On the 23rd of April, Barack Obama, President of the United States of America (fanfare!) issued a warning to us British that at the coming referendum we should vote to remain in the EU.  Reactions have been many and varied: some of these can be found in this article from Reuters.

One most ill-advised reactions, though, came when

Boris Johnson slaps down ‘part-Kenyan’ Barack Obama over Brexit push


claiming that he had had an “ancestral dislike” of the British empire because he was a “part-Kenyan president.”

This may have been a massive faux pas.  Be that as it may, it is almost certainly wrong! wrong! wrong! (as Bob the Killer Goldfish shouted while trying to educate his followers.)

Referring to President Obama’s Wikipedia biography:

[His parents] married in Wailuku on Maui on February 2, 1961, and separated when, in late August 1961, Obama's mother moved with their newborn son to attend the University of Washington in Seattle for a year.

So it would be a very strange turn of events if his mother had not been the one that almost exclusively influenced the young Barack.

On looking this up, I was immediately reminded of how Maurice Wilkins received the sudden announcement, after less than a year of marriage to his American wife Ruth, that she was divorcing him (and would take their young son with her.)  Wilkins being the man who, along with Watson and Crick, received the Nobel Prize Medicine and Physiology in 1962 “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material”

When I was much younger, one idea going around about Americans in the mid 20th Century was that they were “always divorcing”.  Perhaps this came through news of film stars, but I am sure that much of that was the way his marriage to Wallace Simpson had forced the abdication of King Edward VIII.

That is a very small and biassed sample indeed for forming an impression of a whole nation.  And however things may have been then, today I expect there is hardly any difference between Americans and Brits in this regard.  Except for one thing: in America, people appear to be more matter-of-fact and casual about it.  (That again, though, may be an impression generated by the media.)

Though with that Nobel Prize in mind, I still cannot help wondering: “or is it something in their DNA?”