LETTER FROM AMERICA

You might ask how the mission to civilise the Americas went, and I
might tell you.

The short version, it was brilliant. Weather, location, house, area,
food and drink, neighbours, strangers, beaches forests . . . all
brilliant. Longer version, twenty-odd hours travelling after airport
closures due to the tail ends of hurricanes; arriving knackered and
harassed and not in the best of tempers; strange bed, noisy night -
cicadas rubbing their back legs together in sexually excited multitudes
outside the bedroom window while in the forest a wolf howled at a
hunter's moon. Forest means forest, trees up to the balcony with a
canopy so high you crick your neck looking up at it and miss the
squirrel dropping down on to the picnic table to nick your nuts.
Daytime temperatures eighty to ninety degrees with humidity so high
every time you move you go into meltdown. Two minutes doing anything
including breathing and you sweat enough to end a national drought.
This is serious insect country where everything bites and stings, some
of it so poisonously it kills you, so you do tend to take care when
removing the cover from the gas barbecue. Or when mooning. In searing
heat and feeling like legionnaires we planted six trees and sowed three
good-sized lawns and were rewarded in this sub-tropical clime by having
the cut the grass three times before we left. Everything grows so
quickly . . . In two weeks my fingernails were nine inches long and
Maureen was ten feet tall. If I wanted to kiss her I had to stand on a
box.

The pregnant Angela looks like a lush red pod about to burst and walks
about on swollen legs so widespread she's often mistaken for a
well-known bridge. When she passed by it was as though we were in the
middle of an eclipse. Just to cheer her up, I called her Moby. It
seemed to give her moments of morbid pleasure.

John, her husband, has a permanent beam on his face as he lives up to
the image of the perfect dad-in-waiting. I keep warning him things
might change when the baby is born - to a Birthing Plan, would you
believe, two copies, one for the hospital, one for the parents, just in
case they have to sue hospital staff. He prefers the rose-tinted view,
and who can blame him? In THE PLAN he is Angela's birthing partner. The
private maternity suite will be in semi darkness with their selection
of classical music playing softly on the stereo. He will sit behind her
to offer comfort and support and everything will go swimmingly . . . So
we all fervently hope. Maureen's look is Old World sceptical. Even
though unspoken, been there and done it is in her eyes.

The house at Forest Edge is spacious and tidy and stands in about a
quarter acre of country. As Americans are truly literal, Forest Edge is
just that. The forest comes up to the house and the edge of it is at
the balcony. Two minutes stroll away is a lake large enough to hold
fair-sized carp, cat and pan fish which John catches on his
twice-weekly visits to it. As he returns fish polished and kissed back
to the water we might go hungry, but nearby - in American terms, this
means anything up to a two hour drive - is Harry Teeters(fancifully
known as 'Tits') superstore, Ingles supermarket and a giant WalMart. In
the local pharmacy you can buy something called 'Fanny Cream' but I'm
damned if I know what people do with it.

Twentyfive hours after leaving Forest Edge - after a three-week
four-day stay - we arrived back home while our luggage went on holiday
someplace else, Judging by the smell of tacos and tequila on the
leather when it did eventually arrive, it could have been to
Mexico.

Trouble was, the plane Charlotte to Philly was kept an hour on the
Charlotte tarmac while tropical storm Isidore dumped torrential rain on
the upper southern states. On late arrival in Philly we had twenty
minutes to get from concourse C to concourse A and board our flight,
just making it before the Airbus closed its doors, started its engines
and roared off into the night sky. By the time our breath returned the
night had passed and we were drinking coffee and eating sticky buns for
breakfast, courtesy of US Airways. Come the dawn, we landed in a gaggle
of incoming aircraft at Manchester.

The worst thing about the homecoming was the Arriva train from
Manchester to Leeds: mucky toilet and a retard serving cold drinks. 'We
don't 'ave Diet Coke but we got Pepsi. I'll have to check how much.' He
was so long in checking I thought he'd been mugged. Maybe he was in the
toilets, applying 'Fanny Cream.'

Got to have a laugh, haven't you? And, by the way, it is good to be
home.

END