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…