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.