...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.