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.