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.