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.