I have visited the United Kingdom many times over the past 47 years and cannot resist looking for the differences each time. This time it had been almost three years.

Sometimes one sees a preview of what is coming in the United States. Other times one sees the British crunching down on a bullet that Americans know they are going to have to bite or see themselves fall behind, perhaps into the post-imperial stage that the United Kingdom is so far into that it scarcely recalls when it was otherwise.

Some aspects of the U.K. are so outrageous that one is forced either to laugh or to cry. The British are particularly adept at putting one at that particular fork in human emotional geography.

There is a five-star play on in London at the moment called "War Horse." It's about the life of a British horse during World War I. Horses were used to mount officers, to pull carts of dead and wounded and to tow artillery pieces. Some wandered off into the no-man's land between the wires to die. The technology of the play -- the horses, mechanical geese, flying vultures -- was a marvel. At the same time the meaninglessness and horrible futility of war conveyed through the suffering of the horses and, almost incidentally, the people, was shocking. One's tears at the end were for the animals and for us, poor ornery people, a very British approach to war and humanity.

In general the British care more about animals than about people. A lost cat made the front page of the U.K.'s most important newspaper. On the other hand, the British police announced that they would no longer enforce the hard-gained law against fox-hunting. It was, they said, a waste of public funds to pursue it (the law, not the foxes). At the same time, there are now foxes visible at night and the early morning in the garden of my stepson's house in North London.

It seemed that more British have grown fat in the past three years. Never mind the comparison with the post-war years when they had undergone the miseries of rationing and had too little to eat.

Another overwhelming fact of modern British life is multiculturalism. One hears every language, including Somali, familiar to me. People are of every color, from the ebony of a truly black African, through Barack Obama and John Boehner, to the stark white of Russians and Icelanders. Language can be a problem. We encountered two Russian bus drivers who didn't know where they were going, only the route they were on.

There is a higher level of tolerance, at least in London, than one would probably experience if a comparably large polyglot, multiracial Lego box of people were dumped in say, Pittsburgh or Toledo.

On the other hand, there are social strains, probably made worse by the competition in the employment and housing markets brought about by the recession. One outbreak of trouble occurred in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, during our stay.

In recent years, Belfast, which in the past was the best-known venue in Northern Ireland for one of the world's last primitive religious wars, pitting Protestants vs. Catholics, has quieted down with the successful conclusion of the so-called Good Friday agreement. But last week a piece of true ugliness occurred as a group of young men, of no apparent political or religious affiliation, attacked families of Romanians, driving them out of their homes and forcing them to seek refuge in churches. The Romanians were in the U.K. a result of the open borders brought about by Romania's accession to the European Union. They had moved to Britain before the recession caused a sharp rise in unemployment.

The economic downturn is showing itself in numerous ways in the U.K., perhaps some good, most bad. The government has announced that the National Health Services budget will have to be cut by $32 billion. Probably on the plus side, the government is considering reopening rail lines and stations closed more than 40 years ago in the name of greenness, saving money and reducing oil consumption.

Newspapers in the United Kingdom still seem alive, if not healthy, although a daily can cost $1.44 a day. Distributors stand outside Underground stations passing out free copies of three not totally abominable dailies, London Lite, Metro and thelondonpaper. Uh oh.

The most frightening prospect for the economy, according to observers I read and talked with, was inflation. The government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on its way down the sewer because the British are tired of the Labor Party and disgusted by all of their politicians' greedy insouciance, has not sloshed money into the British economy with quite the zest of the Obama administration. It has disbursed enough nonetheless to raise the unholy specter of inflation. Everything costs more. A postcard to my relatives and friends in the United States that cost 43 pence three years ago now requires 56 pence.

In general, I still love the candor, humor and artful crudity of the British. The Sunday Telegraph quoted an Iranian calling Iran's elections, a "loathsome charade," language seen rarely in American journals. An American woman accused of being an accessory to murder in Italy is referred to in the British press as "Foxy Knoxy." One Sunday Times color cartoon had Gordon Brown carrying his bloody, chopped-off head under his arm. Another showed Mr. Brown cleaning up a pile of dog waste left by a poodle going out the door of 10 Browning St., the prime minister's official residence. (Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is referred to as former President George W. Bush's poodle.)

The British also are just about to launch a public inquiry into how Mr. Blair got them into Mr. Bush's Iraq war. That will be worth following for Americans as well.

There's a pub called The White Hart, the first to be licensed in London, in 1216, patronized in those days by rogues, highwaymen and people about to be hanged. One could meet there comfortably to follow this story.