Happy holidays!

As I belatedly installed a pack of "holiday lites" on our Christmas tree last night, I realised just how comprehensively the C-word has been banished from the American vocabulary.

Google "happy holidays", and you get 61.5 million hits. Now try "merry Christmas": a pitiful 40 million. It's no exaggeration to say that in the past couple of months, I've seen the word Christmas in print about four times.

Tens of millions of people in this country don't celebrate it, but still it seems as though someone has done a colossal search and replace on every instance of the word in the United States, substituting something more inclusive, but also much blander.

I'm not religious, and I don't have strong feelings either way, but I'm fascinated at just how quickly and comprehensively the word has been airbrushed into oblivion.

I'm certainly not in the same camp as Fox News commentator John Gibson who, three years ago, published a book entitled The war against Christmas: how the liberal plot to ban the sacred Christian holiday is worse than you thought ("I had a guy who called me and talked about the Christmas party, actually a holiday party now, and he said people would whisper Merry Christmas in each other's ears.").

By the way, if you're looking for a last-minute stocking filler for an unhinged relative, you might do worse than Gibson's hot new opus, How the left swiftboated America: the liberal media conspiracy to make you think George Bush was the worst president in history.

Anyway, in keeping with the magic of Christmas (which most Americans actually do very well, and very enthusiastically), here's some poetry from a member of a profession not normally known for its literary leanings. Her name is Liz Stroebel, and she's a realtor, or what we Brits call an estate agent. This is the complete list of all her condos (which we call flats or apartments) in Homes & Land of Greater New Orleans magazine. The poetry is probably unintentional.

2726 Prytania $229,900
1563-65 N Roman $155,000
2512 Magazine $195,000
736 Harmony $112,500
7508 Asteroid $109,000
2035 Deogracias $125,000
3100 Rue Parc Fontaine $69,000
3225 Whisper $169,000
3304 Meraux $110,000

And finally, here's a painting I did of our house:

Actually I used a very clever piece of software called PhotoArtMaster Classic, which turns photographs into paintings or drawings. It's so much quicker than a brush and easel, and there's none of that tiresome cleaning up afterwards...

I'm beginning to think that there may have been a hidden purpose behind the seemingly random sequence of events that led me from leafy London to the potholed poverty of Louisiana's biggest city.

Researchers from the University of Warwick in England and Hamilton College in New York have published a study of happiness in the USA. Its conclusions will leave most New Orleanians a little bit proud, but not in the least surprised.

They took the results of a major survey of self-reported happiness ratings in every US state, and compared these with objective quality-of-life measures such as climate, population density and house prices. And the state that ranked top based on all of these benchmarks was not Florida, not California, not Hawaii, but Louisiana.

I can tell you exactly why this is. No, on second thoughts I'll leave it to Dan Baum, the New Yorker columnist whose classic work of nonfiction, Nine Lives, encapsulates New Orleans better than any other. Of course Lousiana isn't just about New Orleans, but the city is home to a quarter of the state's population, and I like to think that a little of its lackadaisical outlook has rubbed off on its neighbours.

Most visitors to New Orleans start asking impolite questions: Why has the rebuilding since Katrina gone so slowly? Why do you put up with such corrupt and incompetent politicians? How can you waste so much money on Mardi Gras when you're still living in trailers? Doesn't anyone in this city ever show up on time?

New Orleanians are hard to offend. Stop thinking of New Orleans as the worst-organized city in the United States, they say. Start thinking of it as the best-organized city in the Caribbean.

While the rest of Americans dream and scheme and chase the horizon, New Orleanians are masters at the lost art of living in the moment. If we're doing okay this minute, goes the logic - enjoying one another's company, keeping cool, and maybe having something good to eat - of what earthly importance is tomorrow or next week? Given the fragility of life, why even count on getting there? New Orleannians are notoriously late showing up, if they show up at all, because by and large they don't keep calendars. Calendars are tools for managing the future, and in New Orleans the future doesn't exist.

Actually, we're not all living in trailers any more. When I first flew in to Louis Armstrong International Airport, three years ago and a year after Katrina, the city was awash with white FEMA trailers, but now they've nearly all gone. Life is getting better, but you just have to be patient. Fortunately, patience is a virtue that's in abundant supply round here.

If you live more than 500 miles from Jackson Square, you won't find this funny.

You know you're from Louisiana if...

You've never heard of a dry county.

You've never heard of a county.

You hear gambling is illegal in some other states and are surprised.

You reinforce your attic to store Mardi Gras beads.

Your sunglasses fog up when you step outside.

When you give directions you use "lakeside and riverside" not north and south.

Your ancestors are buried above the ground.

You take a bite of five-alarm chili and reach for the tabasco.

You don't learn until high school that Mardi Gras is not a national
holiday.

You push little old ladies out of the way to catch Mardi Gras beads.

Little old ladies push you out of the way to catch Mardi Gras beads.

You leave a parade with footprints on your hands.

You believe that purple, green, and gold look good together.

Your last name isn't pronounced the way it's spelled.

You get pissed at people who pronounce it Nawlins, Norlens, or New or Leans.

You know what a nutria is but you still pick it to represent your baseball team.

Your town is low on the education chart and high on the obesity chart, and you don't care because you're No. 1 on the party chart.

Your house payment is less than your utility bill.

You don't show your tits during Mardi Gras.

You can spell and pronounce Tchoupitoulas.

Your grandparents are called "Maw-Maw" and "Paw-Paw."

You have to reset your clocks after every thunderstorm.

You're walking in the street with a plastic cup of beer.

When it starts to rain, you cover your beer instead of your head.

You save newspapers, not for recycling but for tablecloths at crawfish boils.

When you travel abroad, you always carry a bottle of tabasco and a salt shaker of Tony's.

You know that if you buy a drive-thru daiquiri, it's not drinking and driving until you put the straw in.

You drive east to get to the West Bank.

You stand on the neutral ground at parades and have no idea what a 'median' is.

Pulling a baby out of a cake is completely normal.

The only Bush you respect is a black man.

You refuse to believe that there is such a thing as the "Utah Jazz".

There is a color called "Bur-GUN-dee".

The concept of a basement never crossed your mind.

You have to get your car's suspension repaired at least twice a year.

Someone in a Lowe's store offers you assistance, and they don't work there.

You've worn shorts and a parka at the same time.

You've had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed a wrong number.

You install security lights on your house and garage, but leave both unlocked.

You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Louisiana.

I had my first encounter with the US healthcare system yesterday.

I went to a GP with a minor ailment, and was told that the charge for the initial visit would be $200. (British readers: forget the official exchange rate. In purchasing power terms, $200 is roughly the equivalent of £200.) After that, it would be $70 a visit.

"So why is it so much more expensive the first time?" I asked politely, concealing my resentment.

"Oh, that's because the doctor has to take a detailed medical background," the receptionist told me.

Then the doctor came in. He didn't say good morning, and only reluctantly shook my hand when I proffered it. He showed me a piece of paper with about a dozen boxes on it: heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure. "Ever had any of these?" he asked.

I told him no, and that was it - my detailed case history had been taken, and my 15-minute visit netted him about 22 cents a second.

It's no wonder the US spends twice as much as other nations on healthcare, and yet lags behind on basic measures like infant mortality and life expectancy. And nor is it surprising that inability to pay medical costs is the biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in this country.

We're still being bombarded with TV commercials opposing President Obama's healthcare reforms, most of them by the thoroughly sinister US Chamber of Commerce. And when I visited the website of my insurance company the other day, there was a banner ad on the home page: OBAMA'S REFORMS WILL INCREASE YOUR PREMIUMS.

The other day, NBC news did a segment comparing British and American government policies on swine flu. They interviewed a British GP who was also a visiting lecturer at Harvard, and therefore had detailed experience of healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic.

At the end, he threw in a nicely crafted and seemingly casual aside. "Of course the two systems are very different. It's survival of the fittest here. If you've got money you're OK, but if you haven't, you get thrown to the wolves." It was so refreshing to hear this one little home truth amid the overwhelming tide of anti-reform propaganda.

Well, that was a non-event.

First Ida was downgraded to a tropical storm, and then, perhaps offended by this snub, she stumbled ashore and lost the will to live. All she could manage was a stiff breeze and a sprinkling of rain.

I never thought when I came to New Orleans that I'd spend so much time in gay bars. But a large proportion of our friends are gay, and so are many of the best bars in town, so I feel quite at home there now.

Nor did I ever expect to end up devoting so much of my time to football on TV, but you can't really avoid it at the moment unless you want to end up a hermit, rejected and unloved.

The Saints, our local team, are on a roll, having won every one of their eight games so far this season, and as a result the whole town comes to a standstill every time they play. This afternoon, the streets of the French Quarter were empty but for handfuls of bewildered tourists wondering where everyone had gone.

Pam and I watched the game at the Good Friends bar. One big advantage of this was that the staff handed out free shots of ultra-potent Cactus Juice liqueur every time the Saints scored, and the final score was 30-20 to us.

Anyway, the sole topic of conversation all afternoon was football. Not once did I hear the words "hurricane" or "storm" mentioned, which was surprising given that the category two Hurricane Ida is heading straight for us, and is scheduled to arrive tomorrow afternoon.

It was a bit like Katrina, when bars in the Quarter were abuzz all the way through America's worst-ever natural disaster, with many drinkers oblivious of the fact that 80% of their city lay underwater.

Our house is primarily mint green. I knew that, but I didn't know that it had drop-lap siding and a full complement of Eastlake details, such as turned columns, an elaborate frieze and decorative millwork of all varieties.

I learned this from the property section of the local paper, where one of the journalists (who calls herself Streetwalker), has the enviable job of wandering around town looking at houses and writing about them. Last Saturday, she chose the 600 block of Spain Street, which is where we live.

I know I'm biased, but it is a beautiful house. The landlord has won an award for his sensitive restoration, with details picked out in many different shades of green, and if we're not sitting outside, the tour buses slow down to let people take pictures.

And I know our good friend Jay next door will be flattered to hear himself described as the muscled man taking out the garbage. He often walks around with no shirt, ostensibly because the weather is hot, but really because he knows that every straight woman and gay guy on the block would love to get their hands on his sixpack.

Every so often Louisiana makes international headlines, and it's always for the wrong reasons. That's partly because even in 2009, more than fifty years after the end of Jim Crow segregation, this state has way more than its fair share of redneck racists.

Two years ago, the world's press beat a path to the little town of Jena, where a handful of nooses hanging from a tree proved that the racial fault lines of the Deep South still lay close to the surface.

More recently, the state's lukewarm electoral support for Barack Obama had undoubted racial roots; Jimmy Carter was right to point out that many people hate him for the colour of his skin. Only 14 percent of whites voted for him in Louisiana. Many of those were in New Orleans, a haven of relative tolerance, and he received a rapturous reception when he visited on Thursday.

This week, a justice of the peace in the town of Hammond took his place in the international spotlight after refusing to grant a mixed-race couple a marriage licence, on the grounds that their union was doomed to failure. Keith Bardwell began his justification with the words "I'm not a racist". Nine times out of ten, this is followed by a "but", and so he continued: "I just don't believe in mixing the races that way. I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom."

As I said in my previous post, this is a wonderful place in which to live. But I still despair of it on a regular basis.

Excuse the long absence (I hope you're all using RSS feeds so you don't keep clicking on the site and finding nothing new). We've been away, first to Disney for Pam's birthday and then to the UK.

Back here, I'm pleased but not surprised to find that the Marigny, the district in which we live, has been named by the American Planning Association as one of America's top ten great neighbourhoods.

I've never lived anywhere with such a fierce and justified sense of pride in itself, and such a strong sense of community and tolerance. It's also beautiful, particularly when the evening sun lights up the paintbox of pink, orange and sky-blue Caribbean-style houses, though the sun hasn't been very much in evidence lately.

You can tell a lot about people from the stuff they leave out in the street for others to pick up.

It comes and goes in waves: one person puts a couple of well-thumbed paperbacks on their front step, another follows suit with a broken laptop and a bag of Mardi Gras beads, and pretty soon everyone on the block has a little museum of unwanted objects on display. Then everything disappears, and a few weeks later the whole endless cycle begins again.

Last weekend, the guy living catty-corner from us moved out of his rented apartment, and left all his detritus for us vultures to pick over.

For several days, an ever-changing knot of people stood on the street corner, exchanging local gossip and discussing the relative merits of old copies of National Geographic, dusty pairs of shoes and glass ornaments.

Among the objects he left on the sidewalk was a collection of faded 1980s male porn magazines. That was snapped up pretty quickly, which was surprising since so many people get their thrills from a computer screen these days, but unsurprising in that at least half the inhabitants of the Marigny are gay.

Then a blow-up rubber female doll appeared hanging from the railings, only to disappear shortly afterwards, smuggled off under someone's arm to some sticky nocturnal tryst.

The neighbour left several days ago, taking the rest of his belongings with him. But then, yesterday afternoon, a couple strolled down the middle of the street carrying a coffin, slightly the worse for wear but still perfectly serviceable.

I was determined not to let my curiosity get the better of me, especially since I had visions of them opening the lid to reveal the decaying remains of some recently deceased relative. We chatted about this and that, but eventually I could no longer ignore the 600-pound gorilla in the room. "OK, what's with the coffin?" I asked.

"We found it lying on the sidewalk just up the street," the guy told me, kicking it open to reveal the neatly stitched cream-coloured lining. "We're going to take it home and use it as a dining-room table."

If coffins could speak, and thank God they can't, that one would have a long and interesting tale to tell.

Can I ask for two minutes of your time to help make New Orleans a better place?

Melissa Sawyer, who lives two doors down the street and is a good friend, used her Harvard education not to line her pockets but to make a difference to people less fortunate than herself.

She co-founded the Youth Empowerment Project (YEP), which provides case management, mentoring and educational services to at-risk young people in this desperate city. It's an uphill struggle, and sometimes a drug dealer's bullet gets there before Melissa does. She's the blonde woman on the right above, and her partner, Renell, on the far right, also works for the project.

YEP is dependent on grants and donations, and is currently applying to Nike for $5,000. This will be awarded to the entrant which receives the largest number of votes, which seems a slightly haphazard way of awarding grant money, but there you go.

Please go here to find out more about YEP and cast your vote, and thank you very much!

We were in our local branch of Winn-Dixie yesterday. As we paid the middle-aged female checkout assistant, the man behind us started loading a mountain of shopping onto the belt. He was red-faced, sweaty, clearly shopping for a large family, and looked harrassed and grumpy.

Even the most basic interaction in the South is slow and courteous. I'm still amused when Pam calls the electricity or phone company with some trifling query about our bill, and ends up gossiping for twenty minutes with a total stranger in a call centre in Atlanta about their husbands, children and grandchildren.

Me, I try, but I have decades of bad habits to overcome. In London, until a few years ago, paying for your goods in a supermarket was an entirely wordless transaction: you don't like being here, I don't like being here, so let's get this over as quickly as possible.

Then some senior executive from Sainsbury or Tesco went on holiday to France or Italy or somewhere, realised that customers there took it for granted that checkout staff would at least pass the time of day, and revolutionised the UK retail industry by introducing the practice there.

I also like the fact that some stores here have greeters. I used to be a bit cynical about this, but now I realise that if you're a big-box retailer it helps to give you a human face, reminding your customers and yourself that no matter how much of a money-guzzling monolith you are, you're still dependent on men and women with mouths to feed and bills to pay.

Anyway, back to Winn-Dixie. The normal greeting is "How ya doin?", to which the reply is "Good, how are you?" But as the man unloaded the first of a dozen boxes of breakfast cereal, he growled: "Tell me somethin' interestin'."

She looked as bored and fed up as he did, but her wit was still rapier sharp and she rose to the challenge. With scarcely a nanosecond's hesitation, she said: "You're our one billionth customer. Congratulations. Ha, ha, ha." Then she picked up her scanner and silently set to work on his Cheerios and Rice Krispies.

I'd been hoping to visit Humptulips, but we ended up going to Wanker's Corner instead.

Pam and I are staying with her brother Mark in Portland, Oregon, at the end of a thousand-mile northwestern road trip. We were supposed to be visiting friends in Canada too, but the Canadians wouldn't let Pam in: she had a drink-driving conviction several years ago, paid the fine and everything, but is still banned from Canada. We've visited lots of European countries without any problems, and it seems unfair that she should be punished in Canada for something she did in the US - but there we go.

Anyway, we turned this setback to our advantage with a spectacular tour of the Cascades mountains, and then set course southwards to Portland. On the way, I spotted a little town called Humptulips, Washington on the map, and because I've always been a great believer in visiting places just because they have interesting names, we decided to go there. But then we realised we were running out of time, so we changed our minds.

Afterwards, I looked up the origin of the town's name on Wikipedia. It says:

The name Humptulips may have come from a local Native American language, meaning 'hard to pole', referring to the difficulty local Native Americans had poling their canoes along the Humptulips River. According to other sources the word means 'chilly region'.^[4] Another possibility is that Humptulips was the name of a band of the Chehalis tribe.

In other words, no one has the faintest idea.

Anyway, today we awarded ourselves a consolation prize by driving 25 miles south from Portland to Wanker's Corner. We had lunch at the Wanker's Corner Saloon and Café, prosaically located in a strip mall, where the waitress patiently explained that they had a constant stream of sniggering, camera-clicking British and Australian visitors. Then we continued to the local store to stock up on provisions.
On the way back to Portland, we passed a sign pointing to Boring, Oregon. I was all for going there too, but it was a 15-mile detour and I was overruled by Pam and Mark, who said that was enough silly placenames for one day.

I was handed this by a man in Seattle yesterday.

I told him it was offensive, an insult to all the millions who voted for Obama in the hope that he'd sort out the terrible mess that is the healthcare system. But he gave me the same beneficent grin as I got back at Mardi Gras, when all the loony Christian fundamentalists converge on the den of iniquity that is New Orleans. I told one what I thought of his banner saying that atheists and homosexuals would burn in hell, but I was just wasting my breath.

I regard it as an immense privilege to live here, and I don't normally believe in biting the hand that feeds me, but I make an exception where healthcare is concerned. I think it's the worst aspect of living in the United States. If you're rich, old, a child, or you work for the right company, you don't need to give it a second thought. Otherwise, it's a constant worry at the back of your mind: one episode of illness could leave you bankrupt. I have my own insurance because I'm self-employed, and it's so grotesquely overpriced that all I can afford is basic catastrophe cover.

Anyway, Britain's national health service has been in the news a lot over here recently, and for all the wrong reasons. The Republicans, and pharmaceutical and insurance companies masquerading as concerned citizens' groups, are trying to persuade the public that the NHS is somehow inferior to the US system.

The other night, we wandered into a bar in a small town in Washington state. It was empty except for the bartender, who was watching an anti-NHS rant on Fox News, with its laughable slogan, "Fair and Balanced". We got chatting, and he said: "You're from England. They have socialized medicine over there."

Socialized is a dirty word here, appropriated by the right and given a whole new meaning. To me, it implies that people look after one another and the rich help to subsidize the poor; to the likes of Fox News, it means that Britain belongs up there with Cuba and North Korea in a totalitarian empire of evil. It's like the word "liberal", which to many people here is the worst insult you can bestow on anyone. To me, it's the opposite of "illiberal", and therefore a good thing.

The bartender told me that he'd recently had a hip replacement, and was glad his insurance company had taken care of all the bills because there was no way he could afford them. "If I'd had to go through your system, I'd still be waiting," he said.

"Maybe, but the waiting lists have come down dramatically since Tony Blair came to power," I said. And then I told him about my first wife, Jayne, who died of cancer in January 2006. "She was in and out of hospital for seven months, and she had every treatment in the book - intensive care, chemotherapy, everything. And do you know how much it all cost?"

He shook his head.

"Nor do I," I said. "That's because every penny of the bill was picked up by the taxpayer."

He didn't look convinced, and that was the end of the conversation because he had to attend to another customer. But I hope he went away and thought about it, because until people like him are convinced that a national health service is exactly what America needs, it's never going to happen.

...and another

I've just thought of another little milestone in the long, slow journey towards being an American in all but name. Though on second thoughts, anyone who's ever met me will know that could never happen.

I was cycling home from the post office yesterday afternoon when a traffic light turned red in front of me. I glanced briefly right and left, and continued with scarcely a moment's hesitation.

Back in London I used to get self-righteously annoyed with the minority of fellow cyclists who flouted the rules, usually as a statement of their youthful masculine identity. I figured that they gave us all a bad name, and for my first two years here I would meekly sit at the side of the road till the lights decided to change.

The problem was, in New Orleans I was literally the only person who did this.

This is not a misuse of the word "literally" ("I was literally blown away when Obama got elected, and since then I've been literally walking on a cloud"), nor rhetorical exaggeration, but measurable statistical fact. If you put a billion-candlepower red light the size of a tractor wheel slap bang in the middle of Canal Street, 99.9 percent of cyclists would fail even to notice it, and the other 0.1% would be me.

Peer pressure like that is impossible to resist, so now I go with the flow, which also includes cycling the wrong way down one-way streets. Someone recently told me that this used to be legal, but clearly old habits die hard because every single cyclist in town still does it. And if you were to open a shop selling nothing but bike lights, you'd be out of business quicker than it takes to say "hit and run".

I don't know why this attitude prevails here. It's not bravado, nor the famous American detestation of rules and over-intrusive government. As far as I can see, it's just because this is New Orleans, and that's how they do things here.

Three signs that you're going native

You measure your life not in years, but in hurricanes

The other day, Pam was reading an ad in the local paper for cheap contact lenses and asked when was the last time I got my eyes tested. I thought for a moment, and then replied: "Ike". She said: "Oh", and went back to her reading.

My monosyllabic response was New Orleans shorthand for September 2008, when hurricane Ike devastated Galveston, Texas. We got off lightly, just catching the edge of the storm, which also caused serious flooding in parts of Louisiana.

I associated it with getting my eyes tested because I was waiting to see the optician on that day. Someone came through the door from the street, and the wind sneaked in behind them, picking up every single piece of loose paper in the shop and sending it whirling into the air.

Later that afternoon, we were walking out of a furniture store and couldn't open the door. It was closing time, so I asked the assistant to unlock it. "No, it's not locked," he said. "It must be the wind holding it shut."

It's not the most accurate measure of time, but you'll often hear people here referring to an event as having occurred between Katrina and Rita, or a few weeks after Andrew.

Incidentally, we recently met a friend of a friend whose name was Katrina. I was itching to ask all the obvious questions you ask someone called Katrina who lives in New Orleans, but I tactfully kept my mouth shut - it's a bit like being in Munich and meeting a man called Hitler.

You measure your weight not in stones, but in pounds

Another friend of a friend recently told me he weighed 250 pounds, and for the first time I didn't try to divide this by 14 in my head.

Until very recently, and like most Brits over a certain age, I weighed myself in stones. I have no idea why we still use this medieval unit of measurement, but I've finally managed to kick the habit.

It's amazing how the Americans, even more than the British, have clung to the wreckage as the rest of the world is swept away by the tide of metrication. Their weather forecasts are in Fahrenheit, their milk comes in quarts and gallons, and when I helped my father-in-law in Tennessee to build the roof of his new extension last year, he would get impatient when I couldn't instantly work out the difference between ten and five sixteenths and ten and three eighths.

Though as The Onion once reported, there are grounds for hope: a new generation of urban dwellers has become intimately familiar with grammes, litres and cubic centimetres.

You measure distances in hundreds of miles, not in miles

We were driving back from seeing Pam's daughter in Little Rock, Arkansas a couple of weekends ago, and I glanced at the GPS and said: "Not far now. It's only a couple of hundred miles."

It was then that I realised how much my perception of distance had changed since leaving my tiny, teeming homeland. Today, I think nothing of driving 450 miles, the distance from London to Inverness in northern Scotland, just to attend Pam's grandson's third birthday party.

Speaking of the GPS, there's a little game I play on long journeys. I'm trying to find the longest distance it instructs me to drive before I have to do anything. The best I've found so far is when we join the I55 interstate heading south towards home, and the GPS says keep left in 157 miles. I'm sure I'd find far better examples if we lived in west Texas or Nevada or somewhere.

I finally picked the bananas from the back garden today. It's four months since they reached full size, and only now have they started to turn yellow - we were starting to think that they might never do so.

They are the best I've ever tasted - the small, intensely sweet Caribbean kind rather than the larger and less flavoursome bananas grown by big, evil multinationals in Latin America.

Pam is cooking dinner for friends this evening, and she's going to flambé them to make New Orleans' most famous dessert, bananas Foster.

Anyone watching channel 264 on DIRECTV would get a pretty peculiar picture of life in modern Britain.

If BBC America is anything to go by (fortunately, it's not), we spend our weekends taking Lamborghinis on tyre-shredding 200-mph test drives along deserted, lava-strewn Icelandic roads.

When our squalid, cockroach-infested houses become uninhabitable, we call in the divas of dirt, a former MI6 spy and her matronly sidekick, who share the contents of our unflushed toilets with millions of viewers.

We open restaurants, but nobody comes. Salvation arrives in the form of an ex-soccer player who says "fuck" a lot to prove that being a chef is no job for pansies, and before long the phone is ringing off the hook.

All this is because BBC America only ever shows about three programmes: Top Gear, How Clean is Your House?, and Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.

I have no idea why the world's greatest broadcasting organisation is so parsimonious about sharing its bounty with the people of America. Complain, and you get a letter from a computer saying that the channel is committed to maintaining a diverse range of entertaining and educational programmes. Which is a joke.

That said, they are very good programmes.

For many years, I completely missed the point of Top Gear, which is about cars. I had little interest in the subject, and none at all in its presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who has now assumed George W. Bush's mantle as the world's leading climate change denier. He has little time for people like me: lefties, environmentalists, cyclists, expats:

Anyone who emigrates from Britain, no matter where they end up, is a bit of a dimwit... Every single expat I've ever met is the same: hunched at a bar in a stupid shirt, at 10 in the morning, desperately trying to convince themselves that they are not alcoholics, that the barman really is their friend and that it's only eleven hours till bedtime.

Then, when they clock your accent, they launch into a slurred tirade about Gordon Brown and the British weather and how their prawns are the size of Volkswagens.*

The trouble is, Jeremy Clarkson is a comic genius, and Top Gear is wonderful. What I didn't realise until I started watching it on BBC America is that it's essentially one gigantic pisstake.

Every so often, the programme gets a bit po-faced for a few minutes ("Of course the V6 version does have the added benefits of a tilt-and-telescope steering wheel, electroluminescent gauges and power mirrors"), but if you're watching a recording you can always fast-forward these bits, like the first five boringly easy questions in Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Clarkson could have been a cult hero in this country too, but the US version of the show never got past the starting grid. This was partly because with its spectacular, elegantly choreographed set pieces, it costs a king's ransom to make. A Bugatti Veyron does battle against a Eurofighter jet; Clarkson turns up in a Rolls-Royce to open a public swimming pool and accidentally-on-purpose drives into the deep end; a snowmobile goes hurtling off the end of a ski jump.

The other reason is that the BBC is publicly funded, so it doesn't have to worry about putting sponsors' noses out of joint. Which is fortunate, because Clarkson and his co-presenters administer brutal tongue-lashings to any vehicle which doesn't come up to scratch: "This is a monumentally crappy car. Do not buy it even if the dealer gets down on his knees and implores you to."

We keep telling our American friends that Top Gear is the best thing on TV, but they just nod politely and uncomprehendingly. Jeremy Clarkson himself said that the programme had gone down poorly with focus groups on this side of the Atlantic: "They just don't understand a single word we're on about. They just don't get it really." Well, he was wrong. Pam is American, and she gets it.

* They are.

I also like to keep an eye on the weather back in London - in the past week or so, it's been almost as steamy as New Orleans. I've just discovered this extremely addictive way of finding out whether it's raining in Trafalgar Square.

Two summers ago, I wrote that New Orleans had experienced its highest-ever temperature of 102F (39C). Yesterday, that record was broken again, with the mercury hitting 104F (40C). At this rate, in 108 years' time the temperature will have reached 212F (100C), and I will no longer require a kettle to boil my cup of Nescafé in the morning.

I didn't ask Father Bill Terry, who maintains New Orleans' 'murder board', what he thought of guns, but I imagine it would be fair to say that his opinion is not overly favourable.

One of his colleagues in Kentucky, however, has a rather less wholesome attitude towards firearms.

If there's a 1, 2 or 3 in the date, there's a festival in New Orleans. This weekend there was a seafood festival, a tomato festival...


and the city's first World Naked Bike Ride.

Fifty or sixty valiant cyclists took part (I didn't). Most of them obeyed the New Orleans Police Department's ban on the display of naughty bits, making imaginative use of duct tape, old socks and body paint. Hopefully in future years there'll be too many naked people for the police to arrest them all, as is the case in other cities around the world: London has gone from 58 riders to over 1,000 in the past five years.

New Orleanians have many virtues, but nonviolent conflict resolution is not one of them. Last year there were 179 murders, an average of one every two days, far more per head of population than any other US city. Of this total, 59 percent remain unsolved, 92 percent were shootings, and an estimated 49 percent were drug related.

Two years ago Father Bill Terry, of St Anna’s episcopal church on Esplanade Street, decided to do something about it. “We couldn’t fix the murders in New Orleans, but we had to act,” he told me. He placed a board outside his church listing the name and age of each victim, and the cause and date of their death. Continuously updated, it has now become a prominent and moving city landmark.

"We started listing names on the murder board around March of 2007. It was several weeks after the big citywide Silence is Violence march on City Hall. A deacon in training came to me and said, ‘We have to do something. But it’s so overwhelming that no matter what we do, I’m afraid that it won't change anything.’ That was the beginning of it all.

“We couldn’t fix the murders in New Orleans, but we did have to act. Then it came to me that one action was to humanize the victims. The primary way to give personhood to anyone is to name them. People who are not numbers and names have power and communicate humanity. So we began with the murder board as a place to remind us all that it’s not about numbers but people.

“In addition, four churches bring roses every month to the chief of police, the mayor, the city council and the district attorney, one rose for each victim that month. We also send them a note naming the victims and saying that we pray for the victims, the perpetrators, and all public servants affected by violence in our city. Violence has more victims than one can imagine – in some way we are all victims.

“Several volunteers dredge through the papers each day for the list of names, and occasionally call the coroner’s office. It’s laborious work, and takes an emotional toll. My wife collects all the articles and obituaries and we preserve them in albums each year. We have these on display as you enter our church, and we keep the albums for prior years in our parish hall.

“I write the names on the board myself. It’s difficult, and it takes a lot out of you. You begin to remember the names and recall the people. This week I posted the name of a young man who, at one time, briefly attended St. Anna’s. I struggled to remember his face and couldn’t, but it was a dark moment writing his name on the board.

“I used to write the names once a week, around Monday, then after a time once every two weeks, then every month. Unintentionally, I was avoiding the obligation. I’m now back to once a week, and afterwards I take time to work in our garden and pray.

“The parishioners are saying a lot by allowing me to put the board up. We read the names of victims each Wednesday and Sunday at Mass during the prayers of the people. St. Anna's folk now expect it, and feel like worship is unfinished or lacking if we don’t read the names.

“I remember in 2007 there was a run of about ten, maybe fifteen days without a murder. That Sunday I announced that we had no victims of violence to pray for in our city that day. The congregation shouted out in joy and clapped. That night I found out that Sunday a boy had been shot to death at about the time we were rejoicing.

“When the murder board became public in the local paper, the Times-Picayune, I got a dozen or more calls from survivors. Many were the mothers of victims. By six p.m. I could take no more calls and broke down and cried, something that I don’t often do. Each story was different, but in some way they were all the same. People said, ‘Thank you for remembering my child. I thought that they’d been forgotten and that nobody cared. Thank you.’

“At least once a month, at odd hours and without much ado, I’ll see a van or car or even two vehicles pull up. A family gets out and walks to the board to find a loved one. They spend a moment, not long, usually take cellphone pictures, then leave.

“On rare occasions a mom or other relative will become vested in the memorial. One brought a small wooden cross and we stuck it in the garden below the sign. Another has come back several times and dug up and replanted the gardens in front of the three signs that we now have; the stories go on. I’m always impressed by passersby who stop and look and meditate on the board.

"One priest has brought several youth groups here from New York, and makes it a mandatory visit. He told me never to stop.”

My dealings with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service have not been pleasant experiences.

There was the official at Philadelphia airport last year who'd clearly got out of bed on the wrong side that day, and who threatened to deport me.

Then there was the computer which, for the past seven months, has been asking me for proof of income to support my Green Card application. Each time I've written pointing out that I've already sent this information, and each time my letter has been ignored. I've phoned, but they just say they can't discuss details of individual cases.

But at last, this week, some nameless human being noticed my plight and pressed a key on their computer. As a result, I received a very friendly letter telling me that I'm now a legal permanent resident of the United States, no longer stuck in limbo between two countries. I can get the social security number and driver's licence that everyone keeps asking me for and which I don't have, and I can start getting on with the rest of my life.

London

Excuse the long silence.

Pam and I are in London for a couple of weeks. One of my main reasons for coming, apart from catching up with friends and family after nine months' absence, was to give a presentation at the conference of my professional body, the Institute of Translation and Interpreting.

Yesterday morning, we were staying at a hotel opposite Buckingham Palace near the conference venue. I was severely jetlagged, the room was very dark and surprisingly quiet for such a central location, and I didn't wake until the housekeeper barged in at 12.20 pm - five minutes after my presentation was due to start.

I threw on my clothes and hurried along Birdcage Walk to the elegant headquarters of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers where the conference was held. But I was too late.

Fortunately, everyone was very understanding, and they reshuffled the programme a bit and fitted me in later on.

The presentation was about my walk, with particular reference to the ways in which it had affected my attitude towards my job. I'd been a bit jaded with the whole profession before I started, but the walk renewed my enthusiasm for translating - not least because I took my laptop with me, and worked in all kinds of weird and wonderful places along the way.

Once, in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, the heartland of the Amish people, I plugged my computer into a Coke machine and worked as horsedrawn buggies laden to the gunwales with Amish families clipclopped by. The walk made me realise how, thanks to the laptop and the internet, translation is now a more mobile and flexible profession than almost any other.

Yesterday evening, we were staying at my parents' place in south London and I had to send a job to a client. They have no internet connection, so I took my laptop and walked down the road, looking for a wireless network that wasn't password-protected.

The thirty or so houses between my parents' and the end of the street had about fifteen networks, and I imagined all these people hunched alone over their computers, each in an online world of their own.

Eventually I found an unprotected network and sent my email, feeling very selfconscious and hoping that no one would come by. But it was cold, dark, and late, and the streets were empty.

Switching off the computer, I reflected that this was yet another instance of what I'd been talking about at my presentation.

I can now work with my laptop perched on a neighbour's front wall at 11 o'clock on a Sunday night. Once, I lugged dictionaries, the tools of my trade, around with me whenever I worked away from home; now they're online and free. The staff of the language bookshop exhibiting at the conference admitted to me that it was hard to sell paper dictionaries any more. The internet has freed us from the tyranny of the desk and given us near-total mobility.

Yes, we have some bananas

A couple of years ago, during our guerrilla gardening phase, we liberated a couple of four-foot banana plants from what was then the derelict house next door and is now the beautifully restored historic home of our friends Kevin and Matt. They're now fifteen feet high - the banana plants, that is, not the neighbours.

We assumed they were like all the other bananas in their garden: ornamental, with long-lasting pink flowers and small, inedible fruit.

But a couple of weeks ago, I was standing at the top of a ladder and pondering yet again how much my life had changed, pruning bananas instead of the roses on my allotment in London, when I realised that hidden among last year's fading leaves was a huge, pendant purple flower ringed by the beginnings of three dozen bananas.

It was the real McCoy, the edible variety. I'd always thought of them as a tropical crop, but our summers are hot enough and our winters sufficiently mild for them to bear fruit.

Now, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is wander bleary-eyed into the garden in my bathrobe to see how they're progressing. They should be ready very soon.

I looked up bananas on the net and discovered that the trunk of the "tree" is actually made up of huge concentric layers of leaf sheaths. When the plant is ready to fruit, a true stem grows up through the middle and the flower grows on the end.

The garden is looking rather good at the moment. Just as in England, I've spent the winter months thinking my obsession with growing things has evaporated, and then all of a sudden the days aren't long enough to complete all the jobs we want to do. Everything happens like a speeded-up film here, with plants seemingly flowering whenever the mood takes them.

For example, we have a couple of bottlebrushes, one of my favourite shrubs. I also have a rather weedy one about three feet high in my garden in London, which puts out its scarlet brush-shaped flowers in July. Here, ours are about nine feet high, have flowered twice already this year, and should eventually become big, mature shade trees.

Our tomato plants are knee-high, and we're hoping they'll have borne at least some fruit before we go to London next month. Most varieties stop fruiting when the daytime temperature exceeds 90F and the night-time temperature stays above 75F, which is not too far off.

Otherwise, Kevin and Matt will get the tomatoes as a thank-you for watering them in our absence, and as a rather inadequate recompense for the theft of their banana trees.

Speaking of which, here's a hilarious story from the UK about Google Earth.

Sometimes I go for little journeys inside my head, for no particular reason except to pass the time, and because I can. They're also a good cure for insomnia, much more effective than counting sheep.

They usually start at my house in Foxwood Road in London, and often head up the hill towards Blackheath station - a seven-minute walk I did perhaps three thousand times during my eighteen years there, the last being in July 2008, so the memories are still very vivid.

Sometimes I travel so fast that the houses on either side are a blur; sometimes I stop and pass the time of day with a neighbour. It's an oddly satisfying exercise that eases the sadness of separation from England.

Now, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are doing the job for me, freeing up precious brain cells for more useful tasks like earning a living and remembering my own name. Today, they launched Google Street View in the UK, offering a 360-degree, driver's-eye experience of most of the country's main cities.

This morning, I relived the journey on my computer screen instead of in my cerebral cortex. I left my former home and set off up Lee Park, the road leading to the station.

The pictures must have been taken last summer. The trees were in leaf, a dense canopy that allows you to walk most of the way to the station in pouring rain without getting wet; the stunning rockery on the corner of Shearman Road was past its springtime best; and the people were wearing t-shirts.

I scanned their faces, trying to spot someone I knew, but they'd been blurred to protect their privacy. When Google Street View was launched in the US, people were reportedly captured sunbathing naked, breaking into other people's homes, and visiting adult bookstores.

Outside number 64 Lee Park, two women stood chatting and eyed the Google car as it passed with its festoon of cameras. Another sped past on a bicycle, and a man walked his black dog.

At the top of the hill, I strolled past Costcutter, surely London's most inappropriately named grocery store. In the window, there was a big sign saying Convenient, Fresh, Friendly, Local, Value (I disagreed with most of these descriptions, but that's neither here nor there), and posters advertising French lessons, three bottles of cider for four pounds, and a children's bring and buy sale.

I continued past Prime Time Video, where the clock read 2:05; briefly peered through the window of the Cancer Research charity shop where I used to work, but saw no one I recognised; and overtook a 54 bus as I headed towards Greenwich Park. I had one more place to pay my respects.

When Jayne died, her friends and relatives installed a bench in the park with a little brass plaque on the back in her memory (if you're ever in the area, please take some polish with you). It has a spectacular view of the Thames and historic Greenwich, and is popular with passers-by catching their breath on the way up the steep hill.

Sadly, I couldn't see the bench because it was too far away from the camera, but maybe it's just as well that this amazing technology still has its limitations. Britain is already a surveillance society, with more CCTV cameras per head than any other country in the world and with privacy and human rights way down the government's list of priorities. Sometimes, people should just be left in peace.

Woohoo!

They're letting me out of here. I finally got my advance parole, which has nothing to do with my extensive criminal activities, but is a piece of paper allowing me back in to the United States if I leave.

Until now, if I'd gone to England or anywhere else, I'd be deemed to have abandoned my application for legal permanent residence. So now Pam and I have the pleasant task of listing all the people and places we want to see when we go there in May.

I already have one engagement: I'm going to do a presentation on my walk at the conference of my professional body, the Institute of Translation and Interpreting.

Years ago, if I'd received such an invitation, I'd have mumbled an excuse, but now I'm following the dictum of my late wife Jayne: Say yes first, and worry later.

Having spent years translating other people's often mind-bogglingly tedious PowerPoint presentations, I now have to learn to use this arguably indispensable communication tool myself - and hopefully not put too many people to sleep.

There is such a thing as a free lunch, but I was stupid enough to forget this.

On Saturday, I paid seven dollars and something for a cabbage and a handful of potatoes from Mr Okra, the itinerant fruit and veg salesman who drives his elaborately decorated truck up and down the streets of New Orleans six days a week, chanting a list of his wares through a PA system like a muezzin in a minaret: "I have oranges. I have bananas. I have mirlitons".

On Sunday, I stood on Judge Perez Drive and cowered as tens of thousands of cabbages, potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic bulbs, lemons, grapefruit, limes, apples, bananas, candy, moon pies and even bags of ice and sugar rained from the sky.

It's that time of year again: just as the Mardi Gras hangovers fade and we've started thinking about work again, along comes another excuse to unplug our laptops and party.

This time the pretext is St Patrick's Day, when everyone in New Orleans takes to the streets in a spontaneous outburst of celebration after suddenly discovering Hibernian genes lurking in their DNA. My mistake was not to realise that the party started nine days before the event itself.

The people on the parade floats throw not just beads and cuddly toys but the ingredients for corned beef and cabbage, fondly believed to be the dish that people in Ireland eat on St Paddy's, though it's about as Irish as bratwurst and sauerkraut. They also distribute whatever food they have gathering dust in their pantries.

As a result, for a few virtuous days each year, we abandon our habitual diet of fried chicken and beignets and begin consuming our five daily portions of fruit and vegetables as hospital emergency rooms fill with people hit by flying cabbages.

The parade on Sunday

At the end of Debbie Fagnano's calliope recital yesterday, I asked her to play You Are My Sunshine. It has very special memories for me, and I'd heard her playing it a couple of times before.

Afterwards, she told me something I didn't know: it's one of the state songs of Louisiana, credited to country music star and two-times state governor Jimmie Davis - though in fact he bought the copyright from the original writer.

It's a strange song, part mourning for a lost love:

The other night, dear
As I lay sleeping
I dreamed I held you in my arms.
When I awoke, dear
I was mistaken
And I hung my head and cried.

This is followed by what sounds like a thinly veiled threat of violence, perhaps a late-night visit from a posse of redneck cousins:

I'll always love you
And make you happy
If you will only say the same
But if you leave me
To love another
You'll regret it all some day.

And then, tacked on at the end, comes this delightful agricultural and culinary irrelevance:

Louisiana my Louisiana
the place where I was born.
White fields of cotton
green fields of clover,
the best fishing
and long tall corn;
Crawfish gumbo and jambalaya
the biggest shrimp and sugar cane,
the finest oysters
and sweet strawberries
from Toledo Bend to New Orleans.

Somehow, it's a good choice of anthem for this tragicomic shambles of a state.

With the possible exception of the train drivers and airline pilots who stir us from our slumbers in the small hours, Debbie Fagnano is the noisiest person in New Orleans. And yet she's also one of the city's best-known and most popular inhabitants, though most people have only seen her as a speck in the distance.

Debbie plays the calliope, or steam organ, on the steamboat Natchez just before it slips its French-Quarter moorings for a twice-daily Mississippi cruise. Her medley of popular tunes, sounding like a slightly off-key children's recorder ensemble, is audible for several miles.

I had to don earplugs when I sat in on her Saturday lunchtime concert which, for my benefit, she began with the British national anthem.

"Ever since I was a kid, I've always loved the water and wanted to own a boat or be on a ship. I'm originally from New Jersey, but my family always knew I'd be out of the ordinary; I had that little gleam in my eye that said something out there would call me away.

"When I visited New Orleans and saw and heard the calliope, I asked the captain if he needed anyone to play it. He didn't at the time, but he kept my name on file and eventually I got the job. I've been doing this since 1989, and I'm also the musical director of a local church.

"The qualifications for this job? Well, you obviously need a knowledge of black and white keys, ideally the organ. You need to be a free spirit; you can't think like a nine-to-fiver, and you have to play outdoors in freezing weather and blistering heat. The only thing that stops me is severe lightning - if I see it coming across the bridge, that's it for the day. But you also have to think small, because a piano has eighty-eight keys and the calliope only thirty-two.

"There are only three working steam-powered calliopes in the US, all on the Mississippi. There are also air-operated ones. Circuses use them a lot, and people have also told me they've seen them in places like Germany and Japan.

"If it wasn't for this job, I'd probably be in a loony bin. It's what mainly keeps me here in New Orleans. People say such nice things to me. One of the nicest was on the first anniversary of 9/11, when I played nothing but patriotic songs. It was very sad, but a woman from Colorado wrote a letter to "the calliopist with the flaming red hair" - I had red hair then - saying how thrilled she was with the calliope and the city.

"When Katrina was approaching, they took the boat upriver out of harm's way. I stayed for the hurricane, and then I went first to Baton Rouge and then back to New Jersey. That was when I realised I'd truly converted to a southern belle. For a few weeks after the storm, they weren't sure whether they were going to bring the boat back and start again, and I've never been so miserable in my life. It was like mourning someone's death.

"But it came back at the beginning of October. That was the happiest day of my working life, and I would just stand there and play for anyone who'd listen. A lot of people told me that the first time they heard the calliope playing after the evacuation, it was like a little bit of normalcy and everything was going to be OK.

"Not everyone likes my playing, though. Once, before the storm, there was a guy wrote a horrible letter to the Times-Picayune bashing me and the captain and the entire steamboat company about me making all this noise for three hours a day. I wrote back saying two times thirty minutes plus one times twenty minutes does not add up to three hours.

"People do sometimes recognise me. They'll say hey, are you that woman that plays the er....? And I'll say did you like it? And if they did, I'll say yes it was me.

"When I die, I'd like my tombstone to be inscribed: 'Here lies Ms Calliope. She made people smile."

A front door gets the Mardi Gras treatment...

a hitching post...

a lamppost...

...and an entire house.

Maybe that professor at UCLA was wrong when he said that people called Bud were underachievers. Twice a day, Bud shoots out of the front door like a cork out of a champagne bottle - I thought he was just desperate to go and sniff other dogs' urine, but it turns out he's showing commitment to fostering a positive human-canine relationship. He didn't exactly pass with flying colours, but don't tell him I told you.

In other four-legged news, today was the dogs' turn to dress up to the nines and take to the streets in the Krewe of Barkus parade, the canine division of the Krewe of Bacchus.

There's a picture of our Mardi Gras float here on the site of the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune. Pam is on the left, having discarded her shark costume and dressed as a 1940s sailor instead.

And, yes, I've finally got round to putting advertising on this site - I hope it's not too intrusive. I can expect to earn less than $10 a month initially, but it's basically free money and an incentive to post more often. I'll let you know how I get on.

Readers in New Orleans will see Mardi Gras-related ads: hotels, balconies for rent to watch the parade, king cakes. What are you seeing in your part of the world?

It's that time of year again: the hotels are full, parking spaces are at a premium, thousands of discarded strings of beads lie in gutters or hang from trees and railings, and the inhabitants have another chance to indulge their passion for cross-dressing.

Mardi Gras kicked off last night with the Krewe de Vieux parade. Pam marched with her sub-krewe, Krewe de Craps, and I volunteered to be an escort. In return for keeping the crowds back as our float made its stop-start progress through the French quarter, and staying sober, I got a free ticket to the krewe ball afterwards, including unlimited beer.

Most of the big parades are of motorised floats, but Krewe de Vieux still uses mules or human beings for locomotion. The mule in the top picture is not too happy about the prospect of hauling a ton of beads, beer and brass-band instruments through three miles of cheering crowds.

This year, Krewe de Craps' theme was sharks - not so much the aquatic version as the Wall Street derivatives traders and hedge fund managers who got us into this sorry mess.

And this is their float. I had to ask what SOL stands for: it's Shit Out of Luck.



One advantage of Mardi Gras for all of us lazy New Orleanians is that you don't have to take down your Christmas (sorry, holiday) decorations on Twelfth Night.

Our house is still festooned with lights, but the British and American flags have been replaced by carnival jesters, and the tree is decorated not with tinsel and baubles but with purple, green and gold necklaces - these being the traditional (and in my opinion hideously mismatched) colours of Mardi Gras.

What it means to live in New Orleans

This article explains, better than anything else I've seen, why New Orleans is so special. It attracts a certain kind of person, and I freely admit to being one:

New Orleanians—no matter what color or how wealthy—aren’t great at planning meetings, showing up on time for them, running them in orderly fashion, deciding on a course of action, and then following through. This isn’t simply laziness or fecklessness; it’s a reflection of a commitment to enjoying life instead of merely achieving. You want efficiency and hard work? Go to Minneapolis. Just don’t expect to let the good times roll there.

There's no business like snow business

Like I said, homesickness is not part of my repertoire. But today, I wish I could just hop on the first plane out of town and head back to London.

I don't even know his last name, and he doesn't know mine. But he's called Josh, he's a transportation engineer from Boise, Idaho, and he made a small difference to several people's lives today, mine included.

I've run over twenty marathons, but when I did the New Orleans Mardi Gras marathon today, I decided to do something I'd never done before. I ran with a pace group led by Josh, who had sufficient confidence in his ability to finish the race in 3 hours 50 minutes, at an average of 8 minutes 49 seconds a mile, that he was willing to run all 26 miles holding a placard announcing this fact and invite others to follow him.

For the first 19 miles or so, I stuck close to him, setting probably the most consistent pace of my running career. Sometimes I found myself looking back and slowing to keep him in sight, which went completely against the grain, though I knew it was common sense.

Then came the only hill on the course - a very modest bridge - and I began to slip behind Josh as he kept up the same unrelenting cadence. He disappeared into the distance, and I never saw him again.

After that I hit the wall, and finished the course with a combination of walking and running. At one stage, one of my fellow runners came to a halt in front of me, turned round, looked me in the eye and said: "Come on Phil." My name was written on my back. "What's with the walking? You can do better than this." I grinned, resumed my slow trot and finished in 4 hours 13 minutes, coming 623rd out of 7,400.

It would have been a lot slower if it hadn't been for Josh and the other unnamed competitor; people like them are one of the reasons I run. I do it partly for the sense of achievement and the high as I cross the finishing line, but part of it is just for the sense of we're all in this together, we've got to look after each other. A bit like life, really.

Good news for redheads

In New Orleans, more than in most other places, people turn their houses, cars and bodies into works of art. This car belongs to somebody up the street from us; you need to enlarge the pictures and read the writing to appreciate its genius.

The world has entered a new era; America has reached a defining milestone in its history; suddenly there is light at the end of the tunnel.

But never mind all that: let me tell you about Heinz salad cream, McVities Chocolate Hobnobs, the Guardian crossword and other things of great moment.

When Pam and I got married last September, we didn't make a big thing of wedding presents. We'd both been through it all before, and we had most of the stuff we needed.

But one of the most thoughtfully chosen and welcome gifts came from our British neighbours, Vic and Polly. It was a 425-gramme squeezy bottle of Heinz salad cream, with an extra little green label explaining to explain to ignorant Americans what it was.

If I were ever on Death Row and they came to take my final lunch order, I'd settle not for lobster thermidor and a gallon bucket of Häagen-Dazs Rocky Road, as so many heinous but unimaginative felons do, but for a nice salad cream sandwich on wholemeal bread still warm from the oven.

Incidentally, did you know where the name Häagen-Dazs comes from? Let's ask Wikipedia.

Contrary to appearances, the name is not Scandinavian; it is simply two made-up words meant to look Scandinavian to American eyes (in fact, the digraphs "äa" and "zs" are a not part of any native words in any of the Scandinavian languages).

This is known in the marketing industry as foreign branding. Mattus included an outline map of Scandinavia on early labels, as well as the names of Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm, to reinforce the Scandinavian theme. A name was created by reversing the name of Duncan Hines (Huncan-Dines"), an original potential marketer of the product. When that deal didn't materialize the name was manipulated to sound Scandinavian.

The playful spelling devices in the name invoke the spelling systems used in several European countries. "ä" (an 'a' with an umlaut/diaeresis) is used in the spelling of the German, Estonian, Finnish, Slovak and Swedish languages, doubled vowel letters spell long vowels in Estonian, Finnish, Dutch, and occasionally German; and zs corresponds to /ʒ/ (as in vision) in Hungarian. None of these spelling conventions is used in pronouncing the name of the American product, which has a short a, hard g, and a final s sound.

One close real name to the fake Häagen is the rare Norwegian first name Haagen. It also bears a resemblance to Den Haag, which is "The Hague" in Dutch. Dazs does not mean anything even in Hungarian despite the "zs" grapheme, and sounds too unfamiliar even to be a name. The closest real word in Hungarian is "darázs", which means "wasp".

A further step in branding is the renaming of the Teatro Calderón in Madrid, Spain to Teätro Häagen-Dazs Calderón.^[4] There is no ä in the Spanish alphabet.

Isn't that fascinating? Drily humorous, slightly pedantic, and obsessed with trivial linguistic details - it could have been written by me.

Anyway, back to salad cream, the one thing I miss most about British cuisine. Before I came here, I used to get through a bottle a week, hooked on its richly moreish mayonnaise mouthfeel with added vinegary bite, compatible with everything from french fries to Ritz crackers.

I find ranch dressing makes an acceptable substitute, but it's not the same, and I miss salad cream. I asked Vic and Polly where they'd obtained our wedding present and filed the name away for future reference: International Foods, a grocery store in nearby Metairie.

Last week, Pam and I finally got round to paying a visit. It was a cornucopia, with a whole big section devoted to British foods I hadn't set eyes on for six months or more.

There was Marmite, the bitter, salt-laden sandwich spread made from the stuff that leaks out of oilwells and forms festering puddles on the ground in Texas. Marmite splits Britain neatly down the middle: either you'd sell your grey-haired, twinkly-eyed grandmother for a jar, or you detest it with a passion beyond words.

Even the manufacturer cheerfully admits that Marmite is not everyone's cup of tea. Its website, Marmite.com, describes the product as "noxious gunk", and continues:

Eat Marmite? You'd rather rip the wings off live chickens. You'd rather be stripped naked in public. You'd rather swallow rat's tails and snail shells... Enough already! We get the picture.

Next to the Marmite was a stack of McVities Chocolate Hobnobs. These delectable oaty biscuits, or cookies if you're reading this in America, were the British marketing sensation of the 1980s when they made their debut. Over one hundred times more addictive than pure crystal meth, they flew off the shelves as fast as supermarkets could restock them.

As we stood in line for the checkout, I felt a sense of empathy for the other unnamed Brits who were presumably helping to keep the store in business. There aren't many of us in New Orleans - this is not Manhattan or Orlando, where half the population seems to hail from the UK.

I also reflected on the relative ease of being an expat in the twenty-first century. You no longer have to do without the things you miss most, the little icons that bring a twinge of... well, not homesickness, but nostalgia for what you've left behind in your quest for a new life.

Today, I can call my parents for eight cents a minute or share trivial details of my life on this blog or Facebook. In the past, I might have subscribed to my favourite newspaper and received yellowing copies by surface mail, three months late. Now I can read them online. My favourite is The Guardian, which even (joy of joys) decided a few months ago to stop charging for its crossword - something else I no longer have to do without.

A few months ago, passing through Washington's Dulles airport, I found a machine in a newsagent's that would print a while-you-wait, same-day copy of any of 150 international newspapers, from The Sun to the South China Morning Post, all for just five dollars.

As I reached for my wallet, the guy behind the counter noticed me and shook his head. "I wouldn't if I were you," he warned. "You'll miss your flight. They can take up to an hour to print."

So this technology may still be in its infancy, but one day soon I'll be able to stroll a few blocks and come back with my copy of The Guardian, literally hot off the presses.

Things have come a long way since those first settlers made what would almost certainly be a one-way journey, severing all ties with their past lives. I may have chosen to live 4,633 miles away from my birthplace as the crow flies, but compared to them I have it easy.