Thanks for sharing your insight, Cerat0n1a! Good point about the Daily Mail. When I asked at work which UK newspapers my coworkers recommended, a senior colleague mentioned a few major ones but said that I should read the Guardian. I think some disparaging remark was made about the Daily Mail at that point. I'm actually reading the book on electronic legal deposit at the library, but I found the excerpts via Google this evening. Mostly I still read news via US sites . . . old habits.
It's interesting that people here seem to be able to tell where in the UK others are from. For the US, I think it's not so easy. It's too big a country, and people move around too much. I think my own accent may be shifting already. When I first arrived, people would ask where in the States I was from as soon as I started to speak, but by this Easter, someone guessed I was a non-native speaker of American English because it sounded like I had studied the language. I've also had people ask if I meant Boston, Lincolnshire, or Boston in the US when I said I was from Boston, though I can't imagine they thought I was originally from there. My mother says I sound exactly the same, but at least I can hear American accents now whereas I never noticed them before.
I don't know how typical my experience is, even for Cambridge. I would say at least half of my interactions here are with people not born and raised in England. I use a foreign language at work, so in order to practise, I only watch online programming in my second language and occasionally in a third language I'm trying to learn. I've opted out of having a television for that reason, though I tend to listen to a few minutes of BBC Radio 2 in the mornings with the clock radio. Mainly when I speak English with English people it's during coffee and lunch breaks at work plus some interactions around church and other activities. Even among my British co-workers, very few are actually from East Anglia. Even being from different regions, my co-workers sound more similar to each other than to some people I've met from London, which isn't that far away.
Two of the words that confused me were coffee and tea. People will say they are having coffee when actually they are drinking tea, and people will talk about tea but really mean an evening meal that doesn't necessarily involve tea at all. Also the same people that drink tea at coffee might drink coffee at tea. I eventually figured out that our morning break is coffee regardless of the actual beverage and that our afternoon break is tea but that dinner is also tea, as well as being dinner or supper. But the afternoon break is sometimes called coffee. And a formal is also dinner.