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.

Like I said, translation is not normally a barrel of laughs. But this story is an exception.

Pam, car, dog, cat, job (for a while)...

The long list of three-letter acquisitions continues.

While I was in Washington DC, Pam took advantage of my absence to acquire not one, but two furry friends. I've never owned any animals, apart from the fifteen goldfish pining for me in my garden pond in London and a quarter share in a guinea pig when I was a kid.

I liked the fact that in theory we could, at the drop of a hat, take off on an impromptu weekend's kayak rolling in the alligator-infested swamps of Louisiana's Cajun country without having to worry about who'd look after the pets in our absence.

But we don't. So Pam took the decision out of my hands, and my concerns were instantly dispelled when Miller and Velvet came bounding into my life.

Velvet is a crappy name for a dog, and the people at Bark in the Park, the event where Pam adopted him, admitted they were running short of inspiration when they chose it. So we rechristened him Bud.



He's part chow, part spaniel, about a year old, fully of slobbery puppyish enthusiasm and with an endearing habit of sighing deeply as though the weight of the world were on his shoulders. His favourite pastimes are gnawing high-voltage electrical cables and surfing the internet.

As for the cat: well, Miller is immaculately groomed and behaved, extremely friendly, and of way above average intelligence. He likes to work up an appetite for breakfast by polishing off the New York Times crossword; his record is three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

And so to the job: a nice little part-time contract as the grandly titled UK English language expert for Rosetta Stone, the world's largest language learning software company. They're not a well-known name in Europe yet, but in the US their bright yellow products have established a blanket presence, especially in airports.

My job was to adapt US English products into British English. I spent a week training at their headquarters in Harrisonburg, Virginia, a couple of hours outside DC, and returned to New Orleans full of enthusiasm for the intellectually challenging tasks ahead. And then, just a couple of weeks later, they unceremoniously dumped me on cost grounds.

I can't say I blame them. I did ask before I started whether there'd be very much work for me; after all, there isn't exactly a yawning gulf between US and UK English when you're learning sentences like "The girl is running" and "The men are reading the newspaper".

I was annoyed at having squandered seven precious days of my short time on earth, but at least I got paid for it, met lots of fellow wordsmiths, and got to see a beautiful part of the country. So no hard feelings there.

Washington, DC

I'm here for a week on business, and at long last someone else is funding my travel habit - not something that happens very often.

Translating isn't too bad as jobs go, but it ranks somewhere below Trappist monasticism in terms of the social skills and level of physical activity it demands of me. So I'm looking forward to some new horizons and the chance to work with a team of flesh-and-blood humans for a change. It looks like it might be an interesting project, so watch this space.

Anyway, being here reminds me of two very inspiring people I met when I arrived in New Orleans two years ago.

Zack Rosenburg and girlfriend Liz McCartney were two young, high-flying lawyers living on Washington's Capitol Hill until Katrina struck in August 2005.

Along with their fellow Americans, they watched the scenes of devastation unfold on their TV screen - but unlike most people, instead of just tut-tutting and reaching for another family pack of Doritos, they decided to go and help. Leaving behind their comfortable apartment and all the other trappings of success, they moved to New Orleans and founded the Saint Bernard Project.

From unpromising beginnings - neither of them knew anything about construction - Zack and Liz have now rebuilt 120 houses in flood-ravaged St Bernard Parish, with the help of 6,000 volunteers from all over the world - including, briefly, yours truly.

Liz has now been named a 2008 Top Ten Hero by CNN, and could win the title CNN Hero of the Year and a prize of $100,000. The winner will be chosen by the public, so please take a moment of your time to vote for her here, because it won't take a minute of your time and because she thoroughly deserves it.

A shotgun wedding

Any momentary hesitation I had about signing the marriage licence was dispelled when the registrar pulled a gun on me.

Pam had already appended her flourish, and now it was my turn. As I stood there in the registry office in the sleepy little Puerto Rican coastal town of Dorado, a cheap plastic ballpoint pen in my right hand as I prepared to take one of the most important decisions of my life, I must have paused for the merest fraction of a nanosecond.

The woman ducked beneath the counter behind her glass screen for a moment, and reemerged brandishing a pistol. "Sign it now," she snapped, gesturing impatiently at the blank space on the piece of paper.

It took a moment for me to notice the huge grin on her face, another to spot that the gun was made of plastic.


We'd already had the blood tests required of anyone planning to marry in Puerto Rico, and were relieved to find that neither of us had gonorrhea or chlamydia. How romantic. We'd shuttled back and forth between various government offices, nerves fraying in the tropical heat, dispensing substantial sums of money to substantial numbers of people.

As I stared down the barrel of the gun, I had another of what I call my Moments, when I think: is this real? how did I get here? I've had a lot of those in the past few years.

Bureaucracy aside, it was a thoroughly happy and wholly unforgettable week. We rented a house with a pool on this beautiful island and invited a small selection of our nearest and dearest to share our wedding with us. Here they all are.




From left to right, they are Pam's daughter Dana and her son Rowan. Then there's my friend Bill, who I'll tell you more about in a moment. Behind him is my brother-in-law Richard and his son Alfie. Pam is standing on the doorstep with her two-month-old granddaughter Arden. Next come my sister Jacqui, Bill's wife Daff, and Dana's husband Scott.

Bill was a secondhand book dealer until a few years ago, but in a dramatic midlife career change he became a Church of England priest. He was kind enough to conduct the marriage ceremony for us, cheerfully tolerant of my lack of religious belief.

I met Bill at university thirty years ago, where I formed a Scrabble club and he was one of the first members. Since then, our every encounter has been accompanied by the rattle of plastic tiles.

I suspect that for him the highlight of the week was not presiding over his friends' marriage, not the lush, mountainous scenery, not the convivial company or generous quantities of Caribbean rum, but the poolside game on Sunday, our wedding day.

He scored an extraordinary personal best of 205 points in one go, spread across two triple word scores and with a fifty-point bonus for getting rid of all his letters. He played crappily. No, sorry, he played CRAPPILY, off my LATRINE.



And so to the wedding itself. We held it on a quiet little stretch of wave-lapped, palm-fringed sand decked with long strings of beach morning glory, candles and coconut shells. Pam made her entrance from several hundred yards away and gingerly picked her way across a stream in her long coral-coloured dress before she reached us.

The only thing missing was sunshine: a tropical depression was brewing, and there was drizzle in the air. But the brightness to the west could have passed for a sunset, and the rain obligingly held off until the end of our short, simple ceremony; next day, the island suffered major flooding.

Here's some pictures. I thought Pam looked wonderful. I don't have any of both of us yet, because I took them, but as soon as someone sends me some I'll put them on here.

New Orleans has by far the most poetic street names of any city in North America, many of them bespeaking the high-minded ideals of the nineteenth century.

I've already mentioned Tchoupitoulas (CHOP-i-TOO-lus, sometimes shortened to "Chop"), named after an extinct Indian tribe.

And then there's Desire, as in A Streetcar Named. There's Elysian Fields, Chartres ("Charders"), Royal, Burgundy ("BurGUNdy") and Frenchmen, all within five blocks from here. There's Prytania, Chef Menteur, Mardi Gras, Cucullu, Fleur de Lis, Annunciation, Manhattan, Stumpf.

There's a street for each of the Muses: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene,
Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania.

I even quite like the name of our own street, Spain. I have an apartment in Tenerife (which I'm actually trying to sell at the moment - anyone interested?), so I can say I have a place in Spain and a place on Spain.

This is almost as good an address as Gay Close in northwest London, where I used to rather shamefacedly reside - in fact, given the demographics of the Marigny district where we now live, Gay Close would be a great name for a new street here.

But it occurred to me the other night, when I took these pictures while out riding my bike, that the honours for best-named set of intersections must surely go to New Orleans Street. I'm sure this was deliberate on the part of the person or persons responsible for choosing street names all those years ago (what a great job! how do you apply? what qualifications do you need?).

Apart from Humanity, the names of the thoroughfares which cross New Orleans Street include Benefit, Treasure, Abundance, Agriculture, Industry, Hope, and Law. And this one.

New Orleans

We got home on Saturday night, weary from our 400-mile journey and not sure what to expect.

There was very little hurricane damage in evidence, and the main victims were the trees, huge numbers of which had blown over or lost branches. One big bough had flattened half of our lovingly tended garden, but things grow so quickly here that we'll be back to normal in a month or so - unlike the thousands of Cubans and Haitians with homes and livelihoods dashed to pieces by Gustav and Ike.

It's also going to be a busy few weeks for the dustmen or garbage collectors or whatever you want to call them, because the accepted way of dealing with fallen trees is to stick them in your bin for collection.

And we're now out of the cone for Ike, meaning that if it continues on its current track, the good citizens of Corpus Christi, Texas will bear the brunt of this weekend's visitation.

On Sunday, I went for a bike ride round the Lower Ninth Ward, which Katrina wiped off the map. It was the first time I'd been there since November, but unlike so much of New Orleans, little had changed; it was as desolate as ever. Most of the houses in this once bustling and mostly black district had been razed to their concrete foundations; others had been smothered by a blanket of weeds.

Here and there people had rebuilt, with whimsical details like fountains and garden gnomes creating an illusion of normality.

I couldn't live here, I thought; it wouldn't matter how picturesque the house, it would be like living in a cemetery, constantly surrounded by absence: silent, empty streets, roofless houses, the ghostly voices of long-departed neighbours blowing in the wind.

But then I turned the corner into Tennessee Street, and suddenly, even on this hot, somnolent Sunday afternoon, it was a hive of activity.

I'd stumbled on actor Brad Pitt's Make it Right project, a community of 150 low-cost, sustainable houses being built right in the shadow of the Industrial Canal levee which breached during Katrina.

Each of these stunning creations, which Pitt commissioned from leading architects, will house a displaced family from the Lower Ninth. Each is raised well above ground level so that when the floods return, as they will sooner or later (thanks to Gustav, they almost did last weekend), they'll suffer the minimum of damage. And each, while firmly rooted in the southern architectural tradition, is very much a product of the twenty-first century.

I coveted all of the houses, none of which will cost more than $175,000, but sadly I'm not a part of the project's target market.

Make it Right is an example of an individual putting his money where his mouth is, and taking direct action to improve the lives of his fellow citizens. In a city where one third of the houses are still uninhabitable, he's planted a few green shoots in a huge, muddy brown expanse of alluvial nothingness - but like I said, New Orleans is fertile ground, so let's hope they take root and flourish.