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.

Driving over lemons

That was the title of former Genesis drummer Chris Stewart's bestselling memoir of farmhouse life in Spain. New Orleans is no rural idyll, but people drive over lemons here too. Yesterday was a very windy day, and large numbers of them blew off the huge tree around the corner from us in Chartres Street and rolled across the road. No one spared them a second glance.

I've been coming to this country for thirty years and I've never been to a football game before. So we recently remedied that omission by watching the New Orleans Saints play the Atlanta Falcons at the Superdome.



It was a stirring performance by both sides. Falcons linebacker Curtis Lofton pounded his fist into the turf after Pierre Thomas bowled over him for a first down. The game-sealing carry provided the perfect punctuation for the Saints' undrafted, second-year running back following the most important performance of his young career.

He scored his first touchdown on a 7-yard screen early in the fourth quarter, powering in for the winning touchdown on a 5-yard toss sweep, bouncing over offensive lineman Carl Nicks as he stretched for the goal line. Thomas also set up that last score with an 88-yard kickoff return after Matt Ryan's 12-yard scramble had given the Falcons a 25-22 lead with 7:51 to go.

Actually I didn't write that. I cut-and-pasted it out of the local paper, whose reporter clearly has at least a rudimentary understanding of the game. Unlike me.

I once spent a year at evening classes trying to learn Japanese, but it was a waste of twelve months; everything the teacher said just went in one ear and out the other. I've had just as little success comprehending the byzantine complexities of football: at least a dozen people have tried valiantly to explain it to me, but they were just wasting their breath.

As an experiment, I tried to read the Wikipedia article on American football before I wrote this entry, but I dozed off over my laptop after a couple of pages.

If the ball becomes dead behind the goal line of the team in possession and its "opponent" is responsible for the ball being there (for instance, if the defense intercepts a forward pass in its own end zone and the ball becomes dead before the ball is advanced out of the end zone) it is a touchback: no points are scored and the team last in possession keeps possession with a first down at its own 20 yard line. In college, in the extremely rare instance that a safety is scored on a try, it is worth only 1 point.

Incomprehension aside, I enjoyed the experience very much. From outside, the Superdome is a vast and sinister concrete nuclear bunker set amid a wasteland of elevated highways and crumbling warehouses, but when we emerged into the arena itself it took my breath away.

This is the third largest domed structure in the world, twenty-seven storeys high, and our seats were about as far away from the action as it was possible to be.

It was like watching the match through the wrong end of a telescope. But this didn't seem to deter our fellow spectators, many of them season ticket holders with their row and seat numbers printed on their t-shirts.

Speaking of which, this must be the only place in America where dressing your offspring in shirts with BUSH inscribed on the back doesn't constitute child abuse, like calling your son Adolf Hitler. The shirts we saw were a homage not to the soon-to-be-ex-chief-executive, but to Saints legend Reggie Bush.

I abandoned my attempts to make sense of the on-pitch action - constant substitutions, points mysteriously appearing on the scoreboard for no visible reason, incomprehensible announcements from referees - and concentrated on soaking up the atmosphere instead.

It was like a vast, rowdy communal Sunday lunch: 70,000 deliriously happy people scoffing grotesquely overpriced burgers, chicken wings and beers and walking out when the mounds of wrappers and cans on the floor made it impossible to see the players any more.

The Saints won, and we marched in a long, slow spiral out of the Dome. As is so often the case here, I felt both totally at home and an utter outsider.

I also experienced a twinge of envy. Football has a lot in common with religion, practised on Sundays by huge numbers of chanting people in big, echoey buildings. If you don't experience that weekly injection of passion from one or the other, or both, you're hard put to find its equivalent elsewhere.

A rose by any other name...

After several days of agonised soul-searching, Pam and I have reluctantly decided to give our dog Bud a new name.

As I mentioned before, we originally called him Bud because we already had a cat named Miller.

For the benefit of British readers, Bud and Miller are two of America's leading brands of beer, both limply bland potations that stimulate the neurotransmitters but not the taste buds.

I once got chatting to a regional sales manager for one of the big US breweries at a bar in Midland, Texas. "I've just come back from a two-week beer-tasting tour of Belgium and Germany," he slurred. "It just made me realise what crappy products I've been selling for the past fifteen years."

Anyway, the worker from the animal refuge found Miller the cat sitting alone in the desolate parking lot of a strip mall boarded up since Hurricane Katrina. Beside him, an empty can of Miller Lite blew listlessly back and forth in the wind. That's how he got his name, and Bud seemed the obvious choice when we acquired a canine companion for him.

Bud is only a year old, his puppyish enthusiasm still undimmed by any trace of world-weary cynicism. He's at a formative stage in his life, and things that happen to him now could crucially affect his fortunes later on. We believe that the decision to rename him is an investment in his long-term future.

It came after I stumbled on a year-old article in the Christian Science Monitor by someone called Jacqui Goddard. It's about the increasing popularity of consultants who, for a modest fee, will advise you on whether the name you choose for your progeny is likely to inspire respect and career success, or have people guffawing behind your back at your incredible lack of taste.

Of course, the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor is itself a living example of how an unfortunate name doesn't have to be a handicap.

It's a lively and authoritative international newspaper whose sole concession to matters spiritual is a daily article on religion - though Jacqui sometimes tells interviewees she's writing for the 'Boston Monitor' to avoid the impression that it's one of those deranged six-page religious rags, the kind that nameless people leave on the chairs in dentists' waiting rooms, hoping you'll undergo a Damascene conversion while having all your teeth pulled out.

Anyway, back to Bud. The article cites Professor Albert Meharabian of UCLA, who has researched people's perceptions of first names.

[Prof. Mehrabian] asked people to ponder lists of names and award each a score in five set categories: ethical/caring, popular/fun, successful, masculine/feminine, and overall attractiveness. The results helped him to produce a comprehensive profile of the kind of positive or negative impression each name conveys.

For example, Chad scored consistently high in all categories, while Bud ranked low – including a zero in the "successful" category. Chads are more likely to have a secure self-image, be regarded more positively by others, and be treated well at school and work than Buds.

In deference to public opinion, therefore, we've decided to call our canine friend Chad.

It wasn't our first choice. After all, Chad is the one of the world's poorest countries, a vast expanse of dusty nothingness sometimes referred to as the Dead Heart of Africa, still basking in the afterglow of being named the world's most corrupt country in 2005. It's also the name given to the little paper butterflies on Florida ballot papers that gave us eight years of George W. Bush.

But there you go: it was Shakespeare who said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but he also said that needs must where the devil drives.

UK shadow chancellor (finance minister) George Osborne yesterday warned: 'We are in danger, if the government is not careful, of having a proper sterling collapse, a run on the pound.'

I have news for Mr Osborne, who clearly doesn't know very much about international finance: the government is not careful, and the pound has collapsed.

For the past two years since I came to the States, the pound has been riding high, at around 2.00 to the dollar, and the cost of living here has been laughably cheap if you're earning pounds and spending dollars.

New York department stores have been swamped by legions of pasty-faced Brits scooping up bucketfuls of designer knickknacks, and Florida real-estate agents by people from Southend lugging wheeled suitcases bulging with cash.

In the past couple of months, the pound has slumped by a third: for once, the UK is even more of a basket case than the US. The smile has been wiped off our faces, and sometimes, when I have nothing better to do with my time, I've been known to sit there mournfully monitoring the currency's helter-skelter descent in real time by repeatedly clicking Refresh on xe.com.

Until I came here, exchange rates were an abstraction that I only noticed when I left the UK for brief periods; now, they've caused me more than a few sleepless nights. I've been guilty of complacency, and the chickens have come home to roost; Pam told me months ago to transfer my savings over here while the going was still good, and I ignored her eminently sensible advice.

Anyway, that's enough of my woes: the credit crunch has been a salutary reminder that economics isn't just dusty abstractions, it's about real people and real lives.

A few days ago, when I finally got round to transferring some money over here, I was on the phone to a woman in my local bank. 'So what currency is it in the UK, anyway?' she asked. 'Is it Ukrainian dollars?'

I'm delighted that Barack Obama is to be the new leader of the free world, but I fear he could prove a disappointment: after eight years of the worst president in history, people's expectations may be unrealistically high.

In Britain, Tony Blair was given a radical mandate for change in 1997, and largely squandered it during the ensuing decade, chipping away at the edges of all that was wrong in British society and failing to tackle many of the really big issues.

But there's no doubting that America is a better place to be this morning than last night, and it will be heartening to watch it regain its respected status on the world stage. Obama could get off to a flying start on his first day by shutting down Guantanamo, banning torture and calling a halt to so-called extraordinary rendition.

We watched the CNN coverage with next-door neighbours and fellow political junkies Kevin and Matt, and it was exceptionally good.

There were giant touch screens detailing past and projected results for every state and county, and ultra-detailed demographic breakdowns. We learned, for example, that the three most reliable predictors of Democratic leanings were being male, having a college degree and never going to church, which is me in a nutshell.

In a milestone in TV history, we were treated to interviews with holograms: not real ones, just superimposed on the screen, though grizzled anchor Wolf Blitzer made a convincing job of pretending his subjects were chatting away right in front of him. They wobbled slightly round the edges, as though trapped in limbo by a temporary transporter malfunction on the USS Enterprise.

I'm in a bit of a no-man's-land myself at the moment. I love elections, and I've never failed to vote in the UK, but in an exception to the principle of no taxation without representation it will be many years before I'm allowed to do so here, and I'll have to become a citizen first.

Voting is one of the two big advantages of adopting US citizenship; the other is never having to deal with the immigration authorities again.

I'm now in the long, slow process of adjusting my status, which means I've started the ball rolling towards getting a green card and becoming a legal permanent resident.

I've just sent off another sixteen pages of forms and another cheque, this time for $1,010. If these are approved, I'll actually get my 'advance parole', which sounds like an alternative to a jail sentence but is effectively permission to leave the country, which I can't at present.

But as I've said before, even when I'm feeling positively overwhelmed by red tape, I try never to lose sight of the fact that living here is a privilege not to be taken for granted.