It's that time of year again: the hotels are full, parking spaces are at a premium, thousands of discarded strings of beads lie in gutters or hang from trees and railings, and the inhabitants have another chance to indulge their passion for cross-dressing.

Mardi Gras kicked off last night with the Krewe de Vieux parade. Pam marched with her sub-krewe, Krewe de Craps, and I volunteered to be an escort. In return for keeping the crowds back as our float made its stop-start progress through the French quarter, and staying sober, I got a free ticket to the krewe ball afterwards, including unlimited beer.

Most of the big parades are of motorised floats, but Krewe de Vieux still uses mules or human beings for locomotion. The mule in the top picture is not too happy about the prospect of hauling a ton of beads, beer and brass-band instruments through three miles of cheering crowds.

This year, Krewe de Craps' theme was sharks - not so much the aquatic version as the Wall Street derivatives traders and hedge fund managers who got us into this sorry mess.

And this is their float. I had to ask what SOL stands for: it's Shit Out of Luck.



One advantage of Mardi Gras for all of us lazy New Orleanians is that you don't have to take down your Christmas (sorry, holiday) decorations on Twelfth Night.

Our house is still festooned with lights, but the British and American flags have been replaced by carnival jesters, and the tree is decorated not with tinsel and baubles but with purple, green and gold necklaces - these being the traditional (and in my opinion hideously mismatched) colours of Mardi Gras.

What it means to live in New Orleans

This article explains, better than anything else I've seen, why New Orleans is so special. It attracts a certain kind of person, and I freely admit to being one:

New Orleanians—no matter what color or how wealthy—aren’t great at planning meetings, showing up on time for them, running them in orderly fashion, deciding on a course of action, and then following through. This isn’t simply laziness or fecklessness; it’s a reflection of a commitment to enjoying life instead of merely achieving. You want efficiency and hard work? Go to Minneapolis. Just don’t expect to let the good times roll there.

There's no business like snow business

Like I said, homesickness is not part of my repertoire. But today, I wish I could just hop on the first plane out of town and head back to London.

I don't even know his last name, and he doesn't know mine. But he's called Josh, he's a transportation engineer from Boise, Idaho, and he made a small difference to several people's lives today, mine included.

I've run over twenty marathons, but when I did the New Orleans Mardi Gras marathon today, I decided to do something I'd never done before. I ran with a pace group led by Josh, who had sufficient confidence in his ability to finish the race in 3 hours 50 minutes, at an average of 8 minutes 49 seconds a mile, that he was willing to run all 26 miles holding a placard announcing this fact and invite others to follow him.

For the first 19 miles or so, I stuck close to him, setting probably the most consistent pace of my running career. Sometimes I found myself looking back and slowing to keep him in sight, which went completely against the grain, though I knew it was common sense.

Then came the only hill on the course - a very modest bridge - and I began to slip behind Josh as he kept up the same unrelenting cadence. He disappeared into the distance, and I never saw him again.

After that I hit the wall, and finished the course with a combination of walking and running. At one stage, one of my fellow runners came to a halt in front of me, turned round, looked me in the eye and said: "Come on Phil." My name was written on my back. "What's with the walking? You can do better than this." I grinned, resumed my slow trot and finished in 4 hours 13 minutes, coming 623rd out of 7,400.

It would have been a lot slower if it hadn't been for Josh and the other unnamed competitor; people like them are one of the reasons I run. I do it partly for the sense of achievement and the high as I cross the finishing line, but part of it is just for the sense of we're all in this together, we've got to look after each other. A bit like life, really.

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.