I've been coming to this country for thirty years and I've never been to a football game before. So we recently remedied that omission by watching the New Orleans Saints play the Atlanta Falcons at the Superdome.



It was a stirring performance by both sides. Falcons linebacker Curtis Lofton pounded his fist into the turf after Pierre Thomas bowled over him for a first down. The game-sealing carry provided the perfect punctuation for the Saints' undrafted, second-year running back following the most important performance of his young career.

He scored his first touchdown on a 7-yard screen early in the fourth quarter, powering in for the winning touchdown on a 5-yard toss sweep, bouncing over offensive lineman Carl Nicks as he stretched for the goal line. Thomas also set up that last score with an 88-yard kickoff return after Matt Ryan's 12-yard scramble had given the Falcons a 25-22 lead with 7:51 to go.

Actually I didn't write that. I cut-and-pasted it out of the local paper, whose reporter clearly has at least a rudimentary understanding of the game. Unlike me.

I once spent a year at evening classes trying to learn Japanese, but it was a waste of twelve months; everything the teacher said just went in one ear and out the other. I've had just as little success comprehending the byzantine complexities of football: at least a dozen people have tried valiantly to explain it to me, but they were just wasting their breath.

As an experiment, I tried to read the Wikipedia article on American football before I wrote this entry, but I dozed off over my laptop after a couple of pages.

If the ball becomes dead behind the goal line of the team in possession and its "opponent" is responsible for the ball being there (for instance, if the defense intercepts a forward pass in its own end zone and the ball becomes dead before the ball is advanced out of the end zone) it is a touchback: no points are scored and the team last in possession keeps possession with a first down at its own 20 yard line. In college, in the extremely rare instance that a safety is scored on a try, it is worth only 1 point.

Incomprehension aside, I enjoyed the experience very much. From outside, the Superdome is a vast and sinister concrete nuclear bunker set amid a wasteland of elevated highways and crumbling warehouses, but when we emerged into the arena itself it took my breath away.

This is the third largest domed structure in the world, twenty-seven storeys high, and our seats were about as far away from the action as it was possible to be.

It was like watching the match through the wrong end of a telescope. But this didn't seem to deter our fellow spectators, many of them season ticket holders with their row and seat numbers printed on their t-shirts.

Speaking of which, this must be the only place in America where dressing your offspring in shirts with BUSH inscribed on the back doesn't constitute child abuse, like calling your son Adolf Hitler. The shirts we saw were a homage not to the soon-to-be-ex-chief-executive, but to Saints legend Reggie Bush.

I abandoned my attempts to make sense of the on-pitch action - constant substitutions, points mysteriously appearing on the scoreboard for no visible reason, incomprehensible announcements from referees - and concentrated on soaking up the atmosphere instead.

It was like a vast, rowdy communal Sunday lunch: 70,000 deliriously happy people scoffing grotesquely overpriced burgers, chicken wings and beers and walking out when the mounds of wrappers and cans on the floor made it impossible to see the players any more.

The Saints won, and we marched in a long, slow spiral out of the Dome. As is so often the case here, I felt both totally at home and an utter outsider.

I also experienced a twinge of envy. Football has a lot in common with religion, practised on Sundays by huge numbers of chanting people in big, echoey buildings. If you don't experience that weekly injection of passion from one or the other, or both, you're hard put to find its equivalent elsewhere.

A rose by any other name...

After several days of agonised soul-searching, Pam and I have reluctantly decided to give our dog Bud a new name.

As I mentioned before, we originally called him Bud because we already had a cat named Miller.

For the benefit of British readers, Bud and Miller are two of America's leading brands of beer, both limply bland potations that stimulate the neurotransmitters but not the taste buds.

I once got chatting to a regional sales manager for one of the big US breweries at a bar in Midland, Texas. "I've just come back from a two-week beer-tasting tour of Belgium and Germany," he slurred. "It just made me realise what crappy products I've been selling for the past fifteen years."

Anyway, the worker from the animal refuge found Miller the cat sitting alone in the desolate parking lot of a strip mall boarded up since Hurricane Katrina. Beside him, an empty can of Miller Lite blew listlessly back and forth in the wind. That's how he got his name, and Bud seemed the obvious choice when we acquired a canine companion for him.

Bud is only a year old, his puppyish enthusiasm still undimmed by any trace of world-weary cynicism. He's at a formative stage in his life, and things that happen to him now could crucially affect his fortunes later on. We believe that the decision to rename him is an investment in his long-term future.

It came after I stumbled on a year-old article in the Christian Science Monitor by someone called Jacqui Goddard. It's about the increasing popularity of consultants who, for a modest fee, will advise you on whether the name you choose for your progeny is likely to inspire respect and career success, or have people guffawing behind your back at your incredible lack of taste.

Of course, the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor is itself a living example of how an unfortunate name doesn't have to be a handicap.

It's a lively and authoritative international newspaper whose sole concession to matters spiritual is a daily article on religion - though Jacqui sometimes tells interviewees she's writing for the 'Boston Monitor' to avoid the impression that it's one of those deranged six-page religious rags, the kind that nameless people leave on the chairs in dentists' waiting rooms, hoping you'll undergo a Damascene conversion while having all your teeth pulled out.

Anyway, back to Bud. The article cites Professor Albert Meharabian of UCLA, who has researched people's perceptions of first names.

[Prof. Mehrabian] asked people to ponder lists of names and award each a score in five set categories: ethical/caring, popular/fun, successful, masculine/feminine, and overall attractiveness. The results helped him to produce a comprehensive profile of the kind of positive or negative impression each name conveys.

For example, Chad scored consistently high in all categories, while Bud ranked low – including a zero in the "successful" category. Chads are more likely to have a secure self-image, be regarded more positively by others, and be treated well at school and work than Buds.

In deference to public opinion, therefore, we've decided to call our canine friend Chad.

It wasn't our first choice. After all, Chad is the one of the world's poorest countries, a vast expanse of dusty nothingness sometimes referred to as the Dead Heart of Africa, still basking in the afterglow of being named the world's most corrupt country in 2005. It's also the name given to the little paper butterflies on Florida ballot papers that gave us eight years of George W. Bush.

But there you go: it was Shakespeare who said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but he also said that needs must where the devil drives.

UK shadow chancellor (finance minister) George Osborne yesterday warned: 'We are in danger, if the government is not careful, of having a proper sterling collapse, a run on the pound.'

I have news for Mr Osborne, who clearly doesn't know very much about international finance: the government is not careful, and the pound has collapsed.

For the past two years since I came to the States, the pound has been riding high, at around 2.00 to the dollar, and the cost of living here has been laughably cheap if you're earning pounds and spending dollars.

New York department stores have been swamped by legions of pasty-faced Brits scooping up bucketfuls of designer knickknacks, and Florida real-estate agents by people from Southend lugging wheeled suitcases bulging with cash.

In the past couple of months, the pound has slumped by a third: for once, the UK is even more of a basket case than the US. The smile has been wiped off our faces, and sometimes, when I have nothing better to do with my time, I've been known to sit there mournfully monitoring the currency's helter-skelter descent in real time by repeatedly clicking Refresh on xe.com.

Until I came here, exchange rates were an abstraction that I only noticed when I left the UK for brief periods; now, they've caused me more than a few sleepless nights. I've been guilty of complacency, and the chickens have come home to roost; Pam told me months ago to transfer my savings over here while the going was still good, and I ignored her eminently sensible advice.

Anyway, that's enough of my woes: the credit crunch has been a salutary reminder that economics isn't just dusty abstractions, it's about real people and real lives.

A few days ago, when I finally got round to transferring some money over here, I was on the phone to a woman in my local bank. 'So what currency is it in the UK, anyway?' she asked. 'Is it Ukrainian dollars?'

I'm delighted that Barack Obama is to be the new leader of the free world, but I fear he could prove a disappointment: after eight years of the worst president in history, people's expectations may be unrealistically high.

In Britain, Tony Blair was given a radical mandate for change in 1997, and largely squandered it during the ensuing decade, chipping away at the edges of all that was wrong in British society and failing to tackle many of the really big issues.

But there's no doubting that America is a better place to be this morning than last night, and it will be heartening to watch it regain its respected status on the world stage. Obama could get off to a flying start on his first day by shutting down Guantanamo, banning torture and calling a halt to so-called extraordinary rendition.

We watched the CNN coverage with next-door neighbours and fellow political junkies Kevin and Matt, and it was exceptionally good.

There were giant touch screens detailing past and projected results for every state and county, and ultra-detailed demographic breakdowns. We learned, for example, that the three most reliable predictors of Democratic leanings were being male, having a college degree and never going to church, which is me in a nutshell.

In a milestone in TV history, we were treated to interviews with holograms: not real ones, just superimposed on the screen, though grizzled anchor Wolf Blitzer made a convincing job of pretending his subjects were chatting away right in front of him. They wobbled slightly round the edges, as though trapped in limbo by a temporary transporter malfunction on the USS Enterprise.

I'm in a bit of a no-man's-land myself at the moment. I love elections, and I've never failed to vote in the UK, but in an exception to the principle of no taxation without representation it will be many years before I'm allowed to do so here, and I'll have to become a citizen first.

Voting is one of the two big advantages of adopting US citizenship; the other is never having to deal with the immigration authorities again.

I'm now in the long, slow process of adjusting my status, which means I've started the ball rolling towards getting a green card and becoming a legal permanent resident.

I've just sent off another sixteen pages of forms and another cheque, this time for $1,010. If these are approved, I'll actually get my 'advance parole', which sounds like an alternative to a jail sentence but is effectively permission to leave the country, which I can't at present.

But as I've said before, even when I'm feeling positively overwhelmed by red tape, I try never to lose sight of the fact that living here is a privilege not to be taken for granted.

Like I said, translation is not normally a barrel of laughs. But this story is an exception.

Pam, car, dog, cat, job (for a while)...

The long list of three-letter acquisitions continues.

While I was in Washington DC, Pam took advantage of my absence to acquire not one, but two furry friends. I've never owned any animals, apart from the fifteen goldfish pining for me in my garden pond in London and a quarter share in a guinea pig when I was a kid.

I liked the fact that in theory we could, at the drop of a hat, take off on an impromptu weekend's kayak rolling in the alligator-infested swamps of Louisiana's Cajun country without having to worry about who'd look after the pets in our absence.

But we don't. So Pam took the decision out of my hands, and my concerns were instantly dispelled when Miller and Velvet came bounding into my life.

Velvet is a crappy name for a dog, and the people at Bark in the Park, the event where Pam adopted him, admitted they were running short of inspiration when they chose it. So we rechristened him Bud.



He's part chow, part spaniel, about a year old, fully of slobbery puppyish enthusiasm and with an endearing habit of sighing deeply as though the weight of the world were on his shoulders. His favourite pastimes are gnawing high-voltage electrical cables and surfing the internet.

As for the cat: well, Miller is immaculately groomed and behaved, extremely friendly, and of way above average intelligence. He likes to work up an appetite for breakfast by polishing off the New York Times crossword; his record is three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

And so to the job: a nice little part-time contract as the grandly titled UK English language expert for Rosetta Stone, the world's largest language learning software company. They're not a well-known name in Europe yet, but in the US their bright yellow products have established a blanket presence, especially in airports.

My job was to adapt US English products into British English. I spent a week training at their headquarters in Harrisonburg, Virginia, a couple of hours outside DC, and returned to New Orleans full of enthusiasm for the intellectually challenging tasks ahead. And then, just a couple of weeks later, they unceremoniously dumped me on cost grounds.

I can't say I blame them. I did ask before I started whether there'd be very much work for me; after all, there isn't exactly a yawning gulf between US and UK English when you're learning sentences like "The girl is running" and "The men are reading the newspaper".

I was annoyed at having squandered seven precious days of my short time on earth, but at least I got paid for it, met lots of fellow wordsmiths, and got to see a beautiful part of the country. So no hard feelings there.

Washington, DC

I'm here for a week on business, and at long last someone else is funding my travel habit - not something that happens very often.

Translating isn't too bad as jobs go, but it ranks somewhere below Trappist monasticism in terms of the social skills and level of physical activity it demands of me. So I'm looking forward to some new horizons and the chance to work with a team of flesh-and-blood humans for a change. It looks like it might be an interesting project, so watch this space.

Anyway, being here reminds me of two very inspiring people I met when I arrived in New Orleans two years ago.

Zack Rosenburg and girlfriend Liz McCartney were two young, high-flying lawyers living on Washington's Capitol Hill until Katrina struck in August 2005.

Along with their fellow Americans, they watched the scenes of devastation unfold on their TV screen - but unlike most people, instead of just tut-tutting and reaching for another family pack of Doritos, they decided to go and help. Leaving behind their comfortable apartment and all the other trappings of success, they moved to New Orleans and founded the Saint Bernard Project.

From unpromising beginnings - neither of them knew anything about construction - Zack and Liz have now rebuilt 120 houses in flood-ravaged St Bernard Parish, with the help of 6,000 volunteers from all over the world - including, briefly, yours truly.

Liz has now been named a 2008 Top Ten Hero by CNN, and could win the title CNN Hero of the Year and a prize of $100,000. The winner will be chosen by the public, so please take a moment of your time to vote for her here, because it won't take a minute of your time and because she thoroughly deserves it.

A shotgun wedding

Any momentary hesitation I had about signing the marriage licence was dispelled when the registrar pulled a gun on me.

Pam had already appended her flourish, and now it was my turn. As I stood there in the registry office in the sleepy little Puerto Rican coastal town of Dorado, a cheap plastic ballpoint pen in my right hand as I prepared to take one of the most important decisions of my life, I must have paused for the merest fraction of a nanosecond.

The woman ducked beneath the counter behind her glass screen for a moment, and reemerged brandishing a pistol. "Sign it now," she snapped, gesturing impatiently at the blank space on the piece of paper.

It took a moment for me to notice the huge grin on her face, another to spot that the gun was made of plastic.


We'd already had the blood tests required of anyone planning to marry in Puerto Rico, and were relieved to find that neither of us had gonorrhea or chlamydia. How romantic. We'd shuttled back and forth between various government offices, nerves fraying in the tropical heat, dispensing substantial sums of money to substantial numbers of people.

As I stared down the barrel of the gun, I had another of what I call my Moments, when I think: is this real? how did I get here? I've had a lot of those in the past few years.

Bureaucracy aside, it was a thoroughly happy and wholly unforgettable week. We rented a house with a pool on this beautiful island and invited a small selection of our nearest and dearest to share our wedding with us. Here they all are.




From left to right, they are Pam's daughter Dana and her son Rowan. Then there's my friend Bill, who I'll tell you more about in a moment. Behind him is my brother-in-law Richard and his son Alfie. Pam is standing on the doorstep with her two-month-old granddaughter Arden. Next come my sister Jacqui, Bill's wife Daff, and Dana's husband Scott.

Bill was a secondhand book dealer until a few years ago, but in a dramatic midlife career change he became a Church of England priest. He was kind enough to conduct the marriage ceremony for us, cheerfully tolerant of my lack of religious belief.

I met Bill at university thirty years ago, where I formed a Scrabble club and he was one of the first members. Since then, our every encounter has been accompanied by the rattle of plastic tiles.

I suspect that for him the highlight of the week was not presiding over his friends' marriage, not the lush, mountainous scenery, not the convivial company or generous quantities of Caribbean rum, but the poolside game on Sunday, our wedding day.

He scored an extraordinary personal best of 205 points in one go, spread across two triple word scores and with a fifty-point bonus for getting rid of all his letters. He played crappily. No, sorry, he played CRAPPILY, off my LATRINE.



And so to the wedding itself. We held it on a quiet little stretch of wave-lapped, palm-fringed sand decked with long strings of beach morning glory, candles and coconut shells. Pam made her entrance from several hundred yards away and gingerly picked her way across a stream in her long coral-coloured dress before she reached us.

The only thing missing was sunshine: a tropical depression was brewing, and there was drizzle in the air. But the brightness to the west could have passed for a sunset, and the rain obligingly held off until the end of our short, simple ceremony; next day, the island suffered major flooding.

Here's some pictures. I thought Pam looked wonderful. I don't have any of both of us yet, because I took them, but as soon as someone sends me some I'll put them on here.

New Orleans has by far the most poetic street names of any city in North America, many of them bespeaking the high-minded ideals of the nineteenth century.

I've already mentioned Tchoupitoulas (CHOP-i-TOO-lus, sometimes shortened to "Chop"), named after an extinct Indian tribe.

And then there's Desire, as in A Streetcar Named. There's Elysian Fields, Chartres ("Charders"), Royal, Burgundy ("BurGUNdy") and Frenchmen, all within five blocks from here. There's Prytania, Chef Menteur, Mardi Gras, Cucullu, Fleur de Lis, Annunciation, Manhattan, Stumpf.

There's a street for each of the Muses: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene,
Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania.

I even quite like the name of our own street, Spain. I have an apartment in Tenerife (which I'm actually trying to sell at the moment - anyone interested?), so I can say I have a place in Spain and a place on Spain.

This is almost as good an address as Gay Close in northwest London, where I used to rather shamefacedly reside - in fact, given the demographics of the Marigny district where we now live, Gay Close would be a great name for a new street here.

But it occurred to me the other night, when I took these pictures while out riding my bike, that the honours for best-named set of intersections must surely go to New Orleans Street. I'm sure this was deliberate on the part of the person or persons responsible for choosing street names all those years ago (what a great job! how do you apply? what qualifications do you need?).

Apart from Humanity, the names of the thoroughfares which cross New Orleans Street include Benefit, Treasure, Abundance, Agriculture, Industry, Hope, and Law. And this one.

New Orleans

We got home on Saturday night, weary from our 400-mile journey and not sure what to expect.

There was very little hurricane damage in evidence, and the main victims were the trees, huge numbers of which had blown over or lost branches. One big bough had flattened half of our lovingly tended garden, but things grow so quickly here that we'll be back to normal in a month or so - unlike the thousands of Cubans and Haitians with homes and livelihoods dashed to pieces by Gustav and Ike.

It's also going to be a busy few weeks for the dustmen or garbage collectors or whatever you want to call them, because the accepted way of dealing with fallen trees is to stick them in your bin for collection.

And we're now out of the cone for Ike, meaning that if it continues on its current track, the good citizens of Corpus Christi, Texas will bear the brunt of this weekend's visitation.

On Sunday, I went for a bike ride round the Lower Ninth Ward, which Katrina wiped off the map. It was the first time I'd been there since November, but unlike so much of New Orleans, little had changed; it was as desolate as ever. Most of the houses in this once bustling and mostly black district had been razed to their concrete foundations; others had been smothered by a blanket of weeds.

Here and there people had rebuilt, with whimsical details like fountains and garden gnomes creating an illusion of normality.

I couldn't live here, I thought; it wouldn't matter how picturesque the house, it would be like living in a cemetery, constantly surrounded by absence: silent, empty streets, roofless houses, the ghostly voices of long-departed neighbours blowing in the wind.

But then I turned the corner into Tennessee Street, and suddenly, even on this hot, somnolent Sunday afternoon, it was a hive of activity.

I'd stumbled on actor Brad Pitt's Make it Right project, a community of 150 low-cost, sustainable houses being built right in the shadow of the Industrial Canal levee which breached during Katrina.

Each of these stunning creations, which Pitt commissioned from leading architects, will house a displaced family from the Lower Ninth. Each is raised well above ground level so that when the floods return, as they will sooner or later (thanks to Gustav, they almost did last weekend), they'll suffer the minimum of damage. And each, while firmly rooted in the southern architectural tradition, is very much a product of the twenty-first century.

I coveted all of the houses, none of which will cost more than $175,000, but sadly I'm not a part of the project's target market.

Make it Right is an example of an individual putting his money where his mouth is, and taking direct action to improve the lives of his fellow citizens. In a city where one third of the houses are still uninhabitable, he's planted a few green shoots in a huge, muddy brown expanse of alluvial nothingness - but like I said, New Orleans is fertile ground, so let's hope they take root and flourish.

Shreveport

There's a simple way of finding out whether your electricity supply has been restored when you evacuate for a hurricane: leave your answering machine on, and call at regular intervals until it responds. We don't have one, but I phoned the neighbours today and they said the power had just come back on, so we're leaving for home tomorrow. The house is undamaged, apparently, but there's a lot of debris lying around.

Gustav has been a wonderful demonstration of the power of the internet. I've been keeping a close watch on www.nola.com, the website of our excellent local newspaper, the Times-Picayune. They've been publishing every day throughout the storm and giving the paper away as a PDF, and they also have local forums for every district of New Orleans, mostly populated with hundreds of messages from evacuees asking whether the power has been restored on their particular block.

One woman on our local Marigny-Bywater forum stayed at home during the evacuation and invited people to send her their addresses, so that she could go and photograph their houses to provide reassurance that they hadn't blown away.

I'm immensely grateful to Bill, Marnie and Garett for putting us up in such comfort for over a week. The local TV stations have been showing footage of the alternative, the hurricane shelters in Shreveport, which makes for pretty grim viewing. Visitors are greeted with the stench of urine and vomit, and showering facilities have been woefully short - a source of considerable local controversy.

Several people were arrested after a fight broke out in one shelter, and some inmates have been demonstrating against the unpleasant conditions. I have some sympathy with their plight, but 96 percent of respondents to a local TV survey thought the refugees were ungrateful whiners who shouldn't come here if they didn't like it.

There's a small but significant chance that we'll be back in Shreveport in the not too distant future. Hurricane Ike, the next but one in a queue of tropical disturbances backed up across the Atlantic, could be heading for the Gulf of Mexico.

Shreveport

This is three-and-a-half-year-old Garett, my second cousin-in-law.

He's looking miserable because Gustav, now downgraded to a tropical storm, is passing overhead. It's been raining solidly for 24 hours so he can't play outside, and his back garden is fast turning into a lake - they're forecasting ten inches in two days.

Also, he has to put up with me and Pam till Friday when Ray Nagin, New Orleans' much-loved mayor, says we can go home.

Shreveport, LA

It's been another surreal day.

The sun has been shining, as usual, and we've been doing all the things a family does on a Sunday at home: reading the papers, playing board games, swimming in the communal pool across the street. I went for a run, but it was too hot and I ended up walking for much of the way.

The Weather Channel has been glowering at us all day from the corner of the room, an ever-present reminder of what's happening to our home town. I wondered irreverently whether they'd called all their advertisers and said sorry, we're having a major weather event and our audience figures have skyrocketed, so we're doubling our rates.

This is when the channel truly comes into its own, with the country's top meteorologists enlightening us about the finer points of surface water temperatures, storm surges and tornadic activity. But it all seemed so abstract. I found it hard to relate to all these fancy graphics and colour-enhanced satellite images, until about 7 this evening.

Gustav's wispy outer fringes had just started to stalk New Orleans, and the reporter was standing in a very familiar location: Canal Street, the city's slightly down-at-heel main shopping street. With 95 percent of the population gone, and a dusk-to-dawn curfew in force, it was eerily deserted.

In the background, rain-lashed traffic lights cycled pointlessly from red to green and back again. The long rows of stately date palms, planted to cheer the place up after Katrina, were already straining at their hurricane tethers.

A tornado warning was in progress, which means that tornadoes have actually been spotted in the vicinity. And already, long before the full fury of the storm erupted, the reporter was lost for words and struggling to stand upright.

I'm glad we're well out of it, and I know we've made the right decision, but part of me wishes I could experience Gustav at first hand. Pam's best friend Toni is staying, together with many of her friendly and supportive neighbours, and at least one person on our block has decided not to evacuate. When we go home, all we'll see is the destruction, not the cataclysm that wrought it.

Another thing I'm very aware of is our good fortune in having relatives with whom to take refuge. The storm has displaced some 1.9 million people, many of whom will end up on makeshift dormitory beds in shelters just miles from here, surrounded by noisy, anxious and sleepless strangers.

Shreveport, Louisiana

Storm, model, cone, voluntary, mandatory, contraflow: the language of hurricanes takes innocuous-looking everyday words and endows them overnight with new and sinister significance. Next day, they're on everyone's lips.

Everyone here is an amateur hurricane expert, though they don't call them hurricanes: they're storms. Everyone has the National Hurricane Center bookmarked on their computer. Everyone knows that a model is one of up to twenty lines on a map showing a storm's possible track, calculated by supercomputers crunching trillions of numbers every second.

The lines form an inverted cone spreading out from a storm's current location and showing the area which it could hit: in the case of Gustav, anywhere from southwest Texas to the Florida panhandle.

When things start to look especially grim, the authorities will declare first a voluntary evacuation - we strongly suggest you get out now - and then a mandatory one, meaning if you don't get out now, you're on your own, and if we catch you in the street, we may arrest you.

They'll also introduce a contraflow system on major highways out of cities like New Orleans so that all lanes flow inland towards safety. Hurricanes are dependent on warm water for their energy, so much of their force is spent after they hit land.

It's not just words that acquire special meanings: so do the numbers from 1 to 5.

If the storm is a category 1 or 2 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with winds of up to 110 mph, people will consider battening down the hatches and sitting it out. If it's a 3, 4 or 5 and you have any sense, you'll evacuate.

If you return home a few days later after a false alarm - the storm hit some other poor unfortunate further down the coast, or it was only a 1 instead of the forecast 5 - no one will laugh at you. Better safe than sorry.

Katrina was a 5, but slowed to a 3 by the time she made landfall - it was the storm surge and poorly engineered levees that made her the most destructive hurricane in US history. Gustav is already a 4, and still has a thousand miles of open water from which to suck up fuel.

Pam and I left on Friday in the car which we'd conveniently and coincidentally bought only a week earlier; otherwise we'd have had to wait for one of the 700 buses that ferry people out of the city to shelters inland. As I write this on Saturday morning, the lines at the main bus terminal are already more than a mile long.

It was a beautifully, sunny, hot day, which made it hard to summon a sense of urgency. We emptied the fridge (if Gustav hits, the city will almost certainly be without power), closed the shutters and put away objects like flowerpots and dustbins that could cause damage if they blew around. But we made the hopefully realistic assumption that there wouldn't be any serious flooding: our house is in the 20% of the city that didn't flood during Katrina.

Outside was a flurry of activity as the neighbours loaded their cars with food, water, pet carriers and elderly relatives. The traffic on the interstate was stop-go, stop-go for the first hour and a half - it's also Labor Day weekend - but at least it wasn't gridlock. Pam once took thirteen hours just to travel the seventy miles to the nearest big city, Baton Rouge, during an evacuation.

After that, the 340-mile drive to Shreveport was relatively painless, and we're now staying with Pam's cousin Bill and his family. It's very strange not knowing whether we'll be returning home some time later next week (Gustav is expected to show up early on Tuesday morning) or remaining for much longer. I hope we don't outstay our welcome.

In an ironic coincidence, Friday was also the third anniversary of Katrina, and as a result we received an unexpected visit just before we left.

My sister Jacqui lives in Florida, and was the only British journalist in New Orleans on that fateful day in August 2005. She spent weeks here covering the aftermath and subsequent anniversaries, and has a deep affection for the city.

Recently, on a whim, she called the state coroner and asked whether there were still any unclaimed and unidentified bodies left over.

"Funny you should ask," he said. "It's three years now, and there are still eighty left. Three of them were babies. I was thinking I'd hold a jazz funeral to lay them all to rest." So Jacqui came to cover this moving story for several UK papers: here's one of her pieces.

Huh, big deal. It was a bit windy, and it rained all day.

It was only a matter of time before I experienced my first bit of Weather. I took this picture a few days go from my own personal satellite, Philos 4, which I can redirect to any corner of the globe at the flick of a switch - I usually use it as a means of reconnoitring beaches for possible visits.

It shows tropical storm Fay heading north from Cuba towards Florida, where it came ashore a record four times, dumping massive amounts of rain and killing ten people. It's now heading west across the Florida panhandle, and is likely to pass very close to New Orleans unless it suddenly peters out or veers off track.

What's a tropical storm? Well, I only had a vague idea until Fay started making headlines, but now I know that it's like a little sister to a hurricane, a cyclonic storm with less than hurricane-force winds, but the potential to develop into one.

People here are very blasé, as well they might be, having lived through the most destructive hurricane ever to hit the US. But they're not complacent, because they know that tropical storms are dangerous, destructive creatures.

In other news, we bought a car yesterday. I'm fast approaching my fiftieth birthday, but have never owned one before. You can manage perfectly well without a car in England, where the public transportation, for all its faults, is excellent.

Here, there's a bus that goes past the end of our road every fifty minutes until about 6 pm, with nothing at the bus stop to tell you when the next one's due. There's a very picturesque streetcar service that has just fully reopened after Katrina, and lots of taxis, and that's about it.

You can manage without a car, and the centre of town is very pedestrian- and cycle-friendly. But there's a feeling of being trapped in a gilded cage, with a great big state out there just begging to be explored: the bayous, Cajun country, the Mississippi plantations. There's friends and family to visit, and affordable places to shop rather than our local ludicrously overpriced supermarket, so I'm looking forward to having my horizons expanded.

A few months ago, in London, we went to see Mike Leigh's film Happy Go Lucky. It was pure joy, one of the funniest movies I've seen in ages, though with sombre undercurrents. I fell in love with the main character, whose sole purpose in life seems to be brightening the lives of those around her - except her congenitally miserable driving instructor, who's driven perilously close to insanity by her sunny demeanour.

There was only one aspect of her personality that briefly jarred with me, and that was her response to the theft of her bicycle at the beginning of the film. "Oh, no, I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye", she chirps, and cheerily tootles off to take driving lessons instead.

I reckon I've owned about fifteen bikes since that first Halfords racer I bought to save on the 5p bus fare to school, and thirteen of those have been stolen. My reaction is anything but happy go lucky: a moment of confusion (maybe I just misremembered where I left it?) followed by blind, murderous rage - the kind where, if someone put the cowering culprit in front of me and handed me a loaded Kalashnikov, I'd pull the trigger with scarcely a moment's hesitation.

The last time it happened was in New Orleans at the end of last year. I'd borrowed Pam's bike, and left it locked right outside the main entrance to Wal-Mart on the city’s most oddly named street, Tchoupitoulas (talking of shibboleths, if you can spell and pronounce it correctly, it means you've finally arrived in New Orleans).

When I came out twenty minutes later, it had vanished. Once the rage had subsided a bit, I reported the theft, but even though it took place right underneath the security cameras Wal-Mart allegedly uses to spy on employees thinking of joining a union, the police weren't interested. Though to be fair, they do have rather more important things on their minds at the moment, like doing something about New Orleans' status as the nation's murder capital.

Anyway, it probably serves me right for shopping at Wal-Mart. Last year, I was stung by a wasp as I walked in to one of their stores, which left a huge, disfiguring crescent-shaped blister below my eye for several days. Someone up there is trying to tell me something.

Now that we're back in New Orleans, I've bought Pam a replacement bike, and also one for myself. I’m ashamed to say I bought it from Wal-Mart, and it cost a shockingly cheap $68 – some family in Guangdong is probably going to bed hungry tonight because of me.

It’s a perfectly good bike, with 21 speeds (a bit pointless when you’re living below sea level and the nearest hill is a few hundred miles away) and front suspension (anything but pointless on this city’s third-world potholed roads). I bought the cheapest one I could find, so that when the inevitable happens and it’s stolen in six months’ time, I won’t mourn it too much.

Incidentally, bike theft hit the headlines in the UK last month when David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservative party and the person most likely to replace Gordon Brown as prime minister, had his stolen in London’s Notting Hill. I was very amused to see that he’d chained it to a bollard (do you have that word in US English?) about three feet high, so the thieves simply lifted it over the top. Duh! And this is the man that could soon have his finger on the nuclear button…

Newspaper headline of the week

This you-couldn't-make-it-up story about John Darwin, the man who faked his own death in a canoeing accident, has nothing to do with Englishmen in New Orleans. But I think the headline is a work of inspired genius.

Y'all have a good day now, ya hear?

I enjoy having a British accent, and I make few concessions to fitting in and sounding like a local. I relish the almost daily conversations with strangers wondering where I'm from (most think I'm Australian. Sometimes I'll say 'Have a guess', and occasionally people will say 'Oh', assuming Havagess is a fjord in Norway or something).

I'll always remember the housekeeper who knocked on my hotel door in Uniontown, Pennsylvania to ask whether I wanted my room cleaned. When I replied, her jaw dropped. 'Wow! I love your accent!' she said. 'It makes you sound so good looking'.

But sometimes needs must, and talking like an American is a matter of basic survival. If people ask me my last name and I say 'Goddard', they look blank and ask me to spell it. But if I say 'GAH-drd', they get it straight away.

When I was walking across the country in midsummer, I sometimes had to knock on people's doors and ask them to refill my water bottle for me. Cue the blank stare again. So I learned to say 'WAH-dr bodl', and after a while I stopped feeling silly adopting a fake American accent.

And there's a word I use, again with a degree of selfconsciousness. It's a shibboleth, a daily reminder that I'm in the deep south and not the east coast or the midwest or the west coast. As it approaches, a little alarm bell goes off in my brain and I have to prepare myself to say it.

Sometimes I lose my nerve and say 'You' even though I'm talking to, or about, more than one person. Sometimes I'll fudge it and say 'You all'. But occasionally I'll come up with a reasonable approximation to the correct pronunciation, 'Yahl'.

It's made me realise that there's a gap in British English that doesn't exist in large parts of the world.

Most European languages have plural forms of 'you'. The French say vous, the Germans Sie or Ihr, the Spanish vosotros or ustedes. Even the Irish have the convenient and ubiquitous 'youse'. But in Britain, where 'thou' and 'ye' have long since died out, we have to come up with some kind of clumsy circumlocution if we want to make it clear that we're talking in the plural.

Anyway, an unexpected 'Y'all' in a conversation can still send a metaphorical shiver of pleasure down my spine.

In the restaurant this evening the waitress said: 'I'll be back in a moment with y'all's drinks'. Afterwards, we staggered off, defeated by a mountain of spaghetti and meatballs, leaving a generous tip because we were embarrassed at the destruction wrought by two-year-old Rowan. But she'd seen it all before, and told us: 'Y'all come back.' Once again, she made me realise that the South is a foreign country within a foreign country.

By the way, Rowan is about to become my step-grandson. I could never have dreamed that a wonderful family of strangers half a world away in Little Rock, Arkansas would one day become relatives by marriage. Here they are: Scott, Dana, Rowan, and four-week-old Arden.

Home again

Hooray! I'm an Englishman in New Orleans again. People have been badgering me to keep up my blog, but 'An Englishman in London' doesn't have the same stranger-in-a-strange-land ring to it.

As we entered the country yesterday afternoon, there was an eerie sense of déjà vu. In July 2007, as I reported earlier, Pam and I arrived in Philadelphia and had a two-hour encounter with a rude immigration official who threatened to send me back to England.

This time we landed in Philly again, and again I was sent off to the same room for secondary screening, two words that strike despond into the heart of any visitor to the States.

But the experience could not have been more different. The official scanned my file silently for a couple of minutes, a smile on his face. Then he said: 'Wow, that's an amazing story. ' He briskly stamped my passport, said 'Welcome to the United States, and good luck with your marriage'.

Did I mention we're getting married on September 20? We want a small, simple beach wedding, and we've decided on Puerto Rico because I'm not allowed to leave the country until about December. There will be six adults and two children in attendance.

It's good to be back in Spain Street, but the best thing about it is the garden. When I left in November, I planted two little banana trees about four feet high, salvaged from the neighbours' garden before it was demolished.

Today, after eight months of blanketing rain and heat, the taller one stands at around fourteen feet. The garden we created out of nothing is a jungle, in the nicest sense of the word: it looks like it's been there for decades.

Tomorrow we're off to Little Rock, Arkansas, to meet Pam's new granddaughter Arden. Then we're going to Eureka Springs, also in Arkansas, for the annual reunion of my new family. I went last year, and it was a baptism of fire which I wouldn't have missed for anything. After that, we have to settle down and do some work to pay for all our travels.

London

Is anyone still reading this?

We're still exiled in London, and I'm wading through the mountains of paperwork it takes to get a fiancé's visa.

This afternoon I went to see my dentist, who owes me a favour after extracting so much from my mouth and my wallet over the past few months.

I had to get her to sign a passport photo for my police report, and prove to the Americans that I'm not an international criminal mastermind. I'm hoping they'll overlook my 28-year-old conviction for cycling without lights in Cambridge.

I was also bemused by the list of only twelve occupations deemed sufficiently respectable to sign passport photos, including teachers, lawyers, members of the armed forces, mayors (oh yeah, I know lots of those).

I've been enjoying our stay here - so much so that I quite like the idea of spending most of the time in New Orleans, but maybe coming back for a few months each year. The time since November has reminded me how much affection I still have for the city in which I've spent the majority of my life. For all its problems, it's getting better by the year - cleaner, better public transport, more prosperous.

I've also been appreciating the chance to spent significant amounts of time with friends and family, and my very friendly bunch of neighbours (well, some of them) here in Foxwood Road.

But I'm also looking forward to returning to New Orleans, and as soon as I do so (we're hoping maybe the end of March) I shall resume this blog.

A few shots from Lanzarote

Time for da Mardi Gras, by Pam

I know that I haven't done well in keeping up with this blog so let me apologize for that. I've been reprimanded by Lee and Mike, our neighbors across the road, for not giving them something to distract them whilst working. We see them regularly so it's hard to believe that there would be something I could write about that they don't already know but here goes.
My time to leave for home is fast approaching, although it is only for 3 weeks that I'm sure will pass very quickly. It will be 2 months to the day between the flight here and the return yet I still found myself saying last night that I'm running out of days to get everything done to prepare for my flight home.
We have had a few adventures since my last post. Aside from visiting here in England to see friends, we went to Lanzarote for a week with Tim and Anne Locke. They live in Lewes, south of London and Phil has known Tim since they were at Cambridge together. The Lockes were a good pair for such a holiday retreat as they encouraged excursion to other parts of the island and what magnificent excursions they were! Phil has a place on Tenerife but hadn't ventured to any of the other 6 islands that make up the Canaries. We found it to be charming and diverse, with wonderful touches of art from Cesar Manrique scattered across this lovely little escape. If you ever get the chance to visit, I say take it!
Now I'd like to address some things that have been running thru my mind in thoughts about this edition of the blog. It has struck me that most people don't greet or even make eye contact when approaching someone on the sidewalk. Coming from a place where conversations are often conducted from across the street, and often with a neutral ground in between, it feels unnatural to not acknowledge a passer-by. I've started a campaign to end this by uttering some sort of greeting to at least one person on each excursion. If everyone that reads this blog does the same thing, it won't be as noble as the motivation for Phil's walk, it might just make life around us a little brighter.
There have been things that I have discovered about London which will forever remain with me, no matter how long I go between visits. One is the sound of songbirds outside of our bedroom window. I wish I could record this magnificent sound, but I'm not sure a recording would ever do it justice. I don't know what kind of birds they are but I will miss their beautiful warbling when I've gone.
Another nice thing has been the gift of flowers from guests coming for dinner or one of our parties. We've had fresh flowers in the house much more than I have had at home and although friends at home are prone to bring wine or beer when visiting, the flowers thing has been a huge hit with me.
I'll miss the buses, trains, trams, and the Tube (London's underground transport). It has been incredible to know that walking to the end of the road or up the hill into the village is all that is between me and the rest of the city... or entire country, for that matter.
Getting to know Phil's world, his family and friends, tromping around his Alma mater at Cambridge, even thru the cold, the rain, the overcast days, has been a fabulous gift. I never envisioned living in London for 2 months, seeing the sites I've seen... and there's more to come!
I'll try to share some photos and an update during Mardi Gras but I make no promises. You can be sure I'll have alot to report, and the adventure continues when Phil meets me in Munich when I return from the States for a European escapade in which we hope to visit Austria,Lichtenstein, Switzerland, and maybe Belgium and The Netherlands.

Laissez le bon temps roulez!!!!