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.

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.