns on that payout, and leaving my husband, friends, and communities for 12 months, would be a new novel manuscript, my sated Anglophilia, and increased personal happiness.
I can trace my fixation with England back to girlhood. Ironic, given that I was born in Ireland, into a family and republic that predominantly wanted a reunited nation free of British rule. I blame my initial infatuation on Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Whenever I wasn’t reading every book those prolific, imaginatively overloaded British authors wrote, I was channeling their protagonists and terrorizing everyone within earshot with my English accent and affectations. Another contributing factor to my odd obsession is the fact that I was born twice—at least according to the “recovered memories” of a past life that I unearthed during hypnosis almost two decades ago. If my subconscious is to be believed, I was an English man of some pedigree in a previous century, falsely accused of a crime (details still repressed) and grotesquely beheaded at the Tower of London. Suffice to say, it was not a single, clean slice. Thoughts of my supposed former self, and of England possibly being my prior home—a return to which might fulfill my lifelong ache to belong, fully, contentedly—ratcheted up during the COVID-19 pandemic. During those strange months of lockdown languish, I devolved into a couch adhesion and devoured every British-centric TV show and film available, including the much-needed optimism-laden Ted Lasso.
Two weeks after my arrival in Richmond, I received a chilling phone call. Bad news that drove deeper a painful lesson I’d already learned several times over as an immigrant of three decades: It is excruciating to be 5,000 miles away during a family emergency. Our daughter had been rushed to the hospital in San Francisco after experiencing a suspected stroke. Doctors swiftly ruled that out and eventually diagnosed an extremely rare case of neuro-invasive COVID-19. The virus had infected her central nervous system. I traveled home on the next flight, the length of the journey torturous, and arrived at the ICU to find several doctors robed in cricket players’ white surrounding her bed like a horseshoe, one saying that genetics researchers had requested a vial of her spinal fluid, to study her and the disease’s particularities. Precious liquid that also shows she’s made of her dad and me. Of stardust. While she lay unconscious, my husband and I played her favorite Taylor Swift songs and closed our hands around hers, saying her name, which means “beautiful,” which means “little poet,” and willing her back to us.
Amazingly, she recovered sufficiently to fly with me to Heathrow and to attend her first day of classes at University of the Arts London. Over the next several months, my primary role and great honor was taking care of her. As she regained her strength and immersed herself in her studies, I returned to drafting my London-set novel and getting my fix of all things English. Ted Lasso Land remained a place I frequented, albeit more in passing. Photos of Ted’s face atop wooden sticks that looked out from several of the shops never ceased to amuse me. One boy, no more than six and with an accent undoubtedly ripened in the Bronx, pointed at such a photo inside the barber shop on Paved Court and pleaded with his parents to allow him to get his tawny curls cut by “Ted Lasso’s hair guy.” When his mom agreed, a passerby clapped. There is, of course, so much more to Richmond than Ted Lasso fever, including Kew, a village that is also a 15-minute walk from the flat. Kew Gardens, home of the largest and most diverse botanical collections in the world, became my favorite place ever. Who knew I was an unabashed tree hugger? At Roebuck, a pub on picturesque Richmond Hill, the vegan Wellington, bursting with butternut squash and accompanied by the Argentinean malbec, was among my most preferred meals. Matinee plays at the Orange Tree Theatre, at one end of Richmond’s high street, became a memorable way to spend Sundays, followed by a stroll to Richmond Bridge and alongside the silver, glittering Thames, a breathtaking area of riverside also featured on Ted Lasso.
Even amid so much beauty, pleasure, and nourishment, the ills and ugliness of the world bled through. Richmond’s storybook streets are also dotted with people who are unhoused and mentally ill, some emaciated, injured, and strung out. Community newsletters and neighborhood groups detail increasing crime. Protesters call out Brexit, police violence, racism and inequality, genocide, and the climate crisis. Meanwhile, I was also dealing with my own health issues: anxiety, COVID, a kidney infection, vertigo, and a major fall that banged up my face and various body parts, requiring several weeks for recovery. Overwhelmingly, though, my 12 months in Ted Lasso Land were a humbling and enriching experience.
Before I left San Francisco, my husband said, “If you go to London for a year, you won’t come back.”
I have come back. But in a way, he was right. I am not the same person on my return. While I’m someone still basking in the great privilege of up and leaving home for a year and realizing a long-deferred dream, I’ve seen that the best and worst of society, of ourselves, is to be found everywhere. Even in a place touted as among the safest and happiest. What I didn’t know at the outset of this past year but learned in the process is that the Ted Lasso way—an ethos of fierce love for ourselves, for one another, for life, for our planet—is something we can take with us anywhere. And with it, I believe I can at long last find a sense of belonging everywhere.
In the days before the lease on our flat ended, I returned to the two shouty-red phone boxes in front of the Prince’s Head. The area was thick with people, and I needed to wait more than 20 minutes for my turn to enter the same booth I’d ducked into at the beginning of my stay. This time I lifted the receiver with a leaden movement and spoke with a tremble. “Goodbye. Thank you.”•
Ethel Rohan is the author of the novels Sing, I and The Weight of Him and the short story collection In the Event of Contact. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, Rohan lives in San Francisco.
