The Southern Belle chillin' in Jolly Ole England

Well, boys and girls, since Phil didn't know what to write, not being an Englishman in a foreign country any longer, I thought I'd give a little of a Yanks perspective on y'all's neck of the woods! One thing I have to say, right off the bat, is that your weather lives up to every crappy thing I've heard and then some! We were told that the weather had been lovely... until the day before we arrived. Figures! We were greeted by a warm house, for which I was extremely grateful, and bedding was easily found since we were knackered from a longer trip than we expected.

(For those of you back home, 'knackered' means really tired. Don't worry, I'm just tryin' to speak the language here so the natives will understand me.)

The house looked a little sad from having tenants and the garden out back was in horrendous condition due to COMPLETE neglect for 18 months. The house looks like people live here again but the garden is still a jungle. I'm waiting for nice weather, which I've heard may be sometime in April or so... Hope Phil doesn't mind tending it in the cold. I'm sure I have something pressing indoors that needs my undivided attention, at least until the sun comes out!

Speaking of undivided attention, I have continued with my purse, uh, lady's handbag, idea with a new twist. Still using the cigar boxes, but with wine labels that I've had for years and maps of London, the Underground, better known here as the Tube, photos of familiar London sites tweaked on Picasa ( a Photoshop-type program from Google, check it out, I love it) and probably do some other European cities, as well. I've decided that since they're one-of-a-kind works of art, they must be named. The Tube bag is named" Mind the Gap" (Londoners will get this one),"Califonia Dreamin'" is naturally California wines, "Parlez-vous vin francais?" French wines, "In Vino Veritas"for the Italian wines since Italian is still the closest language to Latin, and with those names you should kinda get the idea.

We haven't been sightseeing (Did I mention the weather?) but we have had family and friends over to visit. Phil's sister Jacqui and brother-in-law, Richard accompanied Master Alfie Jake Goddard on his European debut. Alfie was born in August and was a trooper to travel all this way to meet his adoring fans. In honor of my fellow American, I slapped together some good ole cornbread dressing, injected a turkey and made a sweet potato casserole for Thanksgiving dinner. I brought the Cajun injector (that would be like a big syringe) with me from the States and all I can say is thank the Lord for the internet! Did you know that you can make a halfway decent cornbread with DRIED POLENTA? There was even a recipe for injector liquid! Who knew it was only butter, lemon juice and chicken stock? Anyway, it was a great feast with loved ones so it was a nice way to begin the time here.

We also threw a party for the neighbors here on Foxwood Road. Between the food that I made, the back-up food that Phil bought in case we didn't have enough, 14 bottles of wine, several cans of beer, and the 16 or 17 people that we had in and out, Phil has decided that he likes having parties...so I'm going to show the Brits what we eat on New Years Day to start things off in the right direction, as well as help us revive from the previous night's festivities.

We share an evening with fanily tomorrow, then head for Lewes (that's pronouced Lewis) to visit a couple that Phil's known since his days at Cambridge, home Friday to go down to the pub with some of the neighbors, then Saturday morning, bright and early, we're headed to Leeds about 200 miles north of here. It's a couple of hours on the train, I think and it's supposed to be very pretty.

Do me a favor, would ya? Pray for a little sunshine over here? I'd greatly appriciate it and so would my dormant camera!

Yesterday we had a yard sale to get rid of some of the stuff we threw out after having the clutter consultant in.

It was a great success, yielding a profit of over $200, and it also taught me something about the social role of yard sales, which are uncommon in the UK.

Some people came through the gate, looked over everything in seconds, and disappeared, clearly not finding what they were looking for. But others were determined to buy something, and spent half an hour or more picking over every item and bombarding us with questions before making their decision.

Several times, people sat down and exchanged life stories with us. One guy had arrived in New Orleans in a similarly unconventional way to myself: he rode randomly chosen freight trains from New York, ended up here, and liked the place so much that he stayed.

Another was the owner of a strip club in Bourbon Street, and I asked him how business was. He told me it was booming, not least because the conference trade, which collapsed after Katrina, was getting off the ground again.

At the moment there are tens of thousands of ophthalmologists in town, many making a beeline for his establishment after the day's last PowerPoint presentation on extorting vast sums of money out of unfortunate shortsighted people. The last conference had been for US police chiefs, but they had sensibly stayed away from Bourbon Street.

He bought a little portable grill, and I imagined lots of near-naked women making themselves toasted cheese sandwiches while they waited to go onstage.

Much of the stuff we were selling was Pam's old clothes, which attracted considerable attention, mostly from men. The first time it happened, I pointed out 'That's women's stuff you're looking at', but he ignored me and bought a couple of skirts. As the day wore on, we sold maybe fifteen more items, and maybe ten of those were bought by men.

Several people were in fancy dress. One guy wore a top hat so battered it looked like it had been hit by a cruise missile, and told me it was 150 years old. Another was clad in an extraordinary Mad Max assemblage, all painted in silver: miner's helmet, sleeveless singlet and lots of studs and leather. As soon as he came in, he spotted a rather fetishistic chain belt of Pam's; our eyes met, I said that's perfect for you, and he bought it.

This is a city in which many people have wardrobes full of fancy dress and bring it out at every opportunity: Mardi Gras, St Patrick's Day, Halloween.

There was more exotic clothing on the menu today, when we held a farewell party for neighbours and friends. The Saints, our local football team, were playing at home, so we timed it to start after the match, and several guests turned up in team gear, complete with gold-glitter eyeshadow and fishnets.

This is a city in which no one cares what you look like or what you get up to in your bedroom. Here, people parade around in exotic costumes for the hell of it, shedding their old identities and making up new ones as they go along.

A couple of weeks ago, the signs began appearing on trees and lampposts all over town. I gave them scarcely a second glance, though the words struck a vague chord somewhere at the back of my mind.

Eventually, as the tide of publicity grew, it dawned on me: these are the opening stage directions of Waiting for Godot, and the signs were advertising free performances of the play by the Classical Theatre of Harlem.

The first night we went, it was so popular that we were turned away. But we persisted the next night, and were rewarded by one of the finest theatrical experiences I've ever been privileged to enjoy.

The setting could not have been more poignant: outdoors in the Lower Ninth ward, at a crossroads, just a few hundred yards from where the Industrial Canal levees broke.

The Lower Ninth, much of it several feet below sea level, was almost literally wiped off the map by the flooding. It was already one of the country's most poverty-stricken areas, and 98 percent of the people were black, leading conspiracy theorists to mutter, perhaps with some justice, that this part of town is low on the recovery agenda.

Where many other districts of New Orleans are now a bustling cacophony of bulldozers and jackhammers as reconstruction money starts to find its way into people's bank accounts, here all is silent. The streets are empty, the shattered houses are fast succumbing to the weeds, and there is talk of turning the area into floodplains or golf courses. This is what the world will look like when civilisation ends.

Which makes it a perfect setting for Godot, and I don't think I've ever believed in a play so much. I felt I was watching a real drama unfold before my eyes, and I cared deeply about the characters.

I'd seen the play once, and read it once, and what I remembered was the stifling sense of claustrophobia. It's as though the action takes place inside a seamless box - we can't be sure what, if anything, exists outside, because the characters' memories and perceptions of it are so flimsy and fragmented.

But this was outdoors, and real life was all too obviously happening not much more than a stone's throw away. Birds twittered, car stereos thudded, and a man shouted dementedly in the distance. There was a powerful echo, and if Pozzo yelled loudly enough into his loudhailer we heard every word bouncing back at us.

This time, I had a strong sense that the possibility of redemption lay just beyond arm's length, but the characters were so intent on waiting for God to save them that they failed to reach out and grasp the opportunity being presented to them.

Godot is a tragicomedy, and the cast milked it for every laugh and every surreptitious tear. It was a wonderful production, and yet in one sense it failed.

Before the play started, we were asked if any of us had been residents of the district. Out of 550 people, only a couple of dozen raised their hands. And later, as one cast member took a short cut through the audience, he ad-libbed: 'What a lot of white faces here in the Lower Ninth'.

Part of the purpose of tonight was to tell people here that the world still cared about them. Another part must surely have been to encourage poor black people to experience something that might otherwise have passed them by. Three of the five actors were black, their body language was black, and they inserted little black in-jokes into the script.

While we were waiting in line, an African American guy in his forties came up and asked me what was going on. I told him it was one of the greatest plays ever written.

What's it about, he asked me. But as soon as I started summarising the plot, if you can call it that, I felt stupid and knew that I'd lost him.

I heard a rumour there was free food, and I'm hungry, he said.

I told him there had been free food the previous night, but there was none on offer now. He looked disappointed, and disappeared into the darkness.

Afterwards, we stood on a dark street corner and phoned for a taxi, but like Godot it never came. Eventually, we flagged one down.

'It's lucky I happened to be passing,' the driver told us. 'The reason your cab never showed was probably because you've got the projects just round the corner, and a lot of drivers won't come here because it's all black people.'

He was from Pakistan, but he was the third taxi driver I've encountered here with less than wholesome views about the people who make up 80 percent of the population .

They always start their sentences: 'I'm not racist, but'. One, just a few nights ago, told me that the reason I sometimes found it hard to get things done in New Orleans was not because the city was recovering from a catastrophe, but because all the jobs were occupied by shiftless, inefficient blacks. Another asked whether I planned to live in this country permanently. I hoped so, I said, but there were a lot of hoops to jump through first.

'They should just let people like you in automatically,' he told me. 'You're just what this country needs. You're respectable, and you're white.'

It was late evening, and I was sitting down at the computer with a bottle of Blue Moon Belgian-style beer to tell you about a funny sign I saw today when I heard the now-familiar blare of a brass band passing outside.

At first I thought it was a belated Halloween parade, but gradually it dawned on me that this was a celebration of the Day of the Dead - All Souls' Day.

The dead are always peering over your shoulder in New Orleans. The ghosts of the early settlers who perished in a dreary succession of swamp-borne epidemics and natural catastrophes still stalk the streets after sunset. Because of the high water table they could not be hidden away beneath the ground, so they were interred in necropolises, streets lined with monuments inscribed in French, German and Italian. Many gape open and empty after their denizens floated away in the flood two years ago.


The day of the dead is a Catholic festival with strong voodoo connections, and people still congregate in the cemeteries to clean relatives' graves and replace the sun-blanched plastic flowers.

Although the revelers parading down our street with lamps, candles and skeleton outfits were mostly middle-class white youngsters using the event as an excuse for yet another party, they were keeping alive an old and worthy tradition of ancestor worship.

Halloween was just as spectacular as my first one last year, the streets of the French Quarter a joyful, heaving mass of pregnant nuns, bandaged zombies and naughty nurses. Time was when I used to mutter excuses when invited to fancy-dress parties, but here I've long since stopped caring. We were the king and queen of hearts. I look like I've acquired a huge beer belly, but it's just the way the costume hangs - honest.


A man fluttered up to us in Decatur Street and said: 'Ooh, nice tiara, darling'.

'Why, thank you,' Pam replied, flattered.

'No, not yours,' the man said in a mildly irritated tone of voice. 'His'.

And finally, the sign I saw beside the road today. I found it so funny (and strange too) that I almost fell off my bike. It was an advertisement for a construction company, and for a moment I thought maybe they specialised in rather non-PC housing for people with learning difficulties. Their website is here.

My time in this country is running out, for the time being at least.

My visa expires on 16 November, and it will take at least three months after that to get another one, so Pam and I will be living in my house in London for a while. I'm looking forward to spending time with all the friends and family I've been neglecting over the eighteen months since I came to the US, and to showing Pam more of my country and its neighbours.

After that we'll be back in New Orleans, and we're hoping eventually to buy a place together. I have no idea what the future holds, but one thing I've learned since I came over here is to take each day as it comes.

Life has become incredibly unpredictable over the past couple of years. I never dreamed when I first visited New Orleans twenty-nine years ago that one day it would be my home and I'd be planning to marry one of its inhabitants.

Or maybe I did have some vague presentiment of the distant future. Last time we went to England, in the summer, we stayed in the room in my parents' house which had once been my own when I was a teenager.

After a couple of days, Pam noticed that on the door was a tiny, postage-stamp-sized sticker bearing the state flag of Louisiana. 'What's this all about?' she asked. 'Is it in my honour or something?'

I had no idea. It had been there for so long that I no longer noticed it. Its origins were lost in the mists of time, but I assume it was a souvenir of my first visit to New Orleans all those years ago. Now, after sitting there unnoticed for decades, it had finally come into its own as a gesture of welcome for my wife-to-be.

Fort Wayne, Indiana

This is part of my new family. Ever since our first nervous meeting at their family reunion in July, they've made me incredibly welcome. They live in the sleepy little town of Decaturville, a couple of hours west of Nashville, Tennessee.

Starting from the left, Pam's stepfather Jerry is 58. By day, he is the sales and purchase director for a medical equipment supplier, and at nights and weekends he spends every waking hour building a huge extension to their house - the picture is taken on the porch. He is a true craftsman, a perfectionist who takes pride in his work, and it's a pleasure watching him.

I've spent many, many hours on the roof with Jerry, mostly banging in thousands of nails. He jokes that I can't hit them them in straight, but if you don't even pay peanuts you don't even get monkeys. Besides, he makes mistakes too - he just hides them better than I do. I like him very much, and we've spent so much time together that we can now understand each other's impenenetrable accents for whole seconds at a time.

Then there's Pam's mother Mary who, at 68, has discovered the secret of eternal youth: she has not a single grey hair on her head. She used to drive trucks, but recently retrained as a hospice nurse. At the moment she's recovering from a heart attack, but she should be back at work soon.

Destiny, 10, and Cheyenne, 12, are Jerry's grandchildren - he got custody of them because their parents were, to put it mildly, not making a very good job of bringing them up. They are both really lovely kids, and I admire Jerry and Mary for taking on the challenge of looking after them 24/7. I've threatened to start fining them a dollar every time they say my name, which is about five hundred times a day.

And finally, there's Pam, who needs no introduction.

They are an extremely close-knit family, and they stick together in adversity, of which they've had their fair share. I'm actually writing this from a hospital waiting room in Fort Wayne, about a hundred miles southeast of Chicago, where Pam's aunt Shirley is seriously ill after a fall. I wish her well.

I nearly forgot one other family member: Rowdy, a one-eyed pekinese/shitzu cross who more than lives up to his name. Here he is, posing with Destiny.

I said Decaturville was a sleepy little town, and that's how it looks to the casual visitor, all autumn leaves and Halloween pumpkins. But the local paper, as in most small towns, is a depressing catalogue of bounced cheques, domestic violence and petty burglary.

The other night we all went on a hayride, fifty adults and children clinging to a tractor-hauled trailer, bumping down narrow country lanes on a chilly night beneath a full moon. There was no hay because the South has been hit by a serious drought this year, but apart from that it was an idyllic scene: quintessentially autumnal, very American.

We passed a trailer, the kind people live in, its front yard littered with half a dozen rusting cars. Suddenly an overpowering, stomach-churning odour assailed our nostrils.

'Smells like someone's set light to their saucepan handle,' I remarked to Pam.

'That's no saucepan handle,' she told me. 'They're cooking crystal meth. It smells like burnt plastic, but worse.' And when we got back I checked on the internet, and she was right, as usual.

Pam and I went to Florida this weekend to stay with my sister Jacqui and brother-in-law Richard, who live in Coral Springs, near Fort Lauderdale. We had two very pleasant encounters.

The first was with my new nephew, Alfie, aged seven weeks. His shirt says 'Dribbling for England', and he could probably burp and fart for his parents' home country too.

Despite his poorly developed social skills, we instantly fell in love with him. He is a real charmer, amply meriting the poster we bought him, which now hangs in pride of place on his bedroom wall.


The other meeting was with someone I haven't seen since February. Matt Gregory left his home town of Bellingham, Washington over a year ago, and has nearly finished his 5,000-mile walk to Key West in aid of cancer research. By a happy coincidence he was passing near Jacqui and Richard's home while we were there, so we collected him from Boynton Beach and put him up for the night.

Matt and I first crossed paths in El Paso, Texas - I was walking in the opposite direction. We spent a tequila-sodden day in the Mexican border town of Juarez sightseeing, comparing notes and eating boiled goats' heads.

I have huge admiration for him, (a) because by the time he finishes, he will have walked some two thousand miles further than I did, and (b) because he started out with just $2,500 in his pocket, the proceeds of selling his truck. He is also enormously likeable, and we obviously have a lot in common.

Matt was on the front page of the Miami Herald today. I felt envious and nostalgic as he vanished into the distance - I know from experience that he'll have a huge amount of adjusting to do after such a mammoth undertaking, and I hope he's as fortunate after his walk as I have been after mine.

I've always hated paying other people to do things I'm perfectly capable of doing myself.

Fix my washing machine? Not my area of expertise, so I call someone who knows what they're doing. Load my dirty socks into said machine? I'll take care of that myself, thanks very much.

Rewire my house? Time to call in the professionals. Do the washing up? That's a job for Phil Goddard.

But sometimes needs must, and in this case the problem that needed urgent attention from someone else was clutter: mountains of it. We had four frying pans, six ashtrays, and no fewer than thirty bottles of Louisiana hot sauce - a staple of the local cuisine, to be sure, but still probably a lifetime's supply for a family with a cavalier attitude to birth control, let alone two people.

Often, the problem was self-perpetuating - we would tire of hunting for a stray object, replace it at great expense, and then rediscover it five minutes later.

We were full of good intentions about clearing up the Augean stable that we called home, but the problem had long since spiralled beyond our control. We were like the sorcerer's apprentice, watching helplessly as an army of bucket-toting brooms filled the house with water, and desperately awaiting the sorcerer's return to sort out the mess.

Eventually we found the sorcerer, and her name was Fanny. Remember the empty and derelict house next door whose overgrown garden we pillaged for banana, ginger and tropical ferns? Well, it's now neither empty nor derelict, but a little buzzing hive of industry, bought a few months ago by two extremely nice guys called Kevin and Matt whom we've got quite friendly with.

They've demolished part of an addition to the house to give it greater historical authenticity, and Fanny was the demolition contractor. We got friendly with her too - she was in and out of our house borrowing things like water and electricity, and we apologised for the fact that there was scarcely a square inch of sofa on which to park herself while we chatted.

'Oh, I can fix that for you,' she said. 'When do you want me to start?'

We both knew straight away that she was exactly the right person for the job: bossy, but in a nice way, with the ability to stay focused and not get sidetracked by a million tasks clamouring for her attention, a disinterested outsider who could see the wood for the trees. So we hired her on the spot.

She turned up yesterday morning, and soon we were humping boxes up and down stairs, constructing a ten-foot pile in the garden of things to sell at a yard sale, and filling black bags on an industrial scale.

At one point I saw Pam and Fanny sitting on the floor of the upstairs room that we use as a dumping ground, surrounded by piles of old electricity bills, family photographs and general junk, with a look on their faces that I interpreted as defeat. But no, they were just taking a breather from their Herculean task, and now, after two days, we've nearly finished. The house is starting to feel quite different: simpler, more spacious, and a more relaxing place to be.

Part of the reason why we needed the space is because Pam is starting a business and needs somewhere to work. After decades of cooking and waiting on tables, she's decided to exploit her natural gift for making things.

The first thing she's going to try selling is cigar-box purses - in Britain, we'd call them handbags. You take an empty cigar box -often beautiful handcrafted objects in their own right, and available for little or nothing - add a handle, some feet for it to stand on, a catch and a lining, and you've created a beautiful and unusual object which people will hopefully shell out large sums of money for.

Lots of people make cigar-box purses, churning them out at a rate of several a day, but Pam's are unique and much more labour-intensive works of art. In a New Orleans twist on a traditional artefact, she decorates hers with Mardi Gras beads , necklaces thrown into the crowd from floats in the Mardi Gras parades.

Here is one of Pam's creations, made in celebration of Endymion, one of the krewes, or carnival clubs, that form such an important part of life in New Orleans. She has turned into a one-woman factory, often working into the small hours, unable to lay down her glue gun and drill. If passion is a prerequisite of business success, then she'll do very well indeed.

It was funny that I should title that last post 'Walking in New Orleans'.

Today I was cycling home when I saw a very familiar figure standing on the steps of his office and saying goodbye to some visitors. It was only when I looked up and saw the gold stars on the railings and the initials FD emblazoned above the door that it dawned on me who he was.

Seventy-nine-year-old Fats Domino lived in a relatively unassuming house here in the Lower Ninth Ward for over half a century, eschewing the trappings of wealth. When it was engulfed by eight feet of water in August 2005, he was evacuated by police and ended up at the Superdome, where refused to pull rank, stood in line for hours, booked himself in under his real name of Antoine, and ended up sleeping on the couch of a student from Louisiana State University who recognised him.

For several days he was believed to have perished, and someone wrote in red paint on the front of his house: RIP Fats. You will be missed.

I discovered his music decades ago when I saw a TV documentary called Walkin' to New Orleans, with the song of that name as the theme tune, and bought a cassette of one of his albums. I little dreamed that one day he and I would be living in the same city and I would spend so many hours walking in New Orleans.

Pam said I should have gone and introduced myself - in times past, you could knock on his door and, if you were particularly lucky, join him in a meal. But he's reportedly a lot more reclusive now.

Walking in New Orleans, 1

It's very easy to kid yourself that nothing has happened in New Orleans.

Several times a week, I go for a long walk. Each time I step out of the front door into the early-morning sunshine I have to make a fundamental choice.

I can walk for miles east or west, parallel with the Mississippi. Here, the levees didn't break, the city didn't flood, and the only reminder of what happened two years ago is the occasional boarded-up window or painted cross telling us that no one died there. The faces I see are predominantly white, and the homes are all the colours of the rainbow.

Or I can stride boldly northwards towards Gentilly and Lake Pontchartrain, through what looks like the results of a particularly vicious artillery bombardment. I went to Beirut once, just a few years after the civil war, and it looked like this.

I try to go north as often as possible, just to remind myself of my good fortune in living where I do and stop myself from developing a ghetto mentality.

I am usually the only white person around, and many of the people sitting on their ramshackle front steps have defeated looks on their faces. I have to be in the right mood before I venture into this part of town.

If I'm feeling good, I concentrate on all the green shoots, the signs that New Orleans is fighting back. Some of the people at least have got their insurance money and built sparkling new homes amid the heaps of debris that line the streets.

But if it's a muggy, overcast day and I haven't woken up properly and everyone's dog barks at me, I think there's no hope for this place and it just needs to be swept clean by a giant broom so everyone can make a fresh start.

On the positive side, walking in New Orleans is anything but a solitary experience - in the space of an hour I will exchange greetings with perhaps twenty people.

A complex set of unwritten rules governs the whole salutation process, and sometimes I get it wrong - for example, you don't have to say how ya doin' to people with their backs to you, passing cyclists, or on busy main roads - but I prefer to strike preemptively by greeting almost everyone I see.

Each encounter is a pleasant little reminder of our shared humanity, the lazy pace of life here, and the old-fashioned southern courtesy that still prevails in most places. It's one of the reasons why I love it so much.

Another is that although New Orleans is one of the most car-dependent cities in America, with public transportation almost non-existent, it's a very walkable city. I've always said I'd find it difficult to live in the suburban sprawl of places like Phoenix and Los Angeles where you have to drive miles just to buy a newspaper in the morning. So for all its woes, it will do me just fine for now, thanks very much.

There's some scary people out there in cyberspace.

This is a comment I received in response to my remarks about guys walking round with their trousers falling down. The writer hasn't actually bothered to read my posting, so he's completely missed the point.

I've left out the second part of his missive because it was a vicious, hate-filled rant, but here's the first.

people in this country have the right to wear what the fuck they want to.we have already lost too many of our freedoms and the last thing we need is the government telling us what we can and cant wear.you are insulted because you saw his underwear? what do you think when you see a hot chick ina thong on a public beach with kids running around?showing her ass?? huh?double standard there maybe?it ain't your business what people wear and if you dont like it then dont look.

Yesterday was the second anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina came screaming in from the sea and changed everyone's lives forever.

President Bush was in town to commemorate that terrible day, and he opened a school a couple of miles down the road from here. All morning, helicopters buzzed back and forth above our heads.

I watched him on TV giving a speech in a classroom, surrounded by black children in red uniforms. It was a pathetic performance: rambling, uncharismatic, more of an impromptu chat than an oration.

He had a card in his hand with some statistics on it - billions of dollars spent on rebuilding levees, schools reopened, that kind of thing - and whenever he started running out of ideas, he would glance down and read out another figure. Whatever the reasons he was elected, it wasn't for his oratory.

In the evening, Pam and I went to a candlelit vigil in Jackson Square, in front of the lovely black-and-white Disneyland-style cathedral that dominates the view from the river.

We listened to mayor Ray Nagin, a figure only marginally less unpopular in these parts than President Bush. He was widely criticised for dithering when it came to ordering an evacuation - though if one of the most destructive hurricanes in history was making a beeline for me, I wouldn't hang around for instructions from some politician.

Nagin told us how, on the day after Katrina, he had taken a helicopter for a tour of inspection. He was very keen to emphasise that this was not some cheapskate chartered chopper, but a Black Hawk, a deadly airborne arsenal of the kind used to pacify restless natives in Somalia.

A sign-language interpreter stood beside him, and I was hypnotised by her expressive gestures. Every now and then I could recognise a word. To say 'helicopter', she made a T of her hands, then wiggled her fingers in a semblance of rotors.

'We flew out across the northern suburbs, and saw a terrible trail of destruction,' Nagin told us. 'Then I asked the pilot to swing back here, back towards the cathedral and the Mississippi. I saw Jackson Square gleaming in the sunshine, and it was like a picture postcard.'

He was doing so well, and then, with a few ill-chosen words, he lost all my sympathy and I found it hard to keep a straight face.

'Right there, in that Black Hawk helicopter, I heard the voice of God speaking to me. He said: "Do you see that square and that cathedral? I shall spare them, so that the city of New Orleans may rise again and make a fresh start"'.

I was very taken with this image, a man with such delusions of grandeur that he had a hotline to the Supreme Being from his rotary-winged Noah's Ark. And I couldn't help wondering irreverently why God had decided to spare Bourbon Street, that great den of drink-sodden debauchery just two blocks away.

But all was not lost. Suddenly we were hearing from a string of prominent Southern preachers, including legendary civil rights activist Al Sharpton, and the mood of the crowd changed dramatically. They were electrified, as one voice after another rose in impassioned condemnation of the bedrock of injustice lying just beneath the topsoil of American society until Katrina laid it bare.

The speakers told us to yell out the names of people we knew who had died or been displaced, our hopes for the future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and how we would help to make it a better place. And we did.

Walking sombrely home, we talked about the art of speechmaking. Listening to Bush and Nagin had been a depressing experience: no fire, no passion, precious little sincerity. But it was good to know that in churches and chapels up and down the land, people could still stand up and send shivers down others' spines with a few well-crafted sentences.

'Foe of baggy pants urges statewide ban', screams a banner headline in today's edition of our endearingly named (and extremely good) local paper, the Times-Picayune.

Local councilman Ronnie Smith has amended the indecent exposure ordinance in his parish (the Louisiana equivalent of a county) to fine anyone exposing their underwear in public. His is the latest of a growing number of communities to introduce such bans amid the vogue for 'low-rider' jeans.

A couple of weeks ago, in a gas station in Tennessee, we saw an example of the kind of person Smith is targeting.

A black teenager shambled across the forecourt towards his car, counting his change with one hand and holding up his beltless trousers with the other. Every so often they would fall to his ankles, and only when he reached a convenient break in his conversation with two friends would he stoop to retrieve them. All the while, his blue-and-green checkered underpants were on prominent display.

I sat there gaping until Pam admonished me. 'It's a free country,' she pointed out. 'If he wants to look stupid, that's his right.'

I couldn't agree with her more, and human rights groups across the country are up in arms, saying the rules are a violation of the constitutional entitlement to free expression.

Ronnie Smith's ban was modelled on one already imposed by Lafourche parish, where councilman Lindel Toups somewhat confusingly contends: 'We're not telling (people) how to dress, just how to wear their clothes'.

I'm not sure which is the greater human folly: a young man's belief that walking around in his boxers makes him anything but a laughing stock, or a lawmaker's hubris in assuming that he has any right to intervene.

Of course all this is a storm in a teacup, a positively picayune matter. Which brings me to the question: why would one of the country's most respected newspapers want to describe itself as 'small and of little importance', which is how Webster's online dictionary defines this word?

Well, when the paper was launched in 1837, its price was one picayune - a Spanish-American coin equivalent to a sixteenth of a dollar and derived from the Louisiana French picaillon.

The paper also publishes a weekly listings supplement called Lagniappe, a word I'd never seen before I came here, though with my semi-autistic Scrabble-player mentality I immediately spotted that it was an anagram of 'appealing'.

Once again, my wife-to-be enlightened me. 'It's a little extra gift, like when you buy a dozen beignets and the guy throws in one more for free,' she said. Lagniappe (lan-yap) is another Louisiana French word, this time from the American Spanish la ñapa, and most people round here are familiar with it.

You know you live in New Orleans when...

-- You have FEMA's number on your speed dial.
-- You have more than 300 C and D batteries in your kitchen drawer.
-- Your pantry contains more than 20 cans of spaghetti.
-- You are thinking of repainting your house to match the plywood covering your windows.
-- You keep an ax in your attic and you know why.
-- When describing your house to a prospective buyer, you say it has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and a safe hallway.
-- Your social security number isn't a secret, it's written in magic marker on your arms.
-- You are on a first-name basis with the cashier at Home Depot.
-- You are delighted to pay only $3.50 for a gallon of regular unleaded.
-- The road leading to your house has been declared a no-wake zone.
-- You decide that your patio furniture looks better at the bottom of the pool.
-- You own more than three large coolers.
-- Three months ago you couldn't hang a shower curtain; now you can assemble a portable generator by candlelight
-- You catch a 13-pound redfish in your driveway.
-- You can recite from memory whole portions of your homeowner's and flood insurance policies.
-- At cocktail parties, women are attracted to the guy with the biggest chainsaw.
-- You have had tuna fish more than 5 days in a row.
-- There is a roll of tar paper in your garage (if you still have a garage).
-- You can rattle off the names of the meteorologists who work for the Weather Channel and you want to name your next child after that guy.
-- Someone comes to your door to tell you they found your roof.
-- Your "drive-thru" meal consists of MREs and bottled water.
-- You spend more time on your roof than in your living room.
-- You've been laughed at over the phone by a roofer, fence builder or tree worker.
-- A battery-powered TV is considered a home entertainment center.
-- You don't have to worry about relatives wanting to visit during the summer.
-- Having a tree in your living room does not necessarily mean it's Christmas.
-- You know the difference between the "good side" of a hurricane and the "bad side."
-- You still think it's normal to live below sea level.

New Orleans is an extremely friendly city. This is partly because it's America; partly because it's the South, and some of it is also a camaraderie borne of shared adversity during Katrina and Rita.

So you're never alone when you're sitting outside on our veranda. There's a dog park just down the street, so dozens of dog walkers parade by at every hour of day and night, and almost no one passes without a brief conversation.

On Tuesday night we were out on the steps with two of the neighbours, beer bottles piling up on the sidewalk as we tried vainly to combat the stifling heat, discussing the latest in an endless sequence of Louisiana bribery scandals.

A guy walked past with his dog, and we exchanged greetings. A minute later two cyclists pedalled silently past and into the darkness.

New Orleans is also an extremely crime-ridden city. It's the murder capital of the United States, and police have just announced that violent crime is up 31 percent over the past year.

Fifty yards down the road the cyclists pulled over, waved an unidentified object at the dog walker, told him it was a gun, and ordered him to hand over everything he had. Fortunately he was travelling light - all he had was a phone, which he gave them. We continued our noisy conversation, oblivious of the drama being acted out a long stone's throw away.

Only later, still badly shaken, did the victim tell us what had happened. We had experienced the best and worst of New Orleans in the same evening.

In other news, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco has declared a state of emergency as the first major hurricane of the season heads our way. The latest forecasts suggest it may make landfall well to the west, in Texas.

In the meantime, Pam has achieved the rare distinction of having two hurricanes named after her. The first was fictional: Pam was the name given in 2004 to a very realistic simulation of a hurricane, used to test the state's preparedness. But this time it's for real: my fiancée's last name is Dean.

Even by the steambath standards of a southern summer, this has been a hot one.

Today the temperature at Audubon Park, which houses the city's zoo, hit a record-breaking 102F (39C). As I write this at 11 pm the mercury is still hovering around 90F (32C), and when I venture gingerly outside the front door of our airconditioned home, I have an inkling of how a chicken leg feels when it's taken out of the freezer and placed on the top shelf of the oven.

Weather is a dominant topic of conversation here at the best of times - we're just approaching the height of the hurricane season and the second anniversary of Katrina, and people are jittery - but the two words on everyone's lips at the moment are 'heat index'. My oven analogy was possibly not wholly appropriate: Arizona may be an oven, but here in the dripping swamps of Louisiana the 60 percent humidity means that on days like today, the temperature feels more like 115F (46C).

'The oppressive heat and humidity make the summer months a misery', opines Lonely Planet's guide to New Orleans. Well, I beg to differ.

When Pam and I went to Paris last month, we had to don sweaters and buy umbrellas - neither of which we'd expected to need in midsummer. Now that's what I call misery.

I like the way the heat here envelops me in its sensual embrace. I like the way it slows everything down, and forces me to allow extra time to leave for appointments so I don't arrive dripping with sweat - though even if I do, no one seems to mind, because they're dripping with sweat too. And I like the fact that the sun never stops shining for very long, and we can grow bananas in our garden.

So there.

New Orleans

I hope no employees of the department of homeland security are reading this, because I'm about to be rather uncomplimentary about one of their number.

We're back home after several weeks of me introducing Pam to family and friends in England, where she appears to passed their intense scrutiny with flying colours, sunning ourselves on the beach in France, and Pam introducing me to her family in Tennessee (of which more anon).

I've always been aware of the enormous privilege my 18-month, multiple-entry visa represents - most people only get six months, and I never take this generosity for granted. But this time, I only got back into the country by the skin of my teeth.

A recent report prepared for the commerce department found that the United States' share of the world tourism market fell by 20% in the six years to 2006, despite the dollar plummeting to record lows. It said part of the reason for the fall was the hostile reception - long queues, photographs, fingerprints and general rudeness - awaiting many foreign visitors to the US.

Geoff Freeman, executive director of the Discover America Partnership, a coalition of businesses seeking to boost America's image around the globe, said: ‘People find that experience to be awful. They believe they are treated like criminals. The system is an inefficient and unfriendly process. We’re talking about staffing and basic customer service.’

Why am I telling you this? Because I experienced it at first hand when Pam and I arrived on the flight from London.

'How long are you planning to stay?' asked the immigration official when I finally reached the front of the usual interminable queue.

'Until my visa expires in November, hopefully,' I told him. He raised an eyebrow, spent a long time tapping away at his computer, and then said: 'I want you to go to the secondary screening office over there to your right, and answer a few questions.'

My heart sank, and I felt rather as though Winston Smith must have done when he was packed off to room 101. I'd already had an encounter with secondary screening the last time I arrived, to do my walk across America, and I still had the bruises from that occasion.

It was half an hour before I was called forward to stand in front of the desk like some petty offender cowering in the dock.

The officer wasted no time launching into his tirade. 'It says here you want to stay till the end of your visa,'he snapped. 'What makes you think you're entitled to do that? And who gave you an eighteen-month visa, anyway? The maximum is six months.'

I told him that there had been special circumstances involved because I'd been walking across America.

'That makes it even worse,' he persisted angrily. 'You know you're not allowed to work.'

No, walking, I said, making a little gesture with my hand by way of demonstration, two fingers trotting across the desk. He ignored me.

'Just because it says multiple entry doesn't mean you can come in as many times as you like,' he said, inexplicably. 'I'm going to have to send you home, but I can't do anything for now because our system has crashed. Go and sit over there.'

By now Pam had come to find me, and we sat despondently for another half hour or more, discussing what we'd do if I had to leave the country. Then my nemesis summoned me to the bench again to deliver his verdict.

'We've decided to let you in for three months,' he told me. That was a month short of the date my visa expired, but it was better than nothing.

I pushed my luck and pleaded for an extra month, but he was unmoved, still unable to fathom why anyone should want to walk from New York to Los Angeles.

Then Pam had a bright idea. She pulled out a Daily Mirror article about how we'd met, and just as she did so a supervisor strolled over. He took the piece of paper from his colleague, scanned it briefly, and said: 'Give him till November'.

It was an exact replay of the previous time, when they'd made me feel about as welcome as Osama bin Laden, refusing to give me any more than six months until I virtually got down on bended knees in front of the supervisor's supervisor.

I wondered whether it was some kind of choreographed bad-cop-good-cop routine, designed to prevent people from being complacent about being allowed into the country, or whether my oppressor simply failed all the exams at charm school.

Scotts Hill, Tennessee.

Excuse the long silence - I've been away in England and France, and now I'm staying with Pam's sister Leah and her family in Tennessee.

We stayed in the south of France for a couple of weeks, and then spent a day in Paris on the way back. It was unseasonably cold with frequent heavy showers. Then the rain stopped, the sun came out, a rainbow appeared above the rooftops, and we went up the Eiffel Tower.

There was a sign at the bottom saying level 3, the top of the tower, was closed. But we still thought it was worthwhile going to level 2, and as it happened level 3 had reopened when we arrived.

At the top, a thousand feet above the rainswept streets, I said to Pam: 'I'm glad we made it all the way up here. It wouldn't have been the same if I'd asked you to marry me halfway up the Eiffel Tower."

'What?' she said.

Then I asked her to marry me, and after about a nanosecond's hesitation she flung her arms round me and said yes. So what had been rather a miserable day suddenly took a distinct turn for the better.

This is a photograph taken immediately after I popped the question.

Freezer jolly bad fellow (allegedly)

Even as it struggles to pick up the pieces after Hurricane Katrina, this is a wonderful, vibrant city. But it has a dark side too, in which a long history of poverty and economic weakness has spawned a culture of widespread corruption.

New Orleans made international headlines today with the indictment of local Democrat congressman William Jefferson on charges of bribery, obstruction and racketeering. If found guilty on all counts, he faces up to 235 years in jail.

Jefferson, and more specifically one of his household appliances, have been the butt of endless jokes here ever since I first visited last year.

In August 2005, FBI agents raided his Washington home and found $90,000 in his freezer, wrapped in aluminium foil and stuffed inside plastic boxes. They allege that the numbers on the notes match those on a $100,000 bribe paid to him by an informant.

As an outsider to American politics, there were two things about this story that I've never understood. One was relatively trivial, and easily clarified; the other is much more important, but remains a mystery to me.

One of the charges of which Jefferson stands accused is wire fraud, an odd-sounding concept that doesn't exist in English law and which I've never understood. So I asked my resident legal expert, and Pam told me that it simply means any form of fraud in which electronic communications were used.

So, for example, if I advertised something on eBay, you sent me money, and I didn't deliver the goods, that would be wire fraud. Likewise, if I advertised a non-existent item in a newspaper and you put a cheque in the post, that's mail fraud.

Both carry substantially heavier penalties than ordinary fraud, and both are essentially legal pretences. Most fraud involves some kind of communication by one or other means, but the concepts of wire and mail fraud turn local offences into ones that cross state lines, allowing the federal authorities to grab power from local and state investigators.

So I learned something today. But what I still don't understand, and maybe there's someone out there who can enlighten me, is this.

The facts of the case have been in the public domain for a long time, and two former aides of 'Cold Cash Jefferson', as he's widely known, have already pleaded guilty. Rolling Stone magazine nicknamed him 'Bribe Taker'. And yet in a runoff election in December, he romped home with a 57% share of the vote.

I just wonder what that says about the 35,000 people who cast their ballots for him, and about their tolerance of politicians who betray their oaths of office.

Jungle warfare

For years, I used to share my fantasy with anyone who'd listen.

I wanted to win the rollover in the lottery (not the easiest of undertakings, since I never bought a ticket), wave adieu to my ho-hum, humdrum life as a freelance translator, and build a vast avant-garde conservatory over my back garden in London, a tower of Babel so dizzying it would make the palm house at Kew look like a garden shed.












Then I'd run up sky-high heating bills creating my own dripping rainforest of waterfalls, exotic fruit, and sinister-looking carnivorous plants. I'd make Alan Titchmarsh an offer he couldn't refuse: give up his job as Britain's foremost TV gardener and be my full-time horticultural adviser. No, on second thoughts, not Alan Titchmarsh: that one who never wears a bra.

At first, the curtain-twitching neighbours would mutter behind my back about this blot on the landscape, but gradually they'd succumb to the heady fragrance of oleander, wet decomposing leaves, and the hundreds of beers on tap in my free 24-hour bar.

Well, that particular ambition may have come to naught, but I've got the next best thing: a garden in steamy, sticky, stifling, sweaty, sultry, sweltering New Orleans. As a bonus, I have a wonderful woman who shares my obsession with all things green and pleasant, and a fridge full of Sam Adams.


The yard beside our house is about a hundred feet by fifteen, and when we arrived there was nothing very much in it. Months later, it's fast becoming full to overflowing, and if we don't kick our addiction to plant acquisition soon we're going to need medical detox.

I call it guerrilla gardening, because much of it involves outright theft.

The house next door is empty, lost in a Dickensian legal limbo, slowly going to rack and ruin. So the other day we hopped over the fence with a spade each and helped ourselves to half the garden. There was so much of it, a tangled riot of ginger, bananas and huge-leafed elephant ears (that's one in the picture at the top) that the owners will never notice it's gone.

We also go for a daily walk which, since the Pacific Ocean got in the way of my hiking ambitions, I've vowed to do for the rest of my life. And we always make sure we have at least one pair of scissors with which to purloin cuttings.

Once, we passed a tract of waste ground which was being dug up by a trio of exhausted-looking Hispanic labourers. Strewn abandoned in a pile were dozens of sunflowers and rudbeckia - everything blooms much earlier here than in London - so we came home triumphantly clutching armfuls of these. And on the way back, we helped ourselves to the abandoned, rusting supermarket trolley (or should I say shopping cart?) that now houses Pam's herb garden.

I have a feeling that plants and planting are going to play an important part in this blog, so better get used to it.

Pam and I are off to England and France on Tuesday for five weeks. I may do some more posts while we're away, but I'm currently engaged in the thoroughly pleasant task of deciding where to go with someone who's never visited my home country before. And the one place that's top of the list: Kew Gardens.

Welcome to The Pod

This is our house at 631 Spain Street, New Orleans. We call it The Pod because it's green and has two Ps in it.*

We put the flags up a week or so ago to make it even more colourful than it already is. You could make a really good living selling flags in New Orleans because everyone has them. The one in the middle features the fleur-de-lys emblem of the city's founding dynasty, the Bourbons. Flags are a great way of making a statement about who lives inside, as in the example below, round the corner from us.














Our house is called a shotgun double. 'Shotgun' means the rooms are arranged in such a way that if you fired a gun through the front door, the bullet would exit through the back without being obstructed by any walls - an experiment performed on an almost daily basis in this city, where the homicide rate is ten times the national average.

'Double' is what in Britain would be called semidetached, except that here, unusually, the houses are back to back instead of side by side. Our landlord, Steve, lives in the one at the back.

We live in Faubourg Marigny, known for short as the Marigny. This is the next district down the Mississippi from the French Quarter, the city's tourist and entertainment hub. It's just as colourful and historic as the Quarter, but without the drunken students vomiting up their margaritas in shop doorways.

Fortunately it escaped significant damage during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, so it's an oasis of tranquillity amid a desert of destruction - you don't have to travel far to find large areas of abandoned housing.

I tend to like ultramodern architecture, and my place back in London is a somewhat minimalist 1960s box with a grey and white interior, but I think The Pod is beautiful. We spend a large part of our lives outdoors: working with laptops, gardening, and sitting on the swing chair on the porch, shooting the breeze with neighbours and passers-by.

This is Pam watching TV in our living room, from where a spiral staircase leads up to one of the two bedrooms.

*Just like a grasshopper, or an apple - perhaps an unripe Cox's Orange Pippin. Can anyone think of any other examples?