Shreveport, Louisiana

Storm, model, cone, voluntary, mandatory, contraflow: the language of hurricanes takes innocuous-looking everyday words and endows them overnight with new and sinister significance. Next day, they're on everyone's lips.

Everyone here is an amateur hurricane expert, though they don't call them hurricanes: they're storms. Everyone has the National Hurricane Center bookmarked on their computer. Everyone knows that a model is one of up to twenty lines on a map showing a storm's possible track, calculated by supercomputers crunching trillions of numbers every second.

The lines form an inverted cone spreading out from a storm's current location and showing the area which it could hit: in the case of Gustav, anywhere from southwest Texas to the Florida panhandle.

When things start to look especially grim, the authorities will declare first a voluntary evacuation - we strongly suggest you get out now - and then a mandatory one, meaning if you don't get out now, you're on your own, and if we catch you in the street, we may arrest you.

They'll also introduce a contraflow system on major highways out of cities like New Orleans so that all lanes flow inland towards safety. Hurricanes are dependent on warm water for their energy, so much of their force is spent after they hit land.

It's not just words that acquire special meanings: so do the numbers from 1 to 5.

If the storm is a category 1 or 2 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with winds of up to 110 mph, people will consider battening down the hatches and sitting it out. If it's a 3, 4 or 5 and you have any sense, you'll evacuate.

If you return home a few days later after a false alarm - the storm hit some other poor unfortunate further down the coast, or it was only a 1 instead of the forecast 5 - no one will laugh at you. Better safe than sorry.

Katrina was a 5, but slowed to a 3 by the time she made landfall - it was the storm surge and poorly engineered levees that made her the most destructive hurricane in US history. Gustav is already a 4, and still has a thousand miles of open water from which to suck up fuel.

Pam and I left on Friday in the car which we'd conveniently and coincidentally bought only a week earlier; otherwise we'd have had to wait for one of the 700 buses that ferry people out of the city to shelters inland. As I write this on Saturday morning, the lines at the main bus terminal are already more than a mile long.

It was a beautifully, sunny, hot day, which made it hard to summon a sense of urgency. We emptied the fridge (if Gustav hits, the city will almost certainly be without power), closed the shutters and put away objects like flowerpots and dustbins that could cause damage if they blew around. But we made the hopefully realistic assumption that there wouldn't be any serious flooding: our house is in the 20% of the city that didn't flood during Katrina.

Outside was a flurry of activity as the neighbours loaded their cars with food, water, pet carriers and elderly relatives. The traffic on the interstate was stop-go, stop-go for the first hour and a half - it's also Labor Day weekend - but at least it wasn't gridlock. Pam once took thirteen hours just to travel the seventy miles to the nearest big city, Baton Rouge, during an evacuation.

After that, the 340-mile drive to Shreveport was relatively painless, and we're now staying with Pam's cousin Bill and his family. It's very strange not knowing whether we'll be returning home some time later next week (Gustav is expected to show up early on Tuesday morning) or remaining for much longer. I hope we don't outstay our welcome.

In an ironic coincidence, Friday was also the third anniversary of Katrina, and as a result we received an unexpected visit just before we left.

My sister Jacqui lives in Florida, and was the only British journalist in New Orleans on that fateful day in August 2005. She spent weeks here covering the aftermath and subsequent anniversaries, and has a deep affection for the city.

Recently, on a whim, she called the state coroner and asked whether there were still any unclaimed and unidentified bodies left over.

"Funny you should ask," he said. "It's three years now, and there are still eighty left. Three of them were babies. I was thinking I'd hold a jazz funeral to lay them all to rest." So Jacqui came to cover this moving story for several UK papers: here's one of her pieces.

Huh, big deal. It was a bit windy, and it rained all day.

It was only a matter of time before I experienced my first bit of Weather. I took this picture a few days go from my own personal satellite, Philos 4, which I can redirect to any corner of the globe at the flick of a switch - I usually use it as a means of reconnoitring beaches for possible visits.

It shows tropical storm Fay heading north from Cuba towards Florida, where it came ashore a record four times, dumping massive amounts of rain and killing ten people. It's now heading west across the Florida panhandle, and is likely to pass very close to New Orleans unless it suddenly peters out or veers off track.

What's a tropical storm? Well, I only had a vague idea until Fay started making headlines, but now I know that it's like a little sister to a hurricane, a cyclonic storm with less than hurricane-force winds, but the potential to develop into one.

People here are very blasé, as well they might be, having lived through the most destructive hurricane ever to hit the US. But they're not complacent, because they know that tropical storms are dangerous, destructive creatures.

In other news, we bought a car yesterday. I'm fast approaching my fiftieth birthday, but have never owned one before. You can manage perfectly well without a car in England, where the public transportation, for all its faults, is excellent.

Here, there's a bus that goes past the end of our road every fifty minutes until about 6 pm, with nothing at the bus stop to tell you when the next one's due. There's a very picturesque streetcar service that has just fully reopened after Katrina, and lots of taxis, and that's about it.

You can manage without a car, and the centre of town is very pedestrian- and cycle-friendly. But there's a feeling of being trapped in a gilded cage, with a great big state out there just begging to be explored: the bayous, Cajun country, the Mississippi plantations. There's friends and family to visit, and affordable places to shop rather than our local ludicrously overpriced supermarket, so I'm looking forward to having my horizons expanded.

A few months ago, in London, we went to see Mike Leigh's film Happy Go Lucky. It was pure joy, one of the funniest movies I've seen in ages, though with sombre undercurrents. I fell in love with the main character, whose sole purpose in life seems to be brightening the lives of those around her - except her congenitally miserable driving instructor, who's driven perilously close to insanity by her sunny demeanour.

There was only one aspect of her personality that briefly jarred with me, and that was her response to the theft of her bicycle at the beginning of the film. "Oh, no, I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye", she chirps, and cheerily tootles off to take driving lessons instead.

I reckon I've owned about fifteen bikes since that first Halfords racer I bought to save on the 5p bus fare to school, and thirteen of those have been stolen. My reaction is anything but happy go lucky: a moment of confusion (maybe I just misremembered where I left it?) followed by blind, murderous rage - the kind where, if someone put the cowering culprit in front of me and handed me a loaded Kalashnikov, I'd pull the trigger with scarcely a moment's hesitation.

The last time it happened was in New Orleans at the end of last year. I'd borrowed Pam's bike, and left it locked right outside the main entrance to Wal-Mart on the city’s most oddly named street, Tchoupitoulas (talking of shibboleths, if you can spell and pronounce it correctly, it means you've finally arrived in New Orleans).

When I came out twenty minutes later, it had vanished. Once the rage had subsided a bit, I reported the theft, but even though it took place right underneath the security cameras Wal-Mart allegedly uses to spy on employees thinking of joining a union, the police weren't interested. Though to be fair, they do have rather more important things on their minds at the moment, like doing something about New Orleans' status as the nation's murder capital.

Anyway, it probably serves me right for shopping at Wal-Mart. Last year, I was stung by a wasp as I walked in to one of their stores, which left a huge, disfiguring crescent-shaped blister below my eye for several days. Someone up there is trying to tell me something.

Now that we're back in New Orleans, I've bought Pam a replacement bike, and also one for myself. I’m ashamed to say I bought it from Wal-Mart, and it cost a shockingly cheap $68 – some family in Guangdong is probably going to bed hungry tonight because of me.

It’s a perfectly good bike, with 21 speeds (a bit pointless when you’re living below sea level and the nearest hill is a few hundred miles away) and front suspension (anything but pointless on this city’s third-world potholed roads). I bought the cheapest one I could find, so that when the inevitable happens and it’s stolen in six months’ time, I won’t mourn it too much.

Incidentally, bike theft hit the headlines in the UK last month when David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservative party and the person most likely to replace Gordon Brown as prime minister, had his stolen in London’s Notting Hill. I was very amused to see that he’d chained it to a bollard (do you have that word in US English?) about three feet high, so the thieves simply lifted it over the top. Duh! And this is the man that could soon have his finger on the nuclear button…

Newspaper headline of the week

This you-couldn't-make-it-up story about John Darwin, the man who faked his own death in a canoeing accident, has nothing to do with Englishmen in New Orleans. But I think the headline is a work of inspired genius.

Y'all have a good day now, ya hear?

I enjoy having a British accent, and I make few concessions to fitting in and sounding like a local. I relish the almost daily conversations with strangers wondering where I'm from (most think I'm Australian. Sometimes I'll say 'Have a guess', and occasionally people will say 'Oh', assuming Havagess is a fjord in Norway or something).

I'll always remember the housekeeper who knocked on my hotel door in Uniontown, Pennsylvania to ask whether I wanted my room cleaned. When I replied, her jaw dropped. 'Wow! I love your accent!' she said. 'It makes you sound so good looking'.

But sometimes needs must, and talking like an American is a matter of basic survival. If people ask me my last name and I say 'Goddard', they look blank and ask me to spell it. But if I say 'GAH-drd', they get it straight away.

When I was walking across the country in midsummer, I sometimes had to knock on people's doors and ask them to refill my water bottle for me. Cue the blank stare again. So I learned to say 'WAH-dr bodl', and after a while I stopped feeling silly adopting a fake American accent.

And there's a word I use, again with a degree of selfconsciousness. It's a shibboleth, a daily reminder that I'm in the deep south and not the east coast or the midwest or the west coast. As it approaches, a little alarm bell goes off in my brain and I have to prepare myself to say it.

Sometimes I lose my nerve and say 'You' even though I'm talking to, or about, more than one person. Sometimes I'll fudge it and say 'You all'. But occasionally I'll come up with a reasonable approximation to the correct pronunciation, 'Yahl'.

It's made me realise that there's a gap in British English that doesn't exist in large parts of the world.

Most European languages have plural forms of 'you'. The French say vous, the Germans Sie or Ihr, the Spanish vosotros or ustedes. Even the Irish have the convenient and ubiquitous 'youse'. But in Britain, where 'thou' and 'ye' have long since died out, we have to come up with some kind of clumsy circumlocution if we want to make it clear that we're talking in the plural.

Anyway, an unexpected 'Y'all' in a conversation can still send a metaphorical shiver of pleasure down my spine.

In the restaurant this evening the waitress said: 'I'll be back in a moment with y'all's drinks'. Afterwards, we staggered off, defeated by a mountain of spaghetti and meatballs, leaving a generous tip because we were embarrassed at the destruction wrought by two-year-old Rowan. But she'd seen it all before, and told us: 'Y'all come back.' Once again, she made me realise that the South is a foreign country within a foreign country.

By the way, Rowan is about to become my step-grandson. I could never have dreamed that a wonderful family of strangers half a world away in Little Rock, Arkansas would one day become relatives by marriage. Here they are: Scott, Dana, Rowan, and four-week-old Arden.

Home again

Hooray! I'm an Englishman in New Orleans again. People have been badgering me to keep up my blog, but 'An Englishman in London' doesn't have the same stranger-in-a-strange-land ring to it.

As we entered the country yesterday afternoon, there was an eerie sense of déjà vu. In July 2007, as I reported earlier, Pam and I arrived in Philadelphia and had a two-hour encounter with a rude immigration official who threatened to send me back to England.

This time we landed in Philly again, and again I was sent off to the same room for secondary screening, two words that strike despond into the heart of any visitor to the States.

But the experience could not have been more different. The official scanned my file silently for a couple of minutes, a smile on his face. Then he said: 'Wow, that's an amazing story. ' He briskly stamped my passport, said 'Welcome to the United States, and good luck with your marriage'.

Did I mention we're getting married on September 20? We want a small, simple beach wedding, and we've decided on Puerto Rico because I'm not allowed to leave the country until about December. There will be six adults and two children in attendance.

It's good to be back in Spain Street, but the best thing about it is the garden. When I left in November, I planted two little banana trees about four feet high, salvaged from the neighbours' garden before it was demolished.

Today, after eight months of blanketing rain and heat, the taller one stands at around fourteen feet. The garden we created out of nothing is a jungle, in the nicest sense of the word: it looks like it's been there for decades.

Tomorrow we're off to Little Rock, Arkansas, to meet Pam's new granddaughter Arden. Then we're going to Eureka Springs, also in Arkansas, for the annual reunion of my new family. I went last year, and it was a baptism of fire which I wouldn't have missed for anything. After that, we have to settle down and do some work to pay for all our travels.