Our house is primarily mint green. I knew that, but I didn't know that it had drop-lap siding and a full complement of Eastlake details, such as turned columns, an elaborate frieze and decorative millwork of all varieties.

I learned this from the property section of the local paper, where one of the journalists (who calls herself Streetwalker), has the enviable job of wandering around town looking at houses and writing about them. Last Saturday, she chose the 600 block of Spain Street, which is where we live.

I know I'm biased, but it is a beautiful house. The landlord has won an award for his sensitive restoration, with details picked out in many different shades of green, and if we're not sitting outside, the tour buses slow down to let people take pictures.

And I know our good friend Jay next door will be flattered to hear himself described as the muscled man taking out the garbage. He often walks around with no shirt, ostensibly because the weather is hot, but really because he knows that every straight woman and gay guy on the block would love to get their hands on his sixpack.

Every so often Louisiana makes international headlines, and it's always for the wrong reasons. That's partly because even in 2009, more than fifty years after the end of Jim Crow segregation, this state has way more than its fair share of redneck racists.

Two years ago, the world's press beat a path to the little town of Jena, where a handful of nooses hanging from a tree proved that the racial fault lines of the Deep South still lay close to the surface.

More recently, the state's lukewarm electoral support for Barack Obama had undoubted racial roots; Jimmy Carter was right to point out that many people hate him for the colour of his skin. Only 14 percent of whites voted for him in Louisiana. Many of those were in New Orleans, a haven of relative tolerance, and he received a rapturous reception when he visited on Thursday.

This week, a justice of the peace in the town of Hammond took his place in the international spotlight after refusing to grant a mixed-race couple a marriage licence, on the grounds that their union was doomed to failure. Keith Bardwell began his justification with the words "I'm not a racist". Nine times out of ten, this is followed by a "but", and so he continued: "I just don't believe in mixing the races that way. I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom."

As I said in my previous post, this is a wonderful place in which to live. But I still despair of it on a regular basis.

Excuse the long absence (I hope you're all using RSS feeds so you don't keep clicking on the site and finding nothing new). We've been away, first to Disney for Pam's birthday and then to the UK.

Back here, I'm pleased but not surprised to find that the Marigny, the district in which we live, has been named by the American Planning Association as one of America's top ten great neighbourhoods.

I've never lived anywhere with such a fierce and justified sense of pride in itself, and such a strong sense of community and tolerance. It's also beautiful, particularly when the evening sun lights up the paintbox of pink, orange and sky-blue Caribbean-style houses, though the sun hasn't been very much in evidence lately.

You can tell a lot about people from the stuff they leave out in the street for others to pick up.

It comes and goes in waves: one person puts a couple of well-thumbed paperbacks on their front step, another follows suit with a broken laptop and a bag of Mardi Gras beads, and pretty soon everyone on the block has a little museum of unwanted objects on display. Then everything disappears, and a few weeks later the whole endless cycle begins again.

Last weekend, the guy living catty-corner from us moved out of his rented apartment, and left all his detritus for us vultures to pick over.

For several days, an ever-changing knot of people stood on the street corner, exchanging local gossip and discussing the relative merits of old copies of National Geographic, dusty pairs of shoes and glass ornaments.

Among the objects he left on the sidewalk was a collection of faded 1980s male porn magazines. That was snapped up pretty quickly, which was surprising since so many people get their thrills from a computer screen these days, but unsurprising in that at least half the inhabitants of the Marigny are gay.

Then a blow-up rubber female doll appeared hanging from the railings, only to disappear shortly afterwards, smuggled off under someone's arm to some sticky nocturnal tryst.

The neighbour left several days ago, taking the rest of his belongings with him. But then, yesterday afternoon, a couple strolled down the middle of the street carrying a coffin, slightly the worse for wear but still perfectly serviceable.

I was determined not to let my curiosity get the better of me, especially since I had visions of them opening the lid to reveal the decaying remains of some recently deceased relative. We chatted about this and that, but eventually I could no longer ignore the 600-pound gorilla in the room. "OK, what's with the coffin?" I asked.

"We found it lying on the sidewalk just up the street," the guy told me, kicking it open to reveal the neatly stitched cream-coloured lining. "We're going to take it home and use it as a dining-room table."

If coffins could speak, and thank God they can't, that one would have a long and interesting tale to tell.

Can I ask for two minutes of your time to help make New Orleans a better place?

Melissa Sawyer, who lives two doors down the street and is a good friend, used her Harvard education not to line her pockets but to make a difference to people less fortunate than herself.

She co-founded the Youth Empowerment Project (YEP), which provides case management, mentoring and educational services to at-risk young people in this desperate city. It's an uphill struggle, and sometimes a drug dealer's bullet gets there before Melissa does. She's the blonde woman on the right above, and her partner, Renell, on the far right, also works for the project.

YEP is dependent on grants and donations, and is currently applying to Nike for $5,000. This will be awarded to the entrant which receives the largest number of votes, which seems a slightly haphazard way of awarding grant money, but there you go.

Please go here to find out more about YEP and cast your vote, and thank you very much!

We were in our local branch of Winn-Dixie yesterday. As we paid the middle-aged female checkout assistant, the man behind us started loading a mountain of shopping onto the belt. He was red-faced, sweaty, clearly shopping for a large family, and looked harrassed and grumpy.

Even the most basic interaction in the South is slow and courteous. I'm still amused when Pam calls the electricity or phone company with some trifling query about our bill, and ends up gossiping for twenty minutes with a total stranger in a call centre in Atlanta about their husbands, children and grandchildren.

Me, I try, but I have decades of bad habits to overcome. In London, until a few years ago, paying for your goods in a supermarket was an entirely wordless transaction: you don't like being here, I don't like being here, so let's get this over as quickly as possible.

Then some senior executive from Sainsbury or Tesco went on holiday to France or Italy or somewhere, realised that customers there took it for granted that checkout staff would at least pass the time of day, and revolutionised the UK retail industry by introducing the practice there.

I also like the fact that some stores here have greeters. I used to be a bit cynical about this, but now I realise that if you're a big-box retailer it helps to give you a human face, reminding your customers and yourself that no matter how much of a money-guzzling monolith you are, you're still dependent on men and women with mouths to feed and bills to pay.

Anyway, back to Winn-Dixie. The normal greeting is "How ya doin?", to which the reply is "Good, how are you?" But as the man unloaded the first of a dozen boxes of breakfast cereal, he growled: "Tell me somethin' interestin'."

She looked as bored and fed up as he did, but her wit was still rapier sharp and she rose to the challenge. With scarcely a nanosecond's hesitation, she said: "You're our one billionth customer. Congratulations. Ha, ha, ha." Then she picked up her scanner and silently set to work on his Cheerios and Rice Krispies.

I'd been hoping to visit Humptulips, but we ended up going to Wanker's Corner instead.

Pam and I are staying with her brother Mark in Portland, Oregon, at the end of a thousand-mile northwestern road trip. We were supposed to be visiting friends in Canada too, but the Canadians wouldn't let Pam in: she had a drink-driving conviction several years ago, paid the fine and everything, but is still banned from Canada. We've visited lots of European countries without any problems, and it seems unfair that she should be punished in Canada for something she did in the US - but there we go.

Anyway, we turned this setback to our advantage with a spectacular tour of the Cascades mountains, and then set course southwards to Portland. On the way, I spotted a little town called Humptulips, Washington on the map, and because I've always been a great believer in visiting places just because they have interesting names, we decided to go there. But then we realised we were running out of time, so we changed our minds.

Afterwards, I looked up the origin of the town's name on Wikipedia. It says:

The name Humptulips may have come from a local Native American language, meaning 'hard to pole', referring to the difficulty local Native Americans had poling their canoes along the Humptulips River. According to other sources the word means 'chilly region'.^[4] Another possibility is that Humptulips was the name of a band of the Chehalis tribe.

In other words, no one has the faintest idea.

Anyway, today we awarded ourselves a consolation prize by driving 25 miles south from Portland to Wanker's Corner. We had lunch at the Wanker's Corner Saloon and Café, prosaically located in a strip mall, where the waitress patiently explained that they had a constant stream of sniggering, camera-clicking British and Australian visitors. Then we continued to the local store to stock up on provisions.
On the way back to Portland, we passed a sign pointing to Boring, Oregon. I was all for going there too, but it was a 15-mile detour and I was overruled by Pam and Mark, who said that was enough silly placenames for one day.