Late to the Party

Sometimes you don't realise you're late until you turn up.

The first time I arrived in New Orleans, at six o'clock on a Friday night, the party was already in full swing and I was perhaps just a little too sober to feel like I was going to have as much fun as everybody else. Despite my best efforts I remained that little bit too sober throughout the weekend and it only slowly dawned on me, weeks later, that arriving a few hours earlier would not have made any difference: I should have got there fifteen years ago.

It seemed to me to be the place a young man could pleasantly do himself some serious liver damage, if he had the time to spare. The problem was that I was no longer that young man and the gaudy revels of Bourbon Street did not appeal to me any more than the ever-present concoction of scents that followed me along its length: a sickly, putrescent perfume of too-sweet alcohol, vomit and bleach. Stately, prim America, the country that, God help it, had once banned alcohol, seemed to need a place where excessive, outrageous behaviour would be tolerated, where folk could act up and get the craziness out of their system before returning to their respectable day-to-day lives. I come from a country with a strong tradition of weekly binge-drinking, but I saw things in the French Quarter that would have shocked me on a Saturday night after a Wales home game in Cardiff: tourists slumped insensible in doorways at nine o'clock in the evening, vomit plastered across the sidewalk, strip bars open for business in the afternoon sunshine as parents and children sauntered by. I'm no prude, but America surely is - and such sights only made it clearer that New Orleans was somehow culturally beyond the reach of the rest of the United States.

And yet, at the same time, this is just one street. Move one block above or below Bourbon and the licentiousness, the neon, the raucous noise that passes for blues music, it all but disappears. By night, the rest of the Vieux Carré is darkness and quiet, secrets and shadow. Amongst the stream of tourists in sports shirts, there is another crowd, another clientele, as different to them as Oberon to Bottom. The men are tall and greying, immaculate and cool in suit and tie despite the languid heat; the women, beautiful and discretely bejewelled. They slip through the darkened streets, into private courtyards on Dauphine St or Saint Phillip, they drink at the Pelican Club and they leave nothing but their evident sophistication behind them. I admit, I tried to follow but, rather like Bilbo chasing faerie rings in Mirkwood, I stumbled in the darkness as they vanished before me.

It was tantalising. These people, I decided, were a link back into the past, to a long lost zenith because this is, without doubt, a city that was once wonderful. Much like my first view of New Orleans, seemingly floating on the surface of Lake Pontchartrain, it reminded me of Venice - both were once important, wealthy, centres of culture. Now they are largely populated by the people that come to gawp at the remains. Whilst Venice is literally kept afloat by tourism, New Orleans (or at least the French Quarter) seems to be an undead corpse, reanimated by the daily influx of new blood. 

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that not even fifteen years would have made much difference. I should have come to New Orleans two hundred, two hundred and fifty years ago, when the party was at its height. I became worried that I would never be able to enjoy the city, always feeling that I had missed out on either its heyday or my own; forever late to the party.

Needless to say, I went back there just this week and had a completely different experience.

For a start, I took my wife and kids: there wasn't any reason why we should wander the length of Bourbon Street. What's more, the clemency of March is different to the humidity of September - and a cool rainstorm had forced the worst of the drunks and vomit off of the sidewalks the night we arrived. We did different things. We took the street car up towards the zoo, along Charles St and back along Magazine and Camp, through the Garden District and the antebellum houses, which eschew both the colonial stylings of the French Quarter and the dreadful concrete drabness of the modern city. Back in the Vieux Carré, Jackson Square and the cathedral were Disney bright.

We all had a lovely couple of days. We ate good food and enjoyed a drink or two. For my part I think I benefited from lower expectations; but something else happened to me - happens to me - in New Orleans. These two short visits have revealed it to be a place of countless opportunity. There's something about the French Quarter, again it's something that reminds me of Venice: as if historic versions of the same city were piled upon each other through multiple invisible dimensions, intersecting through time, like a boozy French-American Narnia.

It means that it will always be worth coming back, because each time it will be a different experience. The party just rolls along and all we can do is dip in and out.

I feel it keenly throughout this return visit: just as I am seeing the city differently, it is seeing me differently. Multiple versions of me walk these streets beside me, unseen, accompanied by friends and acquaintances, people I've known forever and not yet met. School mates and old girlfriends, colleagues, family, friends, grown-up children, grandchildren of mine, they all link arms and pull me around the unchanging corners of New Orleans. Sometimes we're a crowd, cackling at our own jokes, sometimes just a pair of friends or lovers, hand in hand, threading through the languorous shadows. Whoever you are, whoever we're with, I can see how the city wraps itself about us, mysterious, mischievous, playful, always pregnant with booze.

It could be any time. Satchmo might be playing as we drink; the steamers and showboats might be plying their trade on the river as we wait in line for beignets at Café du Monde; it could be last week, one, two, three hundred years ago, or tomorrow. You and I, we drink, we laugh, we dine. The lights twinkle in the galleries and balconies as we slip amongst the tourists and disappear into secret courtyards on Dauphine St or Saint Phillip, closing shutters against a mortal storm that threatens, but never arrives - always the justification for another drink and never the end of the party.

All right, if you insist on visiting New Orleans in the present day, and without me, book a table at Sylvain before you get there. And when you do, drink their Dominique's Departure cocktail. And then, or some other time, head on over to Frenchman Street and drop by the Three Muses. Eat whatever you like, it's all good.

But that time you and I went there? We drank The Muse - don't laugh, you chose it and I reluctantly agreed that it was perfect. It looked ridiculous, do you remember? But elated, full of food and shining with gin, we stepped outside afterwards into the night, jazz trumpet all around us. The stars glittered in the death-black sky. I looked at you, something profound on my mind, but you just smiled, an insane grin, and I clean forgot what I was going to say.

It's that sort of a place.

New York, New York, New York...

My life is pretty great. Occasionally, for example, I get taken to New York. My wife has to go there for work often enough that I get to tag along, sneaked on as hand baggage, maybe as often as once a year. A perfect storm of air miles, baby-sitters and opera commitments hit last weekend with the upshot that I found myself in Manhattan with a whole Sunday to waste as I saw fit.

The problem, at least for someone who occasionally blogs about travelling, is that the more often I visit somewhere like New York, the less remarkable it is. I'm past the initial shock, but still many years away from Proustian remembrances. I'll never be cool enough to be blasé about Manhattan, but I am beginning to accept that it is a real place that I can walk around and explore. Given one free day by myself, I'm not swamped with the frenzied pressure of a tourist, desperate to see as much as he can before he leaves. It's a nice position to be in. But I wouldn't have thought to write about it: a sign I might be starting to take it for granted.

I began with breakfast with my wife at Doughnut Plant on W 23rd Street. This place must be amazing because I don't even really like doughnuts that much. It was her recommendation and (not unusually) she was very right. At 8am on a Sunday, the place was beautifully quiet and the Meyer Lemon Yeast doughnut was absolutely delicious: the perfect glaze cracked as I took a bite, like paper-thin ice on a half-frozen pond. The dough was light and sweet and, to my relief, I realised it was a 'made with' not a 'made from' situation with regard to the yeast. I'm not the greatest coffee-drinker in the world either, but I was able to gulp down their Valrhona Mocha effortlessly, like it was spring water. Not a bad way to start the day.

And then she had to go to work (oh dear) and I had to while away the day until she would be finished. I had made a rough plan which I quickly threw out of the window. Very slowly I made my way to the USS Intrepid, moored at Pier 86, 12th Avenue and 46th Street. It's a WWII aircraft carrier that served at (possibly) the biggest sea battle ever: Leyte Gulf. Today it houses all sorts of military aircraft, as well as a Concorde and the space shuttle Enterprise. There's also a Cold War submarine, USS Growler, that was armed with nuclear cruise missiles and told to sit off the coast of the USSR. I viewed stopping here as tidying up - my boys had already seen it all without me on a previous visit so I had the perfect excuse to whiz around for an hour by myself.

Aircraft carriers are impressive things but I think I enjoyed the submarine most of all. America is good for subs: we've seen the USS Pampanito in San Francisco, HA.19 in Fredericksburg, and U-505 in Chicago. This one was very good: full of old school dials and switches, things that have been designed to go demonstrably 'clunk' when they are pressed - quite an important feature when one is messing about with nuclear missiles. The thing I really liked about Growler was that it provided a technological snapshot. Intrepid served for decades and was refitted again and again, masking her original capabilities, whereas Growler, commissioned in '58 and out of service by '64, was made obsolete almost immediately by the advent of Polaris missiles.

Enterprise, the first space shuttle (built for atmospheric test flights only) is still under wraps following Hurricane Sandy, but we've seen her already at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) back in 2010. (Washington now has Discovery, whilst Mission Control Houston only gets a dodgy mock up handed down from the Kennedy Space Center, which has Atlantis. Don't get me started.) And then Concorde. I had never seen one up close before. Certainly never flown on one. (Let's be honest, the closest I've got is this.) It's a beautiful machine, surprisingly small and delicate but with incredible, alien-looking sweeps and flourishes. It still looks futuristic, like something Derrick Meddings would have dreamed up for Gerry Anderson. On another day, with more (or less) time to spare, I'd have poked my nose around inside, but I was keen to move on.

I've been around the Metropolitan Museum of Art before. Or at least, I've spent some hours inside it and seen some of the enormous and amazing collection. But I knew I hadn't even scratched the surface. I seized the opportunity of a long afternoon to try and get some more of it under my belt. I'm not going to give you a gallery-by-gallery account of everything I saw, but I spent the time well. Even better, there are still rooms and rooms of stuff to go back and see in the future.

I surprised myself by enjoying the period furniture, mainly because the Met does such a good job of contextualising it. They recreate whole rooms and salons, brilliantly evoking the whole culture and not just showing a table or a chest of drawers. I don't know why this should be, but the experience is rather more pleasant here than it is plodding around actual stately piles in England. Perhaps because there is none of that stuffy resentment of a home being made available for viewings, the peasantry being allowed to gawp at how their betters live. Recreated inside a New York art museum, these spaces are appropriated for an international public and largely shorn of the divisive nature of class. The paintings are good too and, being alone, I was able to zoom along, only bothering with the ones that compelled me to stop and stare, which is by far the best way to deal with an enormous collection.

But when I do eventually bring the kids here, the first room I will take them to is the armoury. It's not an intimidatingly large exhibit, but there are some very nice pieces and, although they have a bloodthirsty purpose, they do qualify as works of art in their own right. If you don't believe me, check out the hilts on the rapiers next time you're passing through because they are as swish as you like.

And then, like always, Henry VIII turns up. Twice.

Henry VIII is unavoidable. He is the gouty uxoricidal axle around which English history spins. Every thing that happens before leads to and is neatly drawn together by his reign; every thing that comes after starts with him. So I wasn't surprised to bump into him in Manhattan at all. He materialised in the form of two suits of armour, each made for him at a different point in his life. Before we look at them, let's just spend a moment exploring a long held theory of mine: Henry VIII has a lot in common with Elvis.

Both kings, obviously, and also musicians: Henry was accomplished with the lute, a 'talented player of the virginals' (Frankie Howerd face) and composed tunes, but probably not 'Greensleeves'. Elvis built Graceland and hung out with Richard Nixon; Henry built Hampton Court and Nonsuch and wrestled with the king of France. But there's more - two beautiful-looking young men, full of talent and vitality who let it all go to their heads and their waistlines and became all fat and rubbish.

So this is essentially Henry VIII's '68 Comeback Special suit of armour:

 

And this is his rhinestone onesie, dead-on-a-toilet suit of armour. 

Not convinced? Here's the clincher: Henry's last words were (allegedly) "Monks, monks, monks!". If that doesn't make you think of this, then I don't know what else to say.

Anyway, I have become rather sidetracked. I started writing this because I wanted to mention how nice it was just to be in New York. Nice to be somewhere full of people, mostly young, mostly impossibly fashionable and beautiful, all going about their Sunday in the winter sunshine, either citizens of the world idly gawping at the skyline or native New Yorkers heads down, pacing purposefully. Nice to be somewhere cold too, with everyone wearing hats and coats. I had forgotten, living in Houston as I do, that there is a simple pleasure to be had sitting in a bar or coffee shop and watching people as they step through the door, their skin red and rosy, their frozen faces breaking into smiles as they see their friends, their eyes alive with the anticipation of warmth and comfort and, just maybe, a Meyer Lemon Yeast doughnut.

The Bridges of San Francisco

(Not the Bay Bridge, the other one.)

I love this city, but I don't think I could live here for very long.

I realised this yesterday as we were driving across the Bay Bridge to Oakland. It's a long road bridge that stretches across the Bay in two decks: the upper, open to the sky and with views of the water, is for traffic heading into the city; the lower, leading to California proper, is a claustrophobic corridor of covered steel. Even on a Sunday, with only moderate traffic, getting across the bridge took too long and I started feeling anxious. On a week day, at rush hour, say, with the cars at standstill, I know I would find it extremely difficult to cope.

Because of earthquakes, of course. There will be one, at some point. In Houston our natural disaster of choice is the hurricane - dreadful, destructive, life-wrecking things, but we get a fair bit of warning and one can get out of the way. Earthquakes don't give sufficient notice. As a visitor, for a few days, this doesn't worry me. I think I could stay quite a long while, in fact, and I would carry on feeling fine. Until I found myself on one of the bridges, moving slowly, and, suddenly, I would be horribly aware that one could happen in an instant and there would be almost no chance of survival.

The murders that were committed in Aurora, CO, took place while we were getting ready to fly to California; we weren't properly aware what had happened for a long while after we had landed. You know all about the anger, horror and other strangled, desperate feelings such a crime stirs in one's hearts and guts - but something else struck me once we had finally got back into San Francisco after our trip across the Bay.

They made me feel the same way that the bridge did: suddenly vulnerable to a threat I had discounted as vanishingly unlikely. Murders like this happen from time to time in America, just as the earthquakes do in San Francisco. Unlike these natural disasters, I know they could be prevented - but I also know this country is never going to take the steps that are necessary to do so. Just as the bridges have made me nervous about beautiful San Francisco, these killings have made me despair for America. I'm not sure I want to raise my kids here, lest they get entangled with the madness of the place.

In a few days, I'll leave California and I'll forget about earthquakes.

The sun shines. The waves in the glitter in the Bay. It's beautiful to visit.

A Tiny Slice of Canada with a New York Chaser

I did something unnatural the other day. I crossed a land border into a new country. To some of you that won't sound like too much of a big deal, but to the English this is an alien concept. We prefer our international perimeters to be described by large bodies of water, and this partly explains why cries for Scottish, Welsh or even Northumbrian independence might confuse us. Why bother having a separate country if one can just walk there? Well, that's what you get for growing up in a cul-de-sac, I suppose.

Such rules can not be applied to the vastness of North America and, to be fair, the Niagara river that divides the USA from Canada is large enough perhaps to give even the most insular Englishman pause for thought. But after a plethora of road tolls on the way there, the border checks to get into Canada didn't really seem that much of a big deal. If anything, it was an unexpectedly convivial process. Not that this should in any way be taken as a sign that Canada isn't a 'proper' country: Americans take note, one doesn't judge a nation's greatness by how difficult or unpleasant it is to get into it.

On another occasion we might have fooled about with the idea of driving to the border from Texas, but it's not really feasible during Spring Break. Another time, perhaps. No, we flew to New York to stay with cousins (my wife has cousins everywhere) and drove from there. A trifle of a drive, really, just four hundred miles or so. We took our time.

The road winds up through perfectly rounded hills, its path endlessly criss-crossed by shallow river-beds. The water is dark, winter-cold and dashed with pale rocks and stones. The hills are covered with countless bare trees so that their outlines are softened to a faint grey blur. When the land does flatten it is thick with fur-brown grass, like the countryside has its own winter pelt.

It was nice to be up in the North of the world again. A mixture of oddness and familiarity. I realised I miss even the subtlest of things: the low angle of winter sunlight; the way shadows pool up in the sharp valleys, in the lee of hills; it's an intricate landscape, chiselled and sculpted. There isn't much in the way of topography in my part of Texas and none at all in the city, of course. Even if you do get out west, the land is smashed flat, hammered into an expanse of grassy plains or beautifully desolate desert.

The road in to Ithaca, NY was vertiginous in comparison, rising up over the brim of yet another hill before plunging down into the city. We only stopped for dinner but I liked it. I didn't realise that it was the home of Cornell University, but I should have guessed it was something like that: there were too many cool-looking young people around for it to be an ordinary out-of-the-way small town. From there it was another hour or so, driving through the pitch dark between invisible finger lakes to Geneva, and then in the morning we headed for the border.

It is weird that America is so big. It is unhelpfully large, so much so that I can see, just a little bit, why there are crazy people here who are scared of the federal government or think that their state should be able to ban contraception or what have you. Even I had come to the point, I realised, where I was starting to think of the states as individual proto-countries. Texas is so different from New Mexico, let alone New York, that I had begun to think of them as distinct areas, mis-matched patches in an ungainly American quilt. And then I crossed a real frontier into a real foreign country and I was forced to squeeze the 50 states back into the small box in my head labelled "America", mixed and muddied together like poorly-managed playdough. And, having, done that, I had to try and come to terms with Canada, a country which looks just like America, but which has the Queen on their money.

So, yes, we did Niagara Falls. The horseshoe falls are the big ones and, to be fair, it is impressive. The falls are nagging, insistent, unrelenting. If you ever had to do anything like woodwork at school then I expect you've forced a rod of dowling against the wheel of an electric sander, pressing it forwards so that it is inexorably shwizzed into wood dust. Well Niagara is like that. Relentless and inescapable. No photo can do it justice because it is always thundering and always in motion, continuously dragging the eyes over and down, over and down, over and down until one gives up the fight and lets them rest against the white-out of the gently coiling mist.

The worst bit (or the best bit, depending on your inclination), is the part of the path that somehow goes around the top of the falls so that one is just a couple of metres from the very lip itself. I stood there, caught in a single rolling instant of time, watching the same water rush over and disappear into the event-horizon itself. The sunlight stabbed down, slicing through the water so that I could see just how deep it was at the edge. It also made the water shine, translucent like thick glass, so that I could almost see through the apex. But never for very long. Always the thunderous flow would drag me on with it and I'd be back again to the comparative calm of the lower river: the smoke-blue water giddily spinning and foaming; the mist falling as rain; the permanent rainbow; the hundreds of gulls, wheeling and diving, black against the whiteness.

In my imagination I had always seen it as being set in a wilderness, rather like the Grand Canyon. But no, it has two towns wrapped about either side of it: Niagara Falls, NY, which is rather rugged and a little decrepit in a post-industrial way, with a rather ugly shiny nub of downtown, and Niagara Falls, ON, which is a little tacky. It's got some nice buildings, some lovely houses but it also has a stretch of crap amusement arcades, wax work displays and over-priced pizzerias. For the deeper pockets, there's the casino - the upmarket end as it were. The boys went on a ferris wheel and then we went up the Skylon Tower. Both offered excellent views of the wider landscape and therefore options for escape.

We carried on to Hamilton, ON to stay the night with cousins (my wife has cousins everywhere, did I say?). It was another of the most fleeting stops, but we had a lovely time. We got to shop in a real Canadian store and we got to walk along the hill and stare out over another Great Lake, Ontario. In the very dimmest distance we could see the faint skyline of Toronto.

Annoyingly this first trip was only a series of first impressions, but I like what I saw of Canada. It was suddenly exotic and exciting to see something other than the Stars & Stripes flying, and it was rather wonderful to see kilometers and French words on the road signs. But is this a kind of knee-jerk homesickness? After all, even New York feels like Britain after a winter in Texas. I don't know. It is nice to see that the USA, which can sometimes believe itself to bestride the whole world, doesn't even fill North America. And Canada is such a fascinating idea, a parallel-universe Bizarro America, tinged by another century or so of British rule. Having seen it for myself, I think I understand the country a little now, I have a better sense of how it plugs into the world. It's worth exploring properly and I hope that I will get a chance to do that one day.

We spent the whole day driving back to New York. Surprisingly, getting back across the border was a rather fraught affair, with lots of queuing and waiting and, at the end, a surly American border guard who rolled his eyes at us for trying to navigate the frontier at all. But after that we had a good day's drive. We had possibly the best hot dogs ever at a place called Ted's in Buffalo, NY  (America, for good or ill, excels at inexpensive, unpretentious and very tasty food) and then we ploughed on back down the road, through the hills and across the rivers, all looking much the same as they had on the way up, until the sunlight ebbed from the world and the galaxy of lights that is New York city rose up before us.

It is my ambition that one day I will be able to be blasé about New York City. I want it to be familiar and known, scoured of secrets and mystery.

It's unlikely to happen but we did get to spend a day chipping away at the mystique and I fixed down some of the things I half-remembered from previous visits. This felt good but of course there was no defence against stumbling into new unforeseen wonders or, worse still, foreseen ones.

For example, I knew Grand Central Station was impressive, but seriously? For the first time, I arrived in New York by train and it took a long while to get out of that building. I had expected it to be grand. I hadn't expected it to be exquisite and banded by its own blue vaulted heaven of sky and stars.

Once outside, we ambled. Battery Park to stare across at the Stature of Liberty, then back uptown. On a whim we poked our noses inside the Schwarzman building - the branch of the New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street - only to find another palace. Like a Tuscan church its white stone and marble gives away to a beautiful interior of carved dark wood and luscious frescos. The Reading Rooms were full of people, studying and researching, their gaze split between page and screen - libraries aren't just for storing books, they are for helping knowledge and information to spread freely, regardless of the medium.

With the time we had left we took a walk along the High Line, an old elevated railway line that has been reclaimed as a public park. Initially I was underwhelmed: I hadn't come to New York city to encounter calm or quiet. But as we strolled along above the streets and the traffic I took to it. It's fun to share the space with other pedestrians, to see the backs of buildings and to enjoy the odd vantage points: a secret version of the city hidden away amongst the air rights, which is after all exactly the sort of thing I had been hankering after. Best of all, being an old train line, the High Line actually took us somewhere. Rather than walking around a park to end up where we had started, our stroll had taken us to our destination. Or rather the next in a series of destinations, a series that ended, finally, late that night with us rolling up to the door of our home, way down south.

Aliens vs Mayans

I'm not one for a conspiracy theory. Conspiracies are seductive and slick, but the truth is surely always actually a messy contradictory affair. So I am happy to debunk a cosy little theory that I knitted together on Twitter this morning.

It started with this Guardian article which relates, with a remarkable lack of cynicism, that the Mexican government is cooperating with a new documentary movie which will reveal how aliens interacted with ancient Mayan people. No, really.

Producer Raul Julia-Levy said the documentary-makers were working in cooperation with the Mexican government for what he said was "the good of mankind". He said the order to collaborate had come directly from the country's president, Álvaro Colom Caballeros.

"Mexico will release codices, artefacts and significant documents with evidence of Mayan and extraterrestrial contact, and all of their information will be corroborated by archaeologists," he said. "The Mexican government is not making this statement on their own – everything we say, we're going to back it up."

(Well, Caballeros is actually the president of Guatemala, which is also involved apparently, but never mind that.) You can't see me, but I am still rolling my eyes in disgust at this, but please, I have to deal with the speck in my own eye before I can take a chainsaw to theirs.

In a nutshell, this article caused me to 'go off on one' on Twitter and I mentioned at one point that this was an indication of the awful state of the Mexican tourism industry: that they were now so desperate to make people visit their country that they were prepared to "literally say anything". And, thinking that I really had to get this off my chest properly, I then sauntered over to Google to find a lovely graph showing how US and European tourists were avoiding Mexico.

Well, guess what. I couldn't find one. No one would deny that there are massive problems. This from the Washington Post, April 2009, reveals the impact of Swine Flu, with resorts running at 20% occupancy rates. And this was after the effects of drug cartel violence had begun to be noticed, as this (from the same month) shows. I'm guessing the global economic hoo-ha doesn't help much either.

But things have been improving, albeit from a catastrophically low base. The LA Times reported that visitor numbers for 2010 were up 17.8% on the previous year, in fact, with the trend set to continue in 2011.

So, despite 35,000 deaths over four years, a US State Department travel warning, slashed prices and a promotional tour to the US during which the president Felipe Calderón has resorted to pimping a PBS travel series, I draw the line at accusing the Mexican government of conspiring to fraudulently claim the country contains sites of contact with extra-terrestrials in order to boost tourism.

Because the whole thing is preposterous.

As the Guardian later makes clear, despite the fervent publicity-garnering quotes from the producers, the highest ranking name attached to the project from the Mexican government is Luis Augusto García Rosado, minister of tourism for the Mexican state of Campeche. A glittering career awaits, presumably? But surely nobody with pretensions to political credibility is going to want to be connected with this.

I haven't seen the film, no-one has yet, and I reserve the right to change my mind once I have. But the likelihood that they will be able to produce the sort of evidence that would persuade me is very very small.

What annoys me most about the 'aliens/early civilisation' theory is that we are so ready to belittle the incredible achievements of these societies. Like us, these people struggled against disease, weather, competitors and yet with rudimentary technology produced some of the most amazing artefacts in human history. Archaeologists and historians devote their lives to understanding what these people believed and thought, and how their societies functioned. But we, knowing better, feel the need to attribute the credit to unknown magic powers. It's as if sites like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Nazca Lines or Chichen Itza weren't impressive enough by themselves.

But then conspiracy theories are, of course, the preserve of those who are never satisfied with what's staring them in the face.

A Sense of Place

If History is not what happened, but what you can remember, then Geography is not where things are, but where you left them.

A good thing about the US is that towns and cities stay where they're put. Atlanta, Georgia; Lincoln, Nebraska; Denver, Colorado. You may not be able to point to them on a map, but that doesn't mean that you don't instinctively know where they are, and they prove to be very reliable. Sadly, this is not true of many other places around the world. They've obviously drifted, or meandered off while nobody was looking, like members of your family on a shopping trip. And there is a hard-core cadre of distinctly unhelpful places, proper wrong'uns, who've been bugging me for years.

Why on (Google) Earth, for example, is Billericay in Essex with Basildon and Chelmsford when it should obviously be in Ireland? And Staines, which should be in Essex of course, turns out to be in Middlesex, across the other side of London!

Why do Dungeness and, good grief, the Isle of Sheppey, persist in being in Kent when the western coast of Scotland is clearly where they both yearn to be? It's maddening. (But I have to share with you that there is a tiny place north of Dungeness called Lydd on Sea - if that's not overweening ambition I don't know what is..)

Britain seems to be full of mis-places. Tring in Hertfordshire is another place that sounds like it wants to be in Ireland, as is - of course - County Durham.

Small fry, you may think: British idiosyncrasy. Well, how about a whole country? Oh yes, where's Suriname then? Not in West Africa, tucked up in the Gold Coast. No, not in South East Asia either. It's in South America of all places. What is it doing there?

Perhaps I'm just showing my ignorance, but sometimes geography is deliberately unhelpful. Why Bologna and Boulogne? Is it really necessary for them to be so similar? And FOR CRYING OUT LOUD have you seen how many Guineas there are? It's bordering on obsessive. No wonder the post is always getting lost.

Until this can all be sorted out I suppose I'll just have to muddle through. Now please excuse me - I need to GoogleMap my car keys...

There's Lovely

Wales will always feel like home although perhaps it's blasphemy for me, being Saesneg, to say so. Coming back, even to a new part of the country, feels cosy and familiar. I lived in Wales for twelve years and still want to belong to it, if that is at all possible for an Englishman.

The relationship between the English and Welsh is a close one, still sore in places. We've been exploring some of the monuments to our joint history here in North Wales: the castles built by Edward I at the end of the 13th century. This was when Wales was subdued by the powerful English crown. By building massive castles like Harlech and Caernarfon, Edward followed up his military victories with psychologically crippling blows. These fortresses are massive, beautifully designed and brutally imposing. Today, of course, they serve the Welsh, boosting trade and tourism; nobody thinks of them as English castles anymore...

And outside of the towns, the mountains rise up, covered in grass and sheep, mottled and dappled by the shadows of the broken clouds that scud across the sky and obscure the peaks. Up and down the steep-sided valleys run tiny green steam trains on their narrow rails, belching yellow smoke into the clouds, their carriages full of waving passengers. The hills that aren't green are black, piled with broken slate from which burst blooms of purple rhododendron. And through all this twists the road, rising and falling and turning.

There's water everywhere. It rains, of course, but it also bubbles up, trickles down the mountainside and collects into streams that rush and gurgle over edges, bursting down in falls and cataracts. It drips inside the mines, sliding over the smooth rock in the darkness into the black stillness of an underground lake. Meanwhile the sea sparkles in the sunshine, rushing and moving, breaking against the cliffs and the cries of the gulls.

It's magical place; a great big country folded up into a smaller area. And this corner feels concentrated, more intensely Welsh than the rest, almost a caricature.

It's easy to leave, knowing we will always return.

Old England

More differences. British rain is soft, gentle and pervasive. As I sit and write this, there is a fine tracery of silver drops on the window, a delicate curtain of light. That doesn't happen in Houston where the summer storms unleash a rushing fury of fat wet bullets onto road and roof.

Of course the difference I can't get over with America is that it is just so new: shiny and young. Like a young adult, it is perhaps sometimes too earnest, too eager, when British sensibilities might tend to dry reticence.

I'm happy to think of us as a nation of fuddy-duddies and whilst we have been catching up with family and friends I have been revelling in the dusty dotage of England.

Last week we were in Leicestershire where we visited the house where Lady Jane Grey grew up - now a stately ruin set amongst parkland, overrun by peacocks and deer. We also went to the site of the Battle of Bosworth, which is where I took the picture at the top.

Billed by the visitors' centre as the 'second most important battle in English history' with the tag-line 'Two Kings, One Day', Bosworth, fought in 1485, was the decisive battle in the Wars of the Roses - a dynastic struggle for the crown between generations of rival heirs that took up all of the fifteenth century.

The Plantagenet ruling family splintered into Yorkists (white rose) and Lancastrians (red rose) who fought, usurped and executed each other into extinction until, at Bosworth, the last Plantagenet king (maligned Richard III) was defeated and killed by an upstart princeling called Henry Tudor.

It may be five-hundred years ago, but this is all desperately recent stuff. Henry became Henry VII and after him came Henry VIII and he is essentially the central knot of English history, what with the Split from Rome and everything. To this day there remains a fierce rivalry between the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, even if it is now limited largely to football and cricket matches.

Ooh, look! Speaking of cricket, here is some real village cricket being played on a real village green. Yesterday we went to dangle great-grandchildren in front of my grandfather who lives in a little village on the Wiltshire/Hampshire border. His house is right on the green and so were these chaps (albeit inbetween showers). I took W out to have a look and found myself having to explain not just cricket, but greens and even villages. There were maybe fifteen or twenty people watching and most of them were players. At the end of each over, the scorer hoisted up a board of numbers above his head and pointed it at us for us to see, waiting until I'd nodded or waved before he turned away. It was achingly quiet, only the sounds of the game and the breeze in the trees could be heard.

The cricket is quite new compared with the Tudors - organised village games only began in the seventeenth century - but the green and the thatched cottages around it present a scene which is older than England itself: for over a thousand years people have lived like this.

It's bewildering. But I'm about to head off for a pub lunch in Salisbury - if that can't help me find some perspective, nothing can.

Return of the Native

There it was: the first tiniest hint that my brain has been rewired for America.

The man in the shop looked on, his smile becoming increasingly waxy, as I tried again and again to swipe my card to pay for my purchase. Every now and again he would say, in a dull unbelieving voice, "No, insert your card please," and I would swipe again. We stood there, trapped in a loop, for about a day and a half.

Chip & Pin! Yes, of course, the card goes in like that. But definitely not a new thing, definitely introduced in the UK before I left. I had just forgotten. And this doesn't matter either, wouldn't matter, except for the fact that I had no obvious excuse.

In America, my accent allows me to be ignorant of all sorts of things. I can ask stupid questions all day long and people are delighted to help. But when I stood there in the shop, with my British accent and my British bank card, the man had no reason to assume I had been America for three years. In his eyes I was just an idiot who bumbled along not knowing how to buy things.

And then sometime later, I had to navigate a mini roundabout. Total chaos. Worse because there are roundabouts in America (some in New England and two in Houston if you can believe such a thing) but, of course, they spin the other way, like the fabled antipodean plug holes.

These were just hurdles and I'm over them now, having reasserted submerged behaviours. But I did not expect coming back home to pose such problems, that familiar and known things could be obstacles. I shouldn't have to work things out like I'm in a foreign country.

But I do.

Time/Travel

We've done it again: flung ourselves across the world in an aeroplane and wound up somewhere else, somewhen else. It's a bizarre thing to do, at once both numbingly routine and mind-bendingly exotic.

I get annoyed by some of it, obviously. The way the chap in front swings his seat back into my face before we've even taken off, for one thing. Another is the utter disconnection from the outside world; hopefully soon we'll look back, agog, at Internet-less flights the way we currently remember the days of smoking on planes.

The other thing that irks me is the way time goes out the window. Not the jet-lag inducing missing hours, but the lack of consensus. Time becomes fractured: some passengers are working off the destination time, others still clinging to where we took off from; some try to sleep immediately, some are determined to stay awake. And then there are the passengers who are making connections from or to a third continent and who knows what their clocks are set to.

The airline has its own ideas of course and will dim the lights, or serve you lunch in an attempt to help the transition. But all the while the sun or stars are peering in under open blinds, ever-shifting guides offering their own opinions.

The bare facts of our flight are that we left Houston at 4pm and landed 9 hours later in London at 7am. The advantage to losing six hours en route is that the journey passes very quickly, if only in hindsight.

My favourite bit of the journey is breakfast. It's the beginning of a new consensus. One can't argue with croissant and coffee and, with even just a light dusting of sleep, it is relatively easy to convince one's brain and body that some sort of night has been squeezed into the impossibly small space the schedule allowed.

Tell a lie, that's my second favourite part. The best bit is obviously getting out of Arrivals and into the grey concrete embrace of the Terminal 3 car park. If that sounds like sarcasm, be warned: I am VERY excited to be home again. The coolness of the breeze, the Belisha beacons, the indecent haste with which roads twist in the confined space, warping into an epidemic of roundabouts, these are the first delightful impressions of Britain.

And now we're safely with my in-laws. The boys are buzzing, full of energy, and the gentle sun is shining. The afternoon ahead offers the irresistible prospect of a quick pint with one old friend and a mad dash into London to see a show.

I couldn't sleep, even if I wanted to.

Backwards

Thanks to the magic of technology, I am writing this on the road. Literally, somewhere along the I-40, eastbound, just shy of Albuquerque and heading for Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

It's roughly ten at night. On either side, the desert is a flat black slick despite the light of the full moon high above us. It sits behind a veil of diaphanous cloud that stretches almost to the horizon. The boys are asleep behind us. Laura is driving. We are coasting along on the ceaseless thrum of our wheels on the road, over which we can just hear Flanders & Swan dropping another hat. The cabin is lit by orange dials and passing cars.

I love this bit. Even as a passenger I still relish the sense that we are making progress, chewing up miles and states and gradually, forcibly, bringing our destination closer.

Satisfying though this is, it can't and doesn't detract from the fun we have when we stop and look about. We managed to do a lot of this today as well.

We sauntered around a thousand year old lava flow at Sunset Crater, AZ. It looked freshly ploughed, an avenue of great chunks of clinker and black sand from which these beautiful Ponderosa Pines had sprouted.

And then we clambered around some similarly aged cliff-dwellings, hewn from the wall of the (modestly sized) Walnut Canyon by ancestors of the Hopi tribe of Native People. It was a strenuously peaceful walk: the cool stone weaves between the sunlight and the shadows of trailing trees. The only sounds, the wind and the caws of ravens.

But before all that we had to tear ourselves from a grander canyon. Long ago, in the dark, we got up, wrapped ourselves in all our clothes and set out to watch the sun rise over the rim. Funnily enough, in the dark the abyss isn't anywhere nearly as scary and I was able to perch happily on the low wall above the drop to wait for the sun to peep. The sky faded to grey and below us the rippling folds of rock gradually materialised from the murk, like leviathans swimming up from the depths. And then finally a needle of orange light pierced the gloom and the canyons burst into colour.

Down

I've never been good with heights, particularly, but I'm often okay. Good enough anyway to cope with the Empire State Building and castle turrets.

I can't cope with this. The thought of the spectacular drop off the side of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon is enough to turn my vital organs to jelly. Even here, at a relatively safe distance of a mile or so from the edge, I'm not comfortable. I may never be comfortable. Maybe just knowing it is there, behind me somewhere in the desert, will be enough to interrupt my sleep from time to time for the rest of my life.

My sense of scale, having already been tested by the journeys and vistas I have experienced around America, has now been tortured too. The canyon is ten miles across and more than a mile down. A mile down. A beautiful, magical, breath-taking mile down. But you wouldn't want to take the short cut.

Apparently people only fall very rarely, but you'd never believe it from the way people skip and prance around the paths, or swing their legs out over the precipice, just to have their photo taken. The wilful ignorance or denial of their own mortality is taken as a personal affront, obviously. It's bad enough that I have my children with me ("Dad, puhleese, I DO know what I'm doing"), but every step or pose struck by my fellow visitors is like a knitting needle jabbed straight into my jangling nerves.

I can't help it. People may only fall very rarely, but when they do, they always fall to their deaths. The potential is what terrifies me, the sudden irrevocable moment where a holiday turns to a tragedy. I am a big scaredy cat according to my kids, but I can't help but think that the Grand Canyon would be even more beautiful and amazing experienced from the bottom. The only way to find out is to come back here and walk down the cliffs of course, but I can't help but be convinced I would become happier with every step.

The Painted Desert

Part of the Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona.

Deserts and Forests

I'm losing my ability to think coherently. The desert is dazzling and endless; it fills my mind as much as my vision and as a consequence, words and thoughts I previously relied upon are leaking away.

This morning we took in the Petrified Forest National Park here in Arizona. It's a bit special. The desert is literally littered with semi-precious stones, like agate and jasper, quartz and amethyst. Most remarkably, these minerals lie about the place shaped like fallen tree trunks. The trees were part of a swampy tropical forest two hundred and twenty-five million years ago. They fell and became submerged in a mineral-rich sludge ejected from volcanoes. The trees sucked the silicate inside themselves where it crystalised. Eventually the tree trunk's living tissue became replaced by stone and slowly the landmass rose and became eroded, revealing the petrified trees. You really couldn't make this stuff up.

Eventually, when we have sufficient Internet, I'll post pictures. But for now you'll just have to believe me: it is hauntingly and gobsmackingly beautiful.

Then there were the views across 'The Painted Desert' -sweeping vistas of pink rock and dry green grass, as bright and colourful as any spring meadow. The air is the purest in America apparently and allowed us to see the tops of the San Francisco Peaks, a mere one hundred and twenty miles away.

Several hours later, having ignored the first signs for Los Angeles, we were climbing the shoulders of those mountains, driving up out of Flagstaff and into a living forest of silver birch and Ponderosa pine. At eight thousand feet (three thousand higher than the Petrified Forest) there was snow on the ground. The simplicity of green pine needles and white snow was restful after the colours of the desert, but we were soon heading back down again.

There was just time to arrive at the Grand Canyon itself and have a shufty at the rim before bed.

First impression? I'm terrified.

The Beyond

I must be tired: I have written up a lovely day in a sneery, grumpy way and this will not do. So we shall start again and I will say that the road was good and that the landscape was amazing; that Santa Fe was charming; that even the scary truck stop and the kitsch nostalgia of 'historic' route 66 were pleasant distractions along our way. Yes, even the novelty motel cones of Holbrook, AZ, in which I am writing this, are perfectly lovely.

We started in Tucumcari, NM. In the night, the panhandle prairies had turned to a kind of desert. The morning was bright and chill, the sun shining on a dry landscape of yellow grass and pink rock, dotted with thousands of scrubby green bushes.

We set off, the sun behind us, and the road climbed amongst the mountains of New Mexico, red or black, sometimes even flecked with snow.

We had a few hours in Santa Fe. It's a charming place. The narrow streets are jammed with boutiques, galleries and restaurants. We crashed the jolly Catholic cathedral (built in the 19th century although the city is 400 years old) and pointed out all the saints and transubstantiation to the boys before retiring to a nearby crêperie. If that's not japes, I don't know what is.

Then it was back onto the interstate and foot down all the way into the most remarkable landscape I've yet seen in America. Almost a desert, certainly a desolation, it made yesterday's panhandle plains seem like Piccadilly Circus. Utterly empty, just pale white scrub and occasional distant cliffs of dark red stone. The horizon was so impossibly far away that it seemed ridiculous not to see a glint of sun on the ocean beyond it. But there is no end, the land simply continues, forever.

How did people cross this void? I can't imagine making this trip without an iPod, let alone before the inventions of road or rail. We are passing through this abominably vast landscape, hurrying to move on to the next stop. Trying to cross it on foot or by wagon must have been a feat of psychological endurance more than anything else; surely those seemingly infinite spaces would have ground relentlessly away at certainty and perspective, until you went mad?

In Santa Fe there was a gallery of paintings by Georgia O'Keefe and one struck me in particular. A bold composition of horizontal layers of blue and black, it is called 'The Beyond'. She painted it in 1972, when she was in her eighties.

Even before this afternoon's drive, it seemed to me to be a flat landscape: a black foreground with dark bands of turbulent blue cloud above it. In the middle is a very narrow line of almost white light, as if the setting sun were knifing through a low break in heavy clouds. The colours are cold, almost funereal and it is difficult not try and guess which 'beyond' she saw in those dark skies and those vast horizons.

It is a hopeful painting I thought, not about endings and finalities but about moving on, moving through. Beyond this great space, beyond the setting sun, there'll be another, bigger, wider, emptier. It never ends, not with the desert, not even with the ocean.

The Other Edge of Texas

We didn't do much that was new today, but we did break some new ground eventually, once we had peeled ourselves off of the familiar Dallas road and struck west towards the panhandle. Everything changed after that.

Before then, the journey had all been previously seen bits of Texas. Houston glowered under dark skies, the towers of downtown broken and smoking with cloud. As we inched our way out of the city, the morning grew darker and the sky pressed lower, eventually fragmenting into a ferocious storm in which both thunder and lightning were lost above the vicious rain that fell like beads against the windscreen.

Houston weather that we were glad to leave behind - it stayed, tangled in the city, and we broke free of both. The sky lightened, the sun came out. We drove through the trees, a mixture of green leaves and bare limbs, blossom and brown, all the seasons jumbled as usual.

By the time we'd reached the Dallas/Fort Worth conurbation, we'd been driving for five hours. It passes quickly enough. The roads were quiet, as were the boys in the back, and we coasted along.

After lunch we took a new road. Fort Worth, with its own distant towers and thickly applied frontage road stores, dissolved under the sunshine. We headed north-west towards new places, strange yet familiar sounding: Wichita Falls, Amarillo.

The trees were gone too, replaced by a messy rise and fall of grass and pasture. Like the jumbled trees, the grass was also confused, blending between scrubby brown, bright green and faded yellow. It began to feel very different. The fields were oddly ornamented with small nodding donkeys, or rusted brown boxcars.

Suddenly we were way out, somewhere else.

The towns changed as we went, strung out along the road like knots. Some, like Decatur, announced desperately there was more to see if only we'd stop and look. Others, like Memphis or Claude, seemed to have fallen long ago into a dusty despair, tattered and tiny. They all felt isolated, as much from each other as from anywhere else, and some even had their 19th century ribs poking through their modern trappings. With their General Stores and local banks, these were clearly old western towns. One, Clarendon I think, even had a small stone square Sheriff's office, with iron bars across the windows and patrol cars tethered up outside.

And now, around these dusty islands, the grass became a great ocean of pale green. The land and sky stretched and stretched, pulled impossibly far in all directions, skewing perspective so that objects, the odd silo or wind vane, looked either too close and vanishingly small or, like the silhouetted combines, enormous and distant. The sun began to set, sucking colour from the world as it settled before us, bright and menacing and low in the sky. We stopped for dinner in Amarillo, but before we could see anything of it, night fell abruptly, like a dropped curtain.

We had nearly gone far enough. Another hundred miles or so down the road was the border with New Mexico. We ploughed through the darkness. The boys grumpily tumbled into sleep in their seats. Outside the beautiful, ghostly desolation of the plains was lost, replaced with eerie fields of flashing lights.

We crossed the border into Mountain Time and allowed the last few miles to roll away until the jolly lights of Tucumcari rose over the brow of a hill.

I know absolutely nothing about this place other than that we are leaving it first thing in the morning.

San Francisco

Wow, different again.

San Francisco, with its peculiar topography, bridges, bays, parks, architecture and myriad forms of municipal transport, looks and feels more like something from Sim City than any other place in America. It is beautiful and odd and foreign and familiar all at the same time.

Thanks to some hefty frequent flyer miles L's acquired, I got to tag along for this leg of her November audition tour. Whilst she was stuck inside working, I got a day to myself to zip about. Impossible, of course, in such time to get a proper insight or understanding of a whole city, but it is possible to form some first impressions.

So, firstly, density. How wonderful and thrilling to be somewhere squashed up, where every square foot of ground counts. Houston is so lazily spread out that the very air is thin, but San Francisco is piled high and squeezed in, from the bay to the ocean and therefore immediately has the air of a properly exciting city.

Secondly, the hills are spectacular and stupefying, just as they seem to be in Vertigo, or Bullit, or the Dirty Harry films, or even Crazy Like A Fox (don't tell me you don't remember that, I know you do). In fact watching the streets bend up and up, the impossible angles rendered by sedate lines of traffic, it's hard not to feel part of a vast optical illusion.

San Francisco feels like a city that's happy to play up to its reputation. The cable cars and trams are all carefully preserved from classic eras whilst the buses proudly proclaim their zero emission status, the overhead cables clicking and singing with juice. The architecture varies enormously with white-cubed casas in the hills near the airport, grand and ornate Victorian town houses in the heights, immaculate classical civic buildings around (and including) City Hall and everything else, scruffy and smart in between. Every single billboard I saw was an advert for iPad, but at the same time there is a faded resort charm to the place, rather like Brighton I suppose.

It's a very diverse city, a broad mix of white, black, hispanic and asian Americans; the kids are very cool and there's plenty of delicious individuality on display from all walks of life. But, in some senses, San Francisco is very much the end of the line. There are certainly more homeless people there than anywhere else in America from what I've seen. And, perhaps not coincidentally, plenty of people who look like they are headed in the same direction: young men with wild beards and ragged clothes, ranting at nothing. I wonder if there is a current in this country that pulls or pushes people out west to California. Maybe people end up here simply because they keep going until they hit the ocean and then there is nowhere else to go.

The ocean was my favourite thing. It really does feel like the end of the world, the outer limit; especially if you are keenly aware of the time zone you are in, knowing that there is nothing beyond that is not Tomorrow. The beach itself is vast and empty, fading in each direction to a pale mist that allows mere hints of distant objects. But the sea is even bigger, of course, and emptier and the only sound is that steady insistent drone of waves and motion that becomes almost a lullaby, because no matter how large and savage are the waves that crash upon the black/gold sand, their ferocity is nothing in relation to the size of the ocean.

We went for the sunset and were not disappointed. The sun sinks fast and cleanly out of a cloudless sky and plunges in the endless waters, extinguishing itself. The last of the daylight leaks away immediately and within minutes the world is dark.

We made our way back into the city and took a cable car up into Chinatown. Getting off the cab and suddenly being surrounded by Chinese script, lanterns, restaurants, shops and people was a reminder that there really was something across that ocean after all.

Highs and Lows of Chicago

Last weekend we all dashed to Chicago; L was working and the boys and I tagged along because we are now Official Travel Boffins of America or something. When L first suggested the trip I didn't want to bother, frankly. It seemed too soon after our epic road trip for one thing.But I am trying to stop saying 'no' to things out of laziness, and off we went.

The actual flight was ridiculously easy, despite having to get up at 5am. For one thing, I keep forgetting how straightforward domestic flights are here in the USA. For another, suddenly sitting still for two and a half hours en famille is easy-peasy after all the crazy cross-country driving we have done. Almost immediately we were descending into a Great Lakes rain storm and a few minutes after that we were in a taxi ploughing through the downpour to Downtown.

The city is beautiful, naturally: an uproar of towers and skyscrapers from the last 100 years, steel and glass and stone and brick, blending and reflecting off of each other and looming over the broad streets and spacious parks. Through all this weaves the 'L', the elevated railway with its silver rolling stock. It completely covers some streets, making the sidewalk feel like an undercity from a 1930s dystopian version of the future - which it probably is to be fair.

Our time was limited so we tried to cram in as much as we could. On Saturday we did the Art Institute and managed to impress Christopher with some paintings - albeit only because he recognised them from Doctor Who. Still, he got a real frisson out of seeing Van Gough's bedroom and his self-portrait, so well done the BBC. Bless him, he does think Van Gough's first name is 'Mister' though.

On Sunday L had to some actual work so we left her behind and caught the bus to the Museum of Science & Industry. More on that, and the Sears Willis Tower in a minute.

Our flight times on Monday allowed us just enough time to have a stab at the Field Museum, Chicago's answer to the Natural History Museum. Again it was astoundingly good - excellent evolution/life on Earth/dinosaurs exhibition, wonderful recreation of an ancient Egyptian tomb and a great set of rooms on pre-European American civilisations. Then it was back in the taxi, back on the plane, 'oh, we've landed' and then back home for dinner. Bang, job done.

Now rewind to Sunday for the highs and lows.

Lows: Ha ha, I'm so clever. The low point, of course, was going up to the top of the Willis née Sears Tower. The ride in the elevator (24 feet per second, fact fans) was enough to make me giddy all by itself. The views from the top were spectacular, but they had to ruin it all by installing some glass flooring in a bay window so that my boys could stand on it, jump up and down and watch me beg (from a safe distance) them to get off.

Highs: Ha ha ha! Did I mention how clever I am? The high point was to be found down in the bowels of the Museum of Science & Industry where they have the U-505: a 250ft long, 750 tonne German submarine that was captured by the US Navy off the coast of Africa in June 1944. The boys may be able to cope with heights, but they clearly didn't take to the claustrophobia-inducing interior. With the doors shut, the lights dimmed, and the recorded noise of the engines echoing through the hull, our short guided-tour was very atmospheric. In hushed tones the guide describes the location and capture of the sub as if it were happening right now, above us. Chilling.

Unusually, the 54 crew members were captured/rescued after the sub was depth-charged by Hunter-Killer Task Force 22.3. Even more unusually, the Germans failed to scuttle their ship resulting in a great intelligence coup for the Allies. U-505 was disguised and towed to the Bahamas to be pored over by Naval Intelligence; her crew were sent to a POW camp in Louisiana, just for them, where they played baseball and picked cotton for 25 cents a day. At the end of the war they were all offered American citizenship and six of them took it. Meanwhile, the U-505 was scheduled for use as target practice as German military assets were put beyond use. But the captain of the US task force that had captured the sub intervened - he pulled some strings and got it saved, and he was able to donate it to his local museum in his home town of Chicago.

There it sat, on the front lawn, until a purpose-built underground chamber was constructed for it in 2005. It's amazing, straight out of The Spy Who Loved Me. Most beautifully, one of the six Americanised crew members moved to Chicago, just to be close to his old ship. In fact, he became a volunteer at the museum and himself gave tours of the vessel for many years until he died.

Of the 1200 U-boats that survived World War Two, there are only 5 left in the world. And the U-505 is the only one outside Europe.

As you might be able to tell, I was suitably impressed.

The Last Corner Before Home

There is a corner on the way to your home. You might not even be aware of it, but it is the last one before you turn into your street or road and see the lights of your own house. Before you quite reach it you can see the very beginnings of the road where you live curving out of sight but so close now that there is no more need for doubt - you are home at last.

I got that sensation twice yesterday in Cardiff and ended up walking past my house – my old house. Chris calls it ‘the Brown Door’ and has talked of it often whilst we have been abroad. The three of us were walking to the school and it is the way we had always walked so we were in sight of that corner before I could even ask him if he wanted to walk past it or go the other way. He said he wanted to see it and so we walked down our own road. Something made me keep to the far side, but we went slowly. William seemed oblivious but Chris and I lingered, trying to see inside. The hedge was trimmed, I noted grudgingly, but I was surprised to see the same pictures we had left hanging on the wall. The only difference I could see was a spray of foliage or something on the edge of the bay window. I picked Chris up and forced us on.

Later that night, after tea and biscuits with friends from school, I got sent out in to the wintry darkness to fetch the car. Again, my feet were making their own way and before I knew it I was there: the Last Corner Before Home, my hands reaching for my door keys as I turned into our old street. I checked myself. That sense of anticipation is a visceral thing. You feel it in your guts, in your chest. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and carried on, the moon a shining half-biscuit in the night sky, Venus warm and yellow, just above the familiar roof tops. Again I couldn’t do anything other than keep to the far side of the street. Again I went slowly, trying to see as much as I could through the unclosed curtains. There were lamps on this time and, walking the opposite direction from before I realised that the foliage I noticed was a Christmas tree in the corner where the television should have been. It is a comforting thought.

There is one more of these corners - a quarter of the way across the world if you can believe it. Tomorrow we are going to get on a plane and fly back to America. It will be warm and sunny (I hope) and I am looking forward to getting on with life there, becoming more established, growing roots like the ones we have enjoyed and been supported by in Cardiff. I am also hoping fervently that I get that feeling in my chest, in my guts as we reach the corner of ______ and _____. The unmistakable sensation that we are home again.

The Boy Who Came Back

Extraordinary scenes yesterday in Cardiff. On the last leg of our tour of the country we made good on our long-standing promise to W that he would be able to visit is his old school and see all his old friends once more. By the time we were on our way to Wales I had developed misgivings and doubts. I tried to hint that places and people could change and that this could be unsettling. I needn’t have bothered. If anything Cardiff was too familiar and (perhaps unsurprisingly after only 5 months) little seemed different. Either way, W was unconcerned – the reception he got was staggering.

It started in the playground. As we arrived, one half of his year group were outside and they rushed forwards delighted and bewildered shouting his name. ‘Where have you been?’ said one. ‘I haven’t seen you in ages!’ Almost immediately the questions stopped and they fell into an exhilarating game, chasing him around and around. W seemed transfigured, his face shining, his spirit unfettered. He was wearing a suit jacket that we had found in a supermarket (his Doctor Who jacket) and the tails flapped as he ran, looking back, laughing over his shoulder at the chasing pack, the soles of his sneakers flashing white.

The other class was waiting inside and I eventually got him to go in to the Victorian school buildings to find them. They were sat on the rug, about to have a story, when he barged in just ten or fifteen minutes before the end of the school day. The children erupted from the floor and fell upon him like a crashing wave, shouting his name, grabbing him. At the front is one old friend, and they hug each other as the crowd surrounds them, literally mobbing them. Those at the centre even try to hoist him up but after that doesn’t work they calm ever so slightly and make do with just touching him, manic grins on their faces. Those further back are straining forwards and there are strange haunted smiles from those too far away to reach. It’s a little like the end of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. W himself is laughing, eyes wide. The cut of the jacket’s shoulders make him look older and taller, more alien and stranger. They look at him as if he has returned from the dead. Some of the girls are just stroking him, as if trying to convince themselves he is real.

This class has lost several children - both before we left, and since. I remember friends leaving my school at a similar age and it is like a death – sometimes there’s no warning and a child just vanishes. They never return. But W is the Boy Who Came Back. Whatever the nothingness is into which their former classmates have vanished, he has returned. They are amazed, delighted, stupefied.

The teacher temporarily regains control and gets the class to sit back down so they can ask some questions. W leans nonchalantly back against a desk, occasionally ruffling the hair of some friend or other. He is so assured, so unfazed. Such attention would scare me now, let alone when I was 5 – he is merely glad to see them. Always on the verge of laughter, he waves away the forest of raised hands, the babble of competing questions with an easy smile: 'Now, now, one at a time..'

I don’t listen to the questions although I gather that they want to know what he got for Christmas; almost overwhelmed, I turn to C who has been curled up on my hip throughout most of this. He looks shell-shocked. Other teachers appear and begin talking to me, asking questions about Houston but I struggle to answer, as I have done all day: here in Cardiff, our Texas life seems an impossible fantasy, unreal and exotic.

Once the bell goes and they have all pulled on their coats and scarves, the class processes out with W, back into the playground to show him to their parents. In their wake I ask C how he’s doing.

‘Too much,’ he says.