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.