Strange Things Will Happen: An amateur emigrant in San Francisco

Strange Things Have Happened

2009-09-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

When does the place you live become "home"? It certainly isn't something that happens overnight, regardless of whether you're relocating halfway round the world or just moving into a new house. Instead, it is a change that takes place incrementally. Over time, you become more comfortable with your new surroundings, novel experiences become everyday, the foreign becomes familiar.

And so it has been with me and San Francisco; over the past two years or so, I have been undergoing the steady transformation from outsider to resident. Sure, my accent and immigration status are just two things to remind me that I'm still officially a foreigner in the United States. But that doesn't change the fact that this city now feels a lot like home.

Two events stand out as important markers along the way. The first was election night last November. The announcement that Obama had triumphed would have been a cause for celebration no matter where I was living. But that night as I danced in the streets with friends, it felt like a win for the home side, for my team. Over the course of the election campaign, my stake in the result had increased mentally and even financially (as a resident I may not have been allowed to actually vote, but I was able make campaign contributions). And now, at the end, surrounded by jubilant locals, it wasn't just their guy who had won, but mine too.

The second was more recently on the Fourth of July. My wife and I spent the day with friends in the East Bay so that I could experience a typically American Independence Day parade, and Piedmont's festivities didn't disappoint. At times it seemed as if the whole town was marching past us (even though the whole town was also lining the street). There were jazz bands, bagpipes, cheerleaders, Irish dancers, mop-wielding sailors, people dressed up as Snow White and Uncle Sam, basketball and rugby teams tossing balls around, a samba troupe, half a jet fighter mounted on a trailer, ballet performers, and enough vintage cars to bankrupt the government's cash for clunkers scheme in one fell swoop.

Watching this strange cross-section of cultural contradictions stream past was a reminder that the United States is a country with no single cultural orthodoxy, no shared roots, not even an official language (despite the best efforts of a vocal minority). A place that may not welcome immigrants as readily as it once did, but one where the new arrivals who do make it through the red tape are assimilated faster than almost anywhere else on earth.

Which is why this is my final post here. There are still plenty of things I find remarkable and fascinating about living in America, like finding a "British" section in the ethnic food aisle of supermarkets, or the strange debate that's currently raging over whether or not to provide everyone in the US with affordable health care. And there are some things I may never fully understand, such as baseball. But I'm beginning to see all of these peculiarities as quirks of the place I live, as my weirdness, rather than something to be gazed upon with the safe, insulating distance of an outsider.

And what's the point of writing as an emigrant if I feel like a local?

You can follow my continuing adventures at my website www.keithlaidlaw.com and on my new blog Ludovician.

The terrible curse of the shrinking pint

2009-02-02T16:48:00.000-08:00

Americans are often surprised when I tell them that we Brits share their arcane system of weights and measures.* Sure, in the UK we at least try to teach schoolkids about weird European stuff like kilograms and metres, but we also measure height in good old feet and inches, calculates road distances and speed limits using miles, and even add some extra confusion to the whole festival of irregularity by weighing ourselves in stones, which are equal to 14 pounds. And our pubs serve beer in pints, just like they do here.

Or at least I used to think they did.

I've resisted writing about this before because ranting on about "The Pint" is an effective measure of small mindedness in the UK. It is a symbol of Britain's independence from Europe second only to the portraits of the Queen that grace our coins and banknotes in importance. Indeed, for a certain section of xenophobic idiots, the idea of ordering a beer measured in millilitres would be tantamount to replacing "God Save the Queen" with "Frère Jacques", or knocking down Buckingham Palace to make way for a Volkswagen dealership, a new branch of Ikea and a couple of pizza restaurants.

While I don't agree with such sentiments, I have come to realise that the British pint is more important to me than I thought it was. I'm not talking about the fact that pints back home are about 20 percent bigger than American ones (568 ml compared to 473 ml, fact fans). No, it's the way that when you order a pint in Britain, you know exactly what you'll get: a pint. But depending on where you order one here, it will vary in size from a full British pint, through a standard 16-ounce US measure, all the way down to 12 fluid ounces or less – which isn't much bigger than a half pint back home.

To compensate for serving smaller drinks, some sneaky bars even use special glasses with thicker sides and a heavy bottom that look and feel like the real thing, except that you run out of beer unexpectedly quickly. Other places, particularly music venues or clubs, tend to be a little more upfront about it, probably because there isn't much you can do to disguise the size of plastic cups. Either way, you only know what you're getting after you get your first drink in your hand as bars don't tend to advertise the size of their pours, and prices rarely change to reflect smaller measures.

To someone from Britain, a country where pint glasses carry an official Government stamp and any beer not filled to the brim is immediately returned to the bar for topping up, such irregularity seems unforgiveable. No one in the States would tolerate petrol stations that sold pint-sized gallons, or butchers who shaved an ounce or two off a pound of meat, so why the laissez faire attitude to beer?

Thankfully there is a silver lining to all this bar-based debasement of measurements: the spirits pours here are similarly irregular in size, but uniformly generous when compared to the mean thimblefuls that are served in UK pubs. So perhaps in future I should be ordering a half and a half instead.

* NOTE: Many of Britain's Imperial measurements differ from United States Customary Units in size. However, both systems share a common ancestor, which explains their many similarities - including a complete lack of logic or common sense.

The dollar fades, but refuses to die

2009-01-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

One result of all the recent economic chaos and tumult has been a dramatic change in the value of the US dollar on international exchange rates. It has dipped against the yen, swung both ways against the euro, and soared against the sickly sterling. But the value of the physical one dollar bill - the banknote rather than the currency - never seems to change. Immune to the ravages of time and inflation, it holds a special place in the hearts of an American public that can't seem to let it go.

These strange, battered pieces of paper seem like a relic of a bygone age to someone from the UK. The Bank of England withdrew the higher-value £1 note from circulation over 20 years ago. Britain's lowest denomination banknote these days, the fiver, is worth around $7.25, and at one point last year it leapfrogged even the US $10 bill in value.

There have been several efforts to replace the humble greenback with $1 coins over the years, but all have failed. And little wonder: the most recent version looks and feels more like a car-wash token than a unit of currency. But that alone can't fully explain the reluctance to part with paper dollars. Perhaps it has something to do with bar culture here. Tipping serving staff just wouldn't be the same using small change rather than small notes (although at least dollar coins wouldn't get as soggy when left on wet bars). Or maybe Americans simply prefer fat wallets to bulging pockets: A thick billfold always feels nice, even if it is largely padded out with ones and not one-hundreds.

Whatever the reason, the original George Dubya (Washington, whose portrait graces the dollar bill) looks set to stay with us for at least a while longer.

Soda Stream: Back from the dead

2008-12-16T20:13:00.000-08:00

Last week I wrote a blog for Chow.com about an exciting new product called Soda-Club that adds carbonated sparkle to tap water. It's a great idea if you like fizzy water but don't want to buy it bottled. But what I didn't mention in that piece is that the reason the Soda-Club machine I saw it at a friend's house first caught my eye was because the same product used to be popular in the UK back in the Seventies and Eighties under a slightly different brand name: Soda Stream.

Back in those innocent, pre-Perrier days, these magical machines were used to make DIY soft drinks. You would fizz up some water, then add some sweet syrup flavoring of your choice. The problem was that the results always tasted really crappy compared to real Coke, Fanta, Irn-Bru or whatever, and so the machines eventually fell from fashion. Seeing a brand new, silvery Soda Stream pop up in a hip San Francisco apartment was an unexpected turn of events.

Of course, no discussion of the Soda Stream would be complete without mention of the weirdest fruit of its loins. When you bought a Soda Stream machine, you would always get a few free bottles of soft drink syrup along with it, one of which (for some peculiar reason no one has been able to explain) would be "Dandelion & Burdock" flavour. This strange concoction can best be described as some sort of ancient, mythical British soft drink: think Moxie combined with Dr Pepper, but much weirder and made by witches.

No one ever drank it, so anyone who owned a Soda Stream would find themselves stuck with an old, yellowed, sticky plastic bottle of the stuff, lurking menacingly behind their shiny modern soft-drinks maker. In fact, lots of forgotten, nearly full containers of this peculiar potion are probably still hiding in the darkest reaches of kitchen cupboards across Britain, ready and waiting for the unlikely revival of home fizzmaking.

Be quiet, strange syrups, your time may come again ...

Last of the summer beer

2008-12-03T21:54:00.000-08:00

It's a shame that American beer has such a poor reputation abroad. Budweiser and its ilk have a lot to answer for, because one of the most pleasant surprises about moving to California has been discovering the high quality and wide variety of the local brews. This came as a particular delight after so many years of drinking flat, lukewarm lager in London pubs.

Sure, the names Bud, Coors, and Miller can still be spotted in most places where drinkers gather here (and the dreaded word "lite" is rarely far behind), but almost every local bar and corner store will also sell at least a few far superior all-American alternatives. Some of these lesser-known beers are made locally, while others are shipped in from neighbouring states, but almost are made by small-scale, microbrew-style operations.

In fact, sometimes the choice can be quite bewildering. The bar closest to my work offers 17 different beers on draft, and is by no means an exception. To make room, bars will often mount taps on both the front and back of the bar area (which can make it tough for short-sighted foreigners like myself to work out what's available). And, just in case all that choice wasn't enough, most local breweries also produce a few seasonal beers to spice things up a little at different times of the year.

Which brings me to the sad news that the beer which has become my favourite since arriving on these shores is currently nowhere to be found. Skinny Dip, made by the New Belgium Brewing Company in Colorado, is a summer beer and therefore unavailable for the next few months. I had my last bottle (pictured above) a few weeks ago and now face a long wait until spring for my next.

Our time apart is going to be made even more difficult by the fact that I'm not a big fan of the winter beers now appearing all over town. Admittedly, these dark, spicy ales would be perfect to sip while sitting next to a warming fire on a nasty December night back home in the UK. But here in San Francisco, despite the grumbling of the locals, the weather never strays very far beyond a kind of half-hearted attempt at autumn, so fiercely festive winter warmers seem strangely out of place – kind of like Christmas decorations on palm trees (another fairly common sight around here).

At times it feels as if people here are actually pining for bad weather, just to make their winter experience more authentic. And maybe there will come a time when I'm one of them, but right now the only thing I'm missing is my summer beer.

Storm in a BBC teacup

2008-11-14T04:40:00.000-08:00

I was trying to avoid writing about the tedious "Sachsgate" saga that has been dominating the British media for the past few weeks. So why now? Well, for a few different reasons, but mostly because the NY Times has just done a piece on it, therefore saving me a lot of the work of explaining the whole sorry tale to American readers.

But, just in case you can't be bothered reading that in-depth article, here's the 10-second version: two well-known comedians did a radio show during which they left a few rather puerile messages on an aging actor's answerphone. Two listeners complained. Then a rabidly rightwing tabloid which happens to hate the BBC picked up on the "shocking story" and published a lurid account of the incident, creating a self-perpetuating media shitstorm.

Politicians get involved, people lose their jobs, angry villagers wave pitchforks.

The comparison in the NYT article with Janet Jackson's Superbowl titflash is an apt one. As well as highlighting a certain underlying prudishness on both sides of the Atlantic, both incidents are also excellent examples of the irritating power of a moronic moral minority. These self-appointed guardians of taste claim to protect us from depravity while taking a curious pleasure in revealing and lingering over every salacious detail.

I particularly enjoyed Charlie Brooker's recent account of the snowballing idiocy, which he describes as a "pitiful gitstorm". He also makes a sensible-sounding suggestion about creating anti-complaint hotlines for situations like this one, whereby reasonable people could phone in and cancel out complaints from hysterical halfwits.

If only it were that easy. Here in California we already have a similar idea in place. It's called the proposition system, and unfortunately sometimes there are just too many bigots and cretins to go round.

Dancing in the streets 2

2008-11-05T13:51:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: My friend Michael G's video of the celebrations. It sums up the atmosphere of last night brilliantly. And he managed to capture the moment when the cheering hoards closed down Valencia Street, starting a street party that went on for hours.

Celebrating Obama. from Michael on Vimeo.

Dancing in the streets

2008-11-05T07:20:00.001-08:00

I'm feeling a little rough this morning, so I'll keep this short. But last night was fun. Lots of fun. We went to a friend's house to watch the results come in and, after Obama's victory speech, we headed out onto the streets. It was like Italy had won the World Cup, only with less mopeds and more high-fiving. People cheered, car horns blared. At 19th and Valencia people started gathering on the street corners and then, suddenly, we were all in the street. People danced, and drank, and shouted quite a lot. The police stood by and watched. It was great.

And we weren't alone. There were other impromptu street parties at 16th and Guerrero, on Divisadero, in the Castro (despite the fact that the Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage looks to have won), in Berkeley, Seattle, New York, Washington, Chicago... To see more, just go to Flickr and search for recent photos tagged with Obama and party. Yes we can? Oh yes we did.

Obama takes toontown

2008-11-04T04:17:00.000-08:00

CORRECTION: It seems not everyone is as nervous about Obama's chances of victory in today's election as I thought. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau has already called victory for the Illinois senator in a Doonesbury strip he submitted to newspapers a week ago.

Citing figures that sound suspiciously close to those quoted by fivethirtyeight.com, Trudeau decided he was confident enough about Obama winning to predict the historic moment in a cartoon due to run in tomorrow. Unfortunately, quite a few of the newspapers who run his strip aren't being very supportive of his probability based news-gathering techniques (presumably they'd be happier if he just made stuff up instead).

I particularly liked the quote in the linked story above from a McCain spokesman who hoped the strip "proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame." I'm no clairvoyant, but that doesn't sound to me like the confident boast of a campaign about to pull off the biggest upset in election history.

The only thing to fear is failure

2008-11-02T12:06:00.000-08:00

Despite nearly every poll showing that Barack Obama is going be elected the 44th president of the United States in just a few days' time, no one I know is taking anything for granted yet. Even here in the Democrat stronghold of San Francisco, where I've only seen only one lonely McCain-Palin bumper sticker in months of looking, my liberal friends are more nervous than confident. After two disputed election losses, the blue half of the country isn't daring to believe that the dark days are over just yet. Instead, the atmosphere is a curious mixture of fear and hope.

And it's easy to understand why people here are scared when you read articles like this one. It quotes a Republican couple from Florida who think Obama may be a Muslim because: "He says he’s not, but we have no way of knowing." They follow this bizarre example of circular logic by suggesting that Obama's middle name was given in tribute to Saddam Hussein (it would be a surprise if this were true, considering Obama was born in 1961, a full 18 years before his middle-namesake come to power in Iraq). These people, and many more just like them, will be bringing the full force of their intellects to bear in voting booths around the country this coming Tuesday.

But the one thing that everyone seems to be agreed on is that, no matter what the end result, this election will come to be seen as a historic moment for this country, for good or ill. I'm not so sure. I feel as if things won't be quite as bad as some fear should Obama lose, and perhaps more importantly considering the likely result neither will things be as wonderful should he win. After all, I remember the euphoria surrounding Tony Blair's election landslide in 1997, and look what happened after that.

And this is what scares me. If, as he should, Obama wins, and the Democrats maintain control of both houses (with a far more effective majority in the Senate), then expectations are going to be sky-high. But the reality remains that we are in the early stages of a global economic crisis that is going to get much worse before it gets better, which means rising unemployment and falling incomes for some time to come. And the US remains embroiled in two messy wars, neither with any real end in sight. No matter what Obama's stated intentions, extricating America's forces from Iraq isn't going to be easy, nor is it likely to be pretty. And even with the increased military resources at his disposal that would follow any successful pullout from Iraq, bringing meaningful peace or stability to Afghanistan will be as difficult as ever.

In these circumstances, it seems right that people should feel cautious right now. I just hope we all remember to keep our expectations in check after Tuesday, too.

File under: I wish I'd thought of that

2008-11-02T11:46:00.000-08:00

I'm officially in love with fivethirtyeight.com, the presidential election website run by baseball statistician Nate Silver. Operating under the tagline "political polling done right," he has applied a fantasy sports enthusiast's love of number-crunching to the upcoming ballot, examining the various polls and statistics, and arriving at some interesting conclusions.

In particular, his thoughtful, intelligent analysis of why the various polls are wrong (and let's not forget that to a greater or lesser degree they are all wrong) makes you wonder why we pay attention to any of them in the first place. For example, there's the simple fact that most modern polling companies don't call cell phone numbers, despite the increasing numbers of voters who don't have a landline.

Even better, the site is about much more than mere stats, and includes some excellent on-the-ground first-person reports from campaign battlegrounds around the country. Because these stories aren't the site's main feature (and because this isn't a traditional news website), they tend to be more anecdotal, subjective, and, frankly, interesting than much of the coverage coming out of the traditional news media that I've seen. Just read this provocative story about a racist couple who say they are voting for Obama if you don't believe me.

Best of all, it's all put together by just a handful of people (there are only two credited writers -- even if there are more "backroom" people involved now, I'm guessing there's probably no more than about five total). Note to self: must come up with an idea like this one...

There's only one Barack Obama

2008-10-15T18:15:00.000-07:00

Hurrying home after work tonight, trying to get back before the third and final Obama-McCain Presidential debate started, I saw this sign outside a pub in downtown San Francisco.

I love the idea of screening political debates in bars, but I can't quite imagine the same thing happening in the UK. Of course, it helps that San Francisco is a fiercely liberal Democratic heartland, so the kind of dissenting views that might lead to bar brawls are unlikely. Nevertheless, I think it represents something fundamentally different about the political culture here.

I'm just sorry that I won't have another chance to witness this part of the American electoral process in action (well, not in this election at least). The idea of it intrigues me. Is there heckling? Cheering and booing? Singing even? Well, probably not the latter, but it's fun to imagine all the same. All together now: Can you hear the GOP sing? No-oh, no-oh-oh.

NBC is ruining my Olympics

2008-08-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

Normally I love watching big sporting events on TV, but my first experience of an Olympic Games as seen from an American perspective has been a total washout.

It's not the bias towards Team USA in the coverage and commentary, as that's completely forgivable. The latent jingoism of almost every nation's broadcasters comes to the fore during the Olympics, and Britain was certainly no exception: it has just been a matter of replacing rowing and plucky defeats with more beach volleyball and high-fives.

No, it's the fact that NBC, the network which owns the rights to screen the games in the US, has decided to show virtually nothing live. Instead broadcasts are delayed until prime time, regardless of when they originally took place. This means almost a full day's cold storage for much of the footage.

And not just that, but the few events which have happened at the right time of day in China to be broadcast simultaneously here are only shown live on the East Coast. Prime time starts three hours later on the West Coast, and so does the same, supposedly "live" NBC coverage. Of course, this doesn't stop the channel from leaving the word "live" in the top corner of the screen, as if they - and we - aren't aware that these goods are frozen, not fresh.

But in this world of instant online news coverage, I am aware of it; indeed, with an event the size of the Olympics, it has been pretty much impossible to avoid the fact. I can't go online to check my email without being bombarded with news and results from the games.

So I knew about most of Michael Phelps' gold medal wins before I saw them on television. I knew that China's biggest track and field star, 110-metre hurdler Liu Xiang, had failed in his quest for gold long before I saw him limp out of his first race. I knew that Usain Bolt had destroyed the opposition in the 100m final before I ever got a chance to see him start his celebrations well before he reached the finish line.

And now I also know that finding out the results of sporting events ahead of time makes them a lot less exciting to watch.

But there's always NBC's internet coverage, right? Wrong. Despite the fact that the channel's Olympics website features tons of awesome, high-quality streaming video (which could be shown at any time of day or night without interrupting their schedules), most of that is also delayed, presumably so that it doesn't interfere with those precious prime time ratings.

It's hard not to see this as arrogance. This is an event that is much bigger than any one TV channel, so broadcasters should bend to fit in with the Olympics, not the other way round. But, thankfully, it seems that not everyone who works in the US television industry is so dumb. Sports network ESPN is bidding for the 2014 and 2016 winter and summer games, and promises to show more of them live no matter the time of day or night.

Talking about NBC's Olympic performance, ESPN's executive VP John Skipper told the New York Times: "Our DNA is different than theirs. We serve sports fans. It's hard in our culture to fathom tape-delaying in the same way they have ... We did Euro 2008 in the afternoon. We've done the World Cup in the middle of the morning. We have different audiences."

En fuego

2008-07-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

Summer in California means wildfire season, and this year's is looking set to be one of the worst ever. A rare lightning storm last month ignited forest fires across the state, and the fire services have been battling ever since to get them under control.

The scale of the problem is hard to comprehend. California has huge areas of natural woodland, and recent winters have been drier than normal. All that dense, dry underbrush is just waiting for a spark, and once the flames take hold they're hard to stop. The recent fires have burned more than 1,300 square miles of land, an area twice the size of Greater London. At one point there were a total of 1,781 individual blazes, apparently a state record. That this total is now down to under 300 is partly due to the efforts of the 20,000 firefighters tackling them, but also because many of the smaller blazes combined to form larger conflagrations.

Here in San Francisco, the only sign of the fires still burning comes when the wind swings round to the wrong direction, blowing smoke over the city like a dense smog. The air becomes noticeably harder to breath, and sunsets take on an apocalyptic beauty. But earlier this year, during a visit to Tahoe, I went for a walk through the "burn zone" (pictured) which had been left near where we were staying by a major fire there in 2007. The ground was still scorched down to the dirt and, while the black stumps of some trees had been left standing, others had been consumed completely. All that remained of them were holes in the ground where their roots had continued to smolder down into the earth.

But, like earthquakes, the threat of devastating wildfires is just a fact of life in California. My wife and I visited Malibu for a wedding in October last year, and the rehearsal dinner was held in the groom's parent's house, which had a spectacular view over this celebrity-strewn stretch of southern Californian coastline. It looks like the safest place in the world, but the groom's father told me that the family's first home on the same spot had been destroyed by a wildfire a few years before. He was philosophical about it, saying that they had been able to rebuild and, while they had lost almost everything, at least they were all alive and well.

This was true, of course, but I was still surprised at how relaxed he seemed about it all. Then, just over a week later another series of fires broke out in southern California, one of which led to the evacuation of Malibu and the destruction of some homes there. And then the same thing happened again in November. With the help of good insurance, it's amazing what you can get used to living with.

A tale of two magazine covers

2008-07-15T08:52:00.001-07:00

While the New Yorker is known and respected for many things, the biting wit of its cartoons isn't one of them. Traditionally they span the spectrum from mildly amusing to vaguely depressing. But the magazine's latest front cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama sees it plumb new depths in the humour department.

According to New Yorker editor David Remnick, it was intended to be a satirical statement about right-wing depictions of the Democratic presidential candidate and his wife, but it gets this horribly wrong: as a satire it is both cloddishly heavy handed and, importantly, not really funny. Sure, it will spark debate, but only in the same way your least favourite uncle might when he starts a joke during a family dinner with the words, "I'm not a racist, but..." I mean, even John McCain's campaign immediately condemned it.

When I first saw the illustration, I immediately thought of the Onion's front page headline earlier this year: "Black Guy Asks Nation For Change." Not only does this make me laugh pretty much every time I think of it, but it also nails the issue by making it crystal clear exactly who the joke is aimed at: us and our attitudes to race, not the candidate himself. New Yorker take note: leave the satire to the satirists.

As others see us

2008-07-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

Some American-Scottish humour, which I received in the post today courtesy of my father-in-law...

Maybe he wasn't listening when I explained to him that most of the kilt-wearers you see in Scotland are employed in the tourist industry - and that the rest are tourists.

The cartoon was drawn by Dan Piraro.

European soccerball

2008-07-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

During Euro 2008, I couldn't help but notice that watching football at the pub here is, well, a bit odd. For a start, the time difference means that European football games kick off at any point from 4am onwards on the Pacific coast, and pubs seems to get progressively stranger for every extra hour before noon you visit them pretty much anywhere in the world (outside of Leith, at least). Then there are local peculiarities such as US broadcaster ESPN's regular commentary pundit Tommy Smyth, an eccentric Irishman who seems to have tricked the locals into thinking that "he's bulged the old onion bag!" is an acceptable euphimism for "goal". But, most of all, there is the solitude.

I'm used to football-watching being a communal activity. In Britain, even inconsequential mid-table, lower-league games featuring obscure teams will not only be shown in most pubs, but you can be sure that a large proportion of the drinkers present will be keeping at least half an eye on the action. Presumably this just in case that guy with two left feet playing up front suddenly blasts one into the top corner like Ronaldo. Or perhaps because watching Scunthorpe Utd vs Crewe Alexandria is a better prospect than staring at the flashing lights on the fruit machine - or, perish the thought, actually talking to someone. This meant that even on those rare occasions in London that I managed to persuade an unsuspecting pub to show a game featuring my home team, perennial Scottish underachievers Hearts, I could be pretty sure that I wouldn't be alone.

Things are different here in the US, where I have been relegated to a small, subversive minority of "soccer" fans for even the biggest games. We gather in carefully selected pubs at strange times of the day to huddle around the one television not dedicated to showing proper sports like senior tour golf, last weekend's Nascar highlights, or women's college softball.

But for the past few weeks, as the Euro championship progressed towards its conclusion, our small numbers grew a little. An Irish pub close to my work dutifully showed all the games, and the games that kicked off in the evening in Europe coincided quite nicely with my lunch hour here. During the group stages there were generally only a handful of us, and we would sit at one end of the bar, watching pictures without any sound, surrounded by indifferent locals. But, by the time the semi-finals came round, not only had the sound been turned up, but it was standing room only. Admittedly, some of the people present for those games were slightly confused locals who had stumbled in by accident, but most of us were there to actually see the match, and our numbers included both football-loving foreigners like myself, and that strangest and rarest of beasts: the genuine American soccer fan.

They are still a minority among their own countrymen, but their numbers are growing - and, thankfully, I'm friends with quite a few of them. The fascinating thing for me is the way this small splinter group of American sports fans, and the game of football itself, are viewed by the majority here. In the UK, football supporters are stereotypically thought of as boorish, uncultured lager lads, but here the opposite is true. To have even noticed the sport tends to take a certain cosmopolitan outlook, and the game also has a reputation in the States for being effete, certainly in comparison to the home-grown brand of football. One of the most common criticisms I hear about the round-balled version of the game concerns players "flopping", or diving, which seems to run counter to two of the most fundamental doctrines held dear by most American sports fans: masculinity and authenticity.

(Ironically, foreign football fans also have a reputation in the US for hooliganism, fighting and general thuggery, but we'll ignore that apparent contradiction for now)

These are generalisations, of course, but it's probably no coincidence that the only mainstream American celebrity I can think of who has also come out as a football fan is every liberal intellectual's favourite comedian, Jon Stewart from The Daily Show. Well, him and NBA star Steve Nash, but he's a Canadian who was born in South Africa to British parents, so he doesn't really count.

But, now that Euro 2008 is over, the television in my local pub will have little to offer but a steady diet of baseball for the next few months. Well, that and the fruit machine in the corner.

Oooh, pretty flashing lights...

Please type or print in black ink

2008-04-23T09:01:00.001-07:00

... or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Form.

Almost exactly a year after I first landed in the USA, I have reached a momentous milestone: my first complete set of official documentation. It has been a long, slow, arduous and predictably tiresome slog through more bureaucratic inanity than I ever thought possible. But now, at last, I seem to have made my paperwork peace with pretty much every agency and organisation of any importance.

The paper trail started as soon as I stepped onto American soil, first with US customs and immigration, then straight on to Verizon to get myself a mobile phone. Since then I've had to open a total of five different bank accounts, gone through the surprisingly difficult process of getting a credit card (a simple process made awkward by my complete lack of US credit history, good or bad), queued up for a social security card (twice), registered with dentist, doctor and health insurance, got married (which sent my wife into a similar bureaucratic tailspin as she sought to change her name everywhere), applied to rent countless houses, then finally filled out a lease for one of them (which then had to be connected to all the utilities, as well as damn cable), started a business and registered it at City Hall (it turns out that you need a licence to work as a freelancer in San Francisco), filed my first U.S. tax return (which is fiendishly complicated here at the best of times and, surprisingly, not made any easier when you turn up in the country part way through the year), filled in more tax forms for new employers than I can shake a shitty stick at, dealt with various shipping companies to have my stuff sent here from the UK (and negotiated its passage through US customs), and even picked up loyalty cards for my local supermarket and hardware stores... And each of these individual tasks presented their own unique, unfamiliar, irritating challenges.

Of course, all of this doesn't even include immigration and the Green Card application process, which thanks to the ever-watchful Department of Homeland Security is its own enormous scary maze of crazy paperwork. Rather than detailing the whole process, I can only suggest you download form i-485 for yourself and check out the awesome list of questions that fill page three. Have I ever committed any crime of moral turpitude? Probably not: I had to look up a dictionary to find out what it was . Needless to say, the one piece of advice I'd give anyone, ANYONE, embarking on the same journey is this: Get A Fucking Lawyer. Really. Trying to do this alone would be like trying to traverse the Amazon without a map, blindfold. With one hand tied behind your back. Extremely difficult, basically.

But, after a year of checking boxes, printing answers legibly in ballpoint pen, and being fingerprinted more than can possibly be healthy, I saved one of the best bureaucracies until last. The local DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles, the US equivalent of Britain's DVLA) has a special place in the heart of almost all of the Americans I have spoken to about it. People here are forced to enjoy its unique charms every time they buy or sell a car, move state, or need to obtain or renew a driving licence (which, unlike in the UK, is surprisingly often).

And it isn't just drivers who end up there either, as the DMV is pretty much the only place you can get an official US identification card without going through the even more arduous, and expensive, process of obtaining a passport (and, considering the amount of time you are asked for proof of age or identity here, particularly in bars and shops, having a separate, credit-card sized ID is pretty much essential).

Now, I thought my local Social Security Office offered a colourful cross-section of US society, but that was before I had the pleasure of visiting the DMV. All of American life is here, from the top to the bottom, and all the way across too. Forms are available in a dizzying array of languages, as are all the signs pointing out the various queues you're going to have to wait in. And wait. And wait. And... zzzzzz.

The first part of the licence test here, as in the UK, is a written exam. I gave the supplied California Driver Handbook a cursory glance, then aced the mock test at the back of it, so I felt ready. Unfortunately, the real test is four times as long and much harder. One of the questions I was asked required me to know the exact percentage of alcohol I am legally allowed to have in my blood while driving. What is the point in that? Sorry, I can't have another beer, my BAC is already 0.074%...

Anyway, thanks to the fact the test was multiple-choice (yay, guesswork!), I managed to scrape through.

Which left the behind-the-wheel portion. Of course, having already passed the famously difficult UK driving test, I should have been feeling pretty confident about my chances. However, that was the best part of 20 years ago, and I was driving on the other side of the road back then. How many bad habits had I picked up in the interim?

Quite a lot, it turns out. And this was despite the fact that I didn't have to demonstrate the dreaded dark arts of parallel parking, three-point turns or even that most mystifying manoeuvre of all reversing round a corner. In fact, the most technical task arrived early in the test: reversing in a straight line in the DMV parking lot. Put car in reverse, look over shoulder, don't turn steering wheel... Easy!

But maybe not quite so easy. You are allowed to make a few mistakes while being instructed to turn aimlessly left and right through the streets near the DMV, but each error carries with it a different points penalty. Reach the 15-point mark, and you fail. And I managed to get 13.

So now I am the proud owner of my first-ever US driving licence, a handy credit-card sized piece of ID that looks good next to my Green Card (which, naturally enough, isn't actually green), Social Security card, credit card, bank cards, health insurance cards, Bell Markets Club card... I'm almost starting to feel like a local.

Don't fire!

2008-03-29T10:33:00.001-07:00

One of the companies that I freelance for announced some layoffs earlier this week: quite a few, apparently. So far, so normal. I've worked in publishing long enough to know that there are few businesses in the industry that don't spend large amounts of time and effort think up new reasons to get rid of their loyal employees.

What surprised me was the arrival of a new member of staff, who turned up at the same time the "workforce realignment" was announced. I only noticed him because of the odd way he stared at me just a little too intently when I arrived in the building the next morning. And the morning after that. He stares at everyone, quite a lot.

Loitering just behind the guy who normally mans the front desk, he looks like he's in his fifties, with lightly tinted glasses, neatly trimmed greying hair and a goatee beard. He fills his casual sports jacket with a casually held amount of muscle, and he has a small but noticeable bulge under his coat on his left hip. He looks a little like his last job may have been a freelance gig for a South African diamond mine.

I'm now desperate to find out if it is normal practice here in the United States for companies to hire an armed guard every time they make their staff walk Spanish. I'm also intrigued to know how long this new guy is going to be needed for. I mean, I'm guessing that the kind of person who reacts to unemployment violently can hold a grudge for quite a while - at least for the duration of California's 10-day waiting period.

For the time being, I'm making sure I have my hall pass on clear display at all times.

Small world

2008-03-15T17:38:00.001-07:00

I love technology, and the fact that it never seems to lose its ability to astonish me. Webcams, GPS, the internet: they're all great. However, this isn't all about shiny digital newness, as the combination of a whole bunch of two-tonne metal boxes and a 100-year-old canal have just demonstrated.

To explain: when I visited the UK in January this year, I arranged to have what remained of my worldly belongings transported to me here in California. This turned out to be a painful process, partly due to how complicated and expensive it was, but mainly because of how important those things are to me. It felt plain wrong to hand them over to someone else, and then entrust a whole chain of random strangers to ship them thousands of miles across land and ocean to my new home. But let I go I did. Sort of.

The first stage of their journey took several weeks. First I dropped off the boxes with Meadows International Removals in Edinburgh, whose premises (a back street lock-up) didn't exactly inspire confidence - nor did the owner's insistence that the things they sent turned up at their intended destination "most of the time". From there, I was told that my belongings would be taken by road first to London, and then to Southampton on England's south coast. Once there, my 17 little cardboard boxes would be packed into a small corner of a much larger metal shipping container, which would then be loaded onto a sea-going vessel headed for Los Angeles.

So, a few weeks later, I was duly sent a "bill of lading" from Southampton, presumably to reassure me that all was going well so far. Unfortunately it didn't inspire much confidence, particularly as both my surname and street address in San Francisco were mis-spelled, and the point of origin was listed as Edinburgh, Fife. However, it did tell me the name of the floaty boat that would be entrusted with not getting my things wet on their way to America: the dashing-sounding Antwerpen Express.

Now, being the person I am, I immediately Googled the ship's name to find out a little bit more about her (size, weight, age, propensity for losing containers, that sort of thing). This led me to discover sailwx.info, a website that tracks the locations of ships all over the world, including the Antwerpen Express (updates are only made every 6-12 hours, and all times are GMT.)

So, for the past few weeks I've been following the steady progress of my brave boat as it crossed the Atlantic, made its way down the east coast of the US, and then traversed the Caribbean. Then, the day before yesterday, I noticed that it was nearing the Panama Canal, and I began to wonder if there was a website that offered more details on ships as they passed through. Which is how I discovered this page of webcams covering the main locks on the canal, and started to watch them obsessively in the hope of catching sight of my now-beloved ship.

You see, I really am very attached to the stuff I have on that boat (or, at least, the stuff I hope is on that boat). Before I left the UK almost a year ago, I had to get rid of the vast majority of my possessions (some of it via these very pages), so the things that are left are like a distillation of who I am. To someone else, they may just be a 92kg pile of crappy old records, CDs and books, but they mean much, much more to me. And it's those things which are hopefully still on the high seas, not in them.

So, image the thrill I felt just after 3.30 this afternoon, when a Hapag Lloyd vessel hove into view on the Milaflores Lock camera. Now, I can't be entirely sure it was the Antwerpen Express, as the combination of low image resolution, a slightly dirty camera lens and the curve of the ship's bow all prevented me from getting a good look at the name. But, the only other Hapag Lloyd ship in the area is already on the other, Pacific side of the canal, so I'm pretty sure it was my baby.

And, suddenly, the world seems a little smaller, technology seems a little cooler, and the idea that my precious cargo might actually get to me safely seems a little less remote.

On the eve of a Super Tuesday

2008-02-04T22:16:00.000-08:00

It's around 5pm: I am walking down Market Street, the main thoroughfare that runs through the centre of downtown San Francisco, and I hear a crowd approaching. At first I think they are protestors, because of the shouting and placard waving. But I am wrong.

Numbering around 50, they carry homemade signs and placards bearing the name "Obama", and they are all chanting the same phrase, over and over: Yes We Can. The realisation they are shouting in praise rather than anger is strangely intoxicating in the fading light of this beautifully sunny evening.

Political energy is high in San Francisco tonight. Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, when supporters of America's two main parties in almost half of the country's states - including California - vote to choose their preferred candidates ahead of the presidential election proper later this year.

In this famously liberal city, the debates and ad campaigns are all focussing on the two remaining Democratic hopefuls: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

I can't vote, but I have been intrigued by the contest, especially because of the passionate debates it has sparked among my friends. Which candidate is best qualified to lead the country? And, perhaps more importantly, who has the best chance of beating the Republicans?

Hillary has the weight of experience and an impressive political pedigree. But Obama offers a heady mixture of youth, excitement and charisma. Sure, few people same able to say how the two differ in terms of policy, but to nitpick over that is to kind of miss the point.

Obama is new, he is fresh and he is exciting. Is that enough to get him into the White House? Should that be enough? Probably no more than the fact that Hillary is a woman, or a Clinton.

Perhaps unfortunately the desire for change here reminds me a little of the wave of optimism that swept Tony Blair to government in the UK in 1997. And that's the thing about change: you can never be sure exactly what you're going to get. But you can hope.

Out of print

2007-10-26T11:11:00.000-07:00

Of the many little things I miss about life in the UK, one of the most difficult to come to terms with has been newspapers. Not that I expect to find the Sunday Post on sale at my corner store (the fact I've found a pub willing to show Scottish football matches is miracle enough), but it would be nice, on occasion, to get my hands on a daily with a horizon broader than the one I can see with my own eyes.

Unfortunately, the only newspaper for sale in almost every small store near my house is the local San Francisco Chronicle. Why is it that in a country with around 1,500 different daily newspapers, I am so often offered a choice of just one?

The answer is that the US newspaper market is very localised. The best-selling USA Today is the only truly national title, and its daily circulation of 2.5 million is around 500,000 copies less than that of Britain's biggest tabloid, The Sun.

Indeed, just four US newspapers manage an average circulation of over a million (the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times being the others), which is just one more than the UK's total (the aforementioned Sun, the similarly downmarket Daily Mirror, and the beneath-contempt Daily Mail). This is despite the fact that Britain has a population about a fifth of the size of the States. However, if you lower the circulation threshold to the 200,000-copy mark, US titles outnumber those in the UK by 64 to 12, which is a ratio more in line with what you might expect. (My circulation figures came from here and the Audit Bureau of Circulations.)

But this still doesn't explain why most shops here in San Francisco sell just one or, occasionally, two titles (the Chronicle's most common companion on the shelves being, oddly, the New York Times, which hails from a city 2,500 miles away). The store pictured above, which offers a choice of three, is a treasured find indeed. But where are the Bay Area's San Jose Mercury News and Oakland Tribune? Or the LA Times, Washington Post or even USA Today?

All this has been a rude culture shock for me after luxuriating in London's daily deluge of newsprint for many years. Corner shops there typically stock more than 10 national titles, in addition to a few local rags (such as the London-wide Evening Standard) and some ethnically focused journals (the Voice or Jewish Chronicle). Also, they almost always throw in a few papers from Ireland, Scotland or non-English speaking countries, perhaps just to show off.

Thankfully, it turns out that there is a very good newsagent just a few blocks from my new house. It's tiny, but has the widest selection of newsprint I've seen since arriving in the US over six months ago. It even has copies of the UK Guardian for sale, albeit a day or two late, and for a rather higher price than I'm used to paying.

Sigh. If only the publishers could invent some electronic version of their newspapers I could read for free via the internet. Eh? Oh...

Me-Haul

2007-10-19T19:08:00.000-07:00

Like Hoover in the UK, U-Haul has become a byword for the service it offers. But, as a Brit, my only previous contact with this removal behemoth was in American films and TV shows, where characters who move house never seem to want any generic rental truck: it is always a U-Haul.

The reality, of course, is far less glamorous than such starry introductions led me to expect. Our recent house move was split over two separate days, and the two trucks we hired had over a third of a million miles on the clock between them - and it showed.

They were both Arizona-registered GMC trucks of a characteristically American build: longer, wider and several tons heavier than they needed to be. The exaggerated proportions make you feel like a little kid in comparison. This feeling is magnified when get into the cab and instantly sink deep into the enormous, pillow-soft bench seat. This also causes the far end of the bonnet (and pretty much anything within 50 feet of it) to disappear behind the towering dashboard.

The wheezing engine of the first truck I hired managed to polish off an impressive six gallons of petrol in the space of just 40 miles, all driven at a necessarily pedestrian pace. Meanwhile, the slushy suspension of both trucks caused them to tilt drunkenly into corners, quickly displacing any less-than-perfectly packed cargo in the back. (U-Haul tries to turn this last peculiarity into a selling point, by writing the words “gentle-ride” on the side of the vans in big letters.)

At least the brakes worked, a miracle considering our ridiculously steep street. Or at least they did once I discovered where they were. It turns out that what we call the “hand” brake in Britain is sometimes located on the far left of the foot well here, like an extra foot brake (which probably explains why it’s called the “emergency” brake in America). However, this is not the sort of thing you really want to have to work out while sitting in a fully loaded 3.5-ton truck on a one-in-four gradient.

When I dropped off the first truck in Oakland, I asked one of the workers when (or if) the trucks are ever retired. “Oh, they just go on forever,” she breezed, before insisting that important parts are normally replaced prior to them falling off or failing completely. And these beasts certainly had been worked on: neither of them had a body part that hadn’t been dented or scraped at some point. Major damage is patched and repaired, but minor injuries are left like scars.

Unfortunately, the staff at my second U-Haul location, this time in San Francisco, were rather less friendly. They refused to rent me a truck on account of my weird foreign driving licence, blithely ignoring the fact that I had successfully rented a truck from the same company a few days earlier.

Anyone labouring under the delusion that the States is some utopia of flawless customer service has obviously never suffered the contemptuous indifference of a U-Haul employee doing their very best to be as unhelpful as they possibly can. After our initial “U-Haul requires a US driving licence” / “you didn’t last week” exchanges proved fruitless, the woman serving me offered to consult a higher authority. Confident that right would be done, I agreed, not suspecting for a second that she would begin her telephone call upstairs with a line as brilliantly unhelpful as: “We can’t hire trucks to foreigners, can we?”

So I located a friend with a Californian licence, he hired the truck for me and our stuff was moved. But, just as I began to feel an entirely unexpected wave of fuzzy nostalgia for all the crappy Transit-type vans I hired to shift my belongings around London, I remembered that none of them were ever called upon to drive several thousand miles across the continental United States. Nor, it should be noted, would they be as useful in a game of chicken.

How many Comcast people does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

2007-09-02T19:23:00.000-07:00

The answer is quite a lot, and forgive me if you've heard the joke before. Change the company name and nearly everyone has a few tales to tell of unbelievable corporate fuckwittery. You know the story: all I wanted them to do was blah blah blah, but any number of phone calls and missed appointments and emails and incompetent employees and automated call centres and Kafkaesque/surreal/stupid situations later, all I've got is this half-way amusing anecdote and a stomach ulcer.

My most recent epic saga started on 13 August, when I called Comcast to set up an internet connection and TV service for the house my wife and I were moving into in San Francisco. Sure, they said, no problem. Of course, I should have realised then that they were trouble. The woman I spoke to admitted that the only way I could find out which channels I was going to get with my selected package would be when they connected me. But back then I found the idea of this mystery TV service amusing.

But unfortunately a problem arose when our first cable guy arrived: since the last time the house had been connected up, the service on our street had switched from overhead wires to underground. Someone else would have to come out to run a new cable from the street to our house, the bloke explained.

In the three weeks since that visit, despite numerous phone calls, many visits and yadda yadda yadda, skip to the end... we're still differently cabled. Someone was supposed to come today to do the final hook up but, lo and behold, nobody appeared. And when we called to find out what the problem was, what's that? Oh yes, of course: they had no record of any appointment.

What is frustrating about all this - and it is very frustrating - is that we have little or no real choice over which company we use. There is only one cable company, and Comcast is it. Even if we decided to opt for DSL for our internet, which is much more important for us than the telly, not only would we have to get a slower connection, we'd also have to pay for a phone line we don't need or want and, more than likely, have to go through more of this same crap with someone else to get connected.

Neither do we have any recourse - and there isn't even anyone to take our anger out on. Every technician who has turned up has been perfectly competent, it's just that the problems they've encountered weren't their's to fix. And every one of the many, many people we have talked to on the phone have been perfectly pleasant, but are all wrestling with an octopus of a system too complicated for anyone to understand let alone make work as soon as the slightest glitch comes along.

So, what to do? Well, for one, be thankful that there are still people out there who haven't worked out what an open wireless network is (I wish I could warn whomever it is I'm exploiting right now from the one corner of the living room where I can get good enough reception, but a network name like "netgear" doesn't give too many clues away). Two, realise that I can't do without the internet anymore, and it would really help if I could back up my connection in some way - like the way you have fire insurance or spare batteries for other essentials. And three, know that the revolution can't come soon enough.

I keep thinking of the renegade heating engineer played by Robert De Niro in the film Brazil. Maybe while I wait for my US work permit to come through, I could start doing some underground cable hook-ups. One thing's for sure - I couldn't be any worse at it than Comcast are.

Coincidental rendition

2007-07-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

How unfortunate: on the same day that new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited the States to pay lip service to the benefits of the US and UK working together, comes this excellent report in The Register on the perils of our secret services doing just that.

In short, it says that when British spooks tell their American counterparts about people doing vaguely suspicious things (such as being a bit Asian), said suspects have a tendency to disappear to the darkest corners of the earth, courtesy of the CIA's enforced holiday programme - even when this is specifically requested not to happen. So, MI6 ends up with the choice of either becoming complicit in illegal acts, or keeping shtum about people it suspects may be involved with terrorism.

Insert generic "special relationship" joke here: ___________ .

'What the fuck was that?'

2007-07-20T06:26:00.000-07:00

The answer to my question, asked just before five o'clock this morning, was a "light" earthquake of magnitude 4.2 on the Richter scale. Not a big one, and certainly not the big one, but it was the first I have ever felt and large enough to wake me with a violent jolt - like a brute kicking my bed so hard it shook the entire house.

Every earthquake feels different I'm told, and this one seemed more severe as it happened very close by. The epicentre was just a mile away from where I was trying to sleep in Oakland and, when the real focal point of the action (the hypocentre) is about four miles underground, that short distance on the surface doesn't mean much at all.

(The best comparison I can make is the difference between hearing the low rumble of thunder at a distance of a few miles, and the sound of lightning ripping the air apart just a couple of hundred feet away from you.)

This wasn't a good time to leap out of bed and realise that my dressing gown was still out of action due to an earlier biohazard incident (the dog's fault, not mine). Just a reminder then that I'm living here in unstable times, or at the very least on shaky ground, and that I really need to sort out a disaster kit.

Of course, what's truly terrifying is that the recent 6.8 earthquake in Japan was more than a hundred times stronger than the one I felt this morning. The comforting fact is even that one didn't cause a major disaster.

Losing the war on cliché

2007-07-02T17:16:00.000-07:00

Before I left Britain for the US, I was given a lot of stick* about how I would come back with a mid-Atlantic drawl (which is perhaps understandable given the strong Cockney inflection I developed during the decade I spent in London, innit).

The linguistic teasing of my friends may be less comprehensible to American ears. While Brits are fascinated with accent - especially as it pertains to and signifies class - and frown upon anyone who changes the way they speak as being somehow phony or pretentious, things are different here. The US wouldn't have developed any kind of unified sense of culture or identity without its multinational population adopting a de facto common language - so in a country where many people have changed their mother tongue to assimilate, or are descended from people who have done so, merely changing accent as one moves from state to state or between social classes must seem like small beer in comparison.

(Of course, this explains why so few people here seem overly concerned about how George "Dubya" Bush ended up with a Texan drawl more suited to a ranch hand than to a man born to a very wealthy family in New Haven, Connecticut and taught in exclusive New England educational establishments - first at the Phillips Academy finishing school in Massachusetts, then at the Ivy League universities Yale and Harvard. Mind you, questioning minds can be forgiven for being more exercised about how on earth he was allowed to become president in the first place.)

While I'm doing my best to preserve my Edinburgh brogue, adopting a certain amount of local vocabulary is unavoidable if I want to be understood: I'm much more likely to find somewhere to pee in a restaurant by asking a waitperson where the "restrooms" are, for example, rather than asking after the toilet, loo or bog. Similarly, in The Amateur Emigrant, Robert Louis Stevenson recounts his own experience of being misunderstood in a hotel on the banks of the Missouri River in 1879, noting that:

"... although two nations use the same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification."

To give a modern example of what he means, a gas station attendant (a breed now extinct in Britain but still found in some US states) will always ask some close variant of the question "shall I fill her up?" rather than something such as "how much petrol would you like?" We simplify our everyday interactions by sticking to these set phrases, but we have little reason to notice them until they change.

The problem for me is that certain words just sound ridiculous coming out of my mouth. I feel awkward talking about quarters, nickels and dimes (especially as I have trouble remembering which of the latter two is worth five or 10 cents), and downright silly referring to a car's hood or trunk instead of its bonnet or boot - particularly as it's hard to say either without using the verb pop in place of "open" (ie, "can you pop the trunk?"). Ditto sidewalk, sneakers and the dreaded pants (instead of pavement, trainers and trousers, respectively)

But, having thought about it, I've realised the words that cause me the most consternation are also those most likely to crop up in American films and TV shows. Thus for me to ask for a drink "straight up" or "on the rocks" (as opposed to one with or without ice) sounds sillier than asking the barman for "chips" rather than crisps - people in films, after all, rarely bother with bar snacks. Likewise, American vegetable names (zucchini, eggplant, cilantro, etc) don't seem to sound too daft coming out of my mouth - at least on the odd occasions I remember not to use the British versions courgette, aubergine or coriander - but the names of foods that are more likely to pop out of (or indeed into) the mouths of actors, such as candy, fries or soda (sweets, chips and juice), tend to stick in my throat.

Thankfully, for every idiom I falter over, I am discovering many more bons mots to delight me. I have adopted the local custom of referring to spirits such as whisky and vodka collectively as hard liquor (which carries with it more than a whiff of "hardened alcoholism", not to mention the implication that somewhere there is also soft liquor to be found), pluck or courage has been transformed into moxie (a word which even more wonderfully comes from the name of an actual soft drink, which seems to be like a Maine equivalent of Irn Bru) and buildings standing diagonally opposite at a crossroads are now catty corner from one another (which is one of those great phrases that, when you hear it for the first time, you wonder how you ever did without it for so long).

So I guess the way I speak ain't gonna stay exactly the way it yoosta...

* Translations: perhaps in an unconscious attempt to demonstrate how little my accent has changed, I seem to have used quite a few words and phrases peculiar to Britain in this post. For the benefit of American readers, here are explanations for some of the things I couldn't find in my copy of Webster's but, for further reading, I recommend Jeremy Smith's excellent British-American dictionary Bum Bags and Fanny Packs, which my gorgeous girlfriend helpfully bought for me.

"given a lot of stick" = been the subject of verbal abuse
"innit" = a Cockney contraction of "isn't it", commonly used at the end of every phrase or sentence, innit
"class" = one of the few things bigger in the UK than it is in the US
"small beer" = a person or thing of little importance
"juice" = a word used by the Scottish to denote any soft drink but which has no direct equivalent in England (the English claim, if pushed, to use the phrase "fizzy pop" but in reality never say anything of the kind)
"Irn Bru" = a soda made in Scotland, from girders.

Divine inspiration

2007-07-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

Whiling away a few idle moments online the other day, I came upon this little gem courtesy of Daniel Pemberton. I first met Daniel when we both worked for Esquire many moons ago, and he was also a regular at my local pub in Bermondsey - but he is better known to the outside world as a composer for TV and film.

Anyway, he recently worked on a documentary for Windfall Films called Monster Moves about those people in the States who take the concept of moving house more literally than most by shifting actual buildings rather than just their contents. And, in a moment of inspired genius, they decided to film the 12-mile journey of Trinity Lutheran Church in Iowa in the style of a song and dance number.

The end result (which you can see at the bottom of this page on Daniel's website) is a wonderful piece of film that somehow manages to make small-town America seem both more friendly and more frightening at the same time.

Footnote: You can see more pictures and get a little background on the church move from this local enthusiast's website, and also read about how it was filmed by Windfall. And, if you like Daniel's music, you might be interested to know that he has just released a CD called TVPOPMUSIK - all the details can be found on his MySpace page.

The air-attack warning sounds like...

2007-06-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

No matter how much you think you know about a place before you arrive, there are always going to be some things you only discover after being there for a while. Like, for example, the way that in Edinburgh some fool fires a 105mm howitzer in the centre of town every lunchtime. Or, as I've just discovered, San Francisco conducts a weekly air-raid siren test.

I'm not sure what was most scary about discovering the Tuesday Noon Siren: what I thought might be about to happen when I first heard it; what might be happening for real the next time I hear it; or the fact that I've only heard the damn thing once in the eight weeks I've been here.

Actually, thanks to the internet, you can rest assured of finding something even scarier online when researching whatever it was that scared you in the first place: in this case the fact that someone has seen fit to create the Siren Archive - an "online museum of outdoor warning devices from around the world". Enjoy.

A-political

2007-06-04T15:54:00.000-07:00

When I recently visited the town of Monterey, which lies just over 100 miles south of San Francisco, the town was filled with strange signs saying either "Yes on A" or "No on A". Disappointingly, this wasn't a surrealist campaign concerning that pushy, me-first letter of the alphabet (and, in a town whose name manages to include an "a" sound without need for the letter itself, such militant feelings would perhaps be understandable). Instead, it referred to Proposition A, a local political initiative being put before the voters there today (5 June 2007).

I was quite tickled by these cryptic posters which seemed like a send up of the meaningless slogans politicians love to trot out these days (the Labour and Conservative party website front pages, for example, currently feature the headlines "Join the winning team" and "The future for Britain" - it doesn't really matter which is which). But a bit of asking around and a visit to the Monterey County Elections website revealed that Proposition A - along with its excitingly named siblings B and C - concern the county's Orwellian-sounding General Plan, a set of policies that define the area's long-term planning and land-use policy.

More specifically, Prop A is a vote on whether or not to amend the county's 1982 plan. Prop B, meanwhile, seeks to repeal a new, 2006 plan - the existence of which one would think makes the 1982 version rather redundant, with or without amendment. And Prop C, seemingly ignorant of Prop B's plans, perversely wants to enact the 2006 version. Keeping up at the back? No wonder the posters didn't go into specifics.

It turns out that this confusing tangle is a common occurrence here, thanks to the fact that California - like many US states - lets its citizens create, change or repeal laws without waiting for their legislators to do it for them. The only restriction is that you need to submit a suitably large petition in support of your plan to get it on to ballot papers. At the local county level where I am in San Francisco city, you need just over 10,000 names, while a California state initiative requires 434,000 signatures (the latter may sound like a lot, but it is only about 1.3 per cent of the state's 34 million-strong population - also, bear in mind that a recent petition on the Downing Street website attacking the Government's road pricing plans attracted 1.8 million signatures despite the fact that it had no power to change anything at all).

The relative simplicity of this process means voters here can end up with a bewildering array of choices on election day. In the November 2004 general election, voters in San Francisco not only had to pick candidates for the White House, Senate, House of Representatives and a whole bunch of local offices, but also had to decide whether they supported or opposed no less than 32 separate state-wide and county-level initiatives.

To add to the confusion, many propositions and measures are - like those in Monterey - overlapping or contradictory. For example, one may seek to increase funding to schools by 2.5 per cent, the next may want to increase funding by an additional percentage point or two but make the whole thing performance-related, and a third may seek to increase funding on a sliding scale of 3.25 to 9.5 per cent, with the exact amount to be decided by how far a randomly picked group of parents can throw their children on a TV show created specifically for this purpose ("Do you really want little Jimmy to learn? Then let's see him fly!").

And then an electorate desperate to secure any improved funding for schools might vote in favour of them all - it seems the paradox of choice isn't restricted to supermarkets here.

Incidentally, anyone interested in finding out what happens to the A in Monterey (as well as the B and C, presumably), should be able to find the results via either the local Monterey Herald newspaper, or the official Monterey County website.

Footnote: The townspeople of Monterey also seem to have a peculiar Brit-fetish. The town centre is home to no less than five "British" pubs (the London Bridge, Britannia Arms, Mucky Duck, Crown & Anchor and Bulldog) and one strange little shop selling British goods.Despite doing extensive research (okay, so I looked up Wikipedia) I can't find any good reason for this: Monterey was the California state capital under first Spanish and then Mexican rule, and only became part of the wider United States after the war of independence. In fact, the only vaguely British connections I can find are that Robert Louis Stevenson stayed there for a couple of months in 1879 (hardly notable when John Steinbeck was a Monterey resident for many years) and Francis Drake sailed past the then-townless bay in 1579. Any pointers on the missing transatlantic link gratefully received.

Shop local

2007-05-18T13:43:00.000-07:00

Wandering home the other day, I decided to take a closer look at one of the small shops just round the corner from my new flat: High Bridge Arms Inc. Actually, I only intended to have a nosey peek in from the outside but, as I cupped my hand to the glass to try to see what lay behind the rather dusty camouflage netting in the window, the door buzzed to let me in. At that point it seemed rude to stay standing outside - and it's probably best to be as polite as you can be with your neighbourhood arms dealer.

Of course, not every street corner in SF has a gun shop - far from it. A quick search of the local Yellow Pages lists only one other gunsmith in the city, and slightly confusingly that one appears to also sell cosmetics and fragrances. (Now there's a great retail combination: "Come on down to Betty's Bullets'n'Beauty Supplies - everything you need to knock him dead or take him out".)

Inside High Bridge, glass cabinets display rows of square-edged handguns lying on top of the kind of plastic cases that - in my experience, at least - usually hold power tools. There are also all sorts of bullets, knives, handcuffs and T-shaped batons on offer, while a rack behind the counter holds a selection of shotguns with a uniformly urban rather than country gent aesthetic - all utilitarian plastic in place of the polished walnut I'm more used to seeing on the one type of firearm still legal in the UK. In fact, almost everything for sale here seems to be matt black.

It was a surprise to see guns being sold without reference - no matter how spurious - to sport, in the shape of either hunting animals or target shooting. But, as the "law enforcement supplies" sign outside implies, these guns aren't being sold for fun. The posters and catalogues for gun manufacturers such as SigArms and Glock remain pointedly neutral, while others for the likes of BlackHawk tactical nylons (a company which disappointingly doesn't supply tights to the special forces) use images of black-clad figures in ski masks waving their laser sights through smoke-filled rooms to full effect.

I suppose at least there is an honesty to this, but not one that is particularly comforting.

Seek and ye shall find

2007-05-05T18:11:00.000-07:00

One activity I've enjoyed a lot since arriving here in San Francisco is shopping. Suddenly, the experience of going to the corner shop for a pint of milk has been transformed thanks to all the unfamiliar brands, weird products and surprising... er, surprises I find there. I used to buy semi-skimmed milk in the UK, for example, but here I have to work out if I want skim, 1% fat, 2% fat or even "half & half" (which it turns out is actually half cream, half milk and therefore nothing like semi-skimmed at all).

And all this is before you hit the big chain stores. I went to a branch of the general-purpose chain Target the other day. Alongside the normal escalators in the middle of the shop it had extra ones designed to carry your shopping trolley up and down between floors for you. Escalators! For trolleys! You just can't buy entertainment like that.

Added to these mundane thrills, the Bay Area is home to a whole heap of genuinely quirky and downright weird shops. There's one just round the corner on 17th Street that sells only door knobs. And then there's the McSweeney's-related pirate supplies store over on Valencia Street. In fact, Valencia seems to be almost exclusively filled with intriguing shops touting quirky second-hand books, furniture, curios and clothes.

There are also some incredible bargains to be had (especially for me, thanks to the exchange rate). But here I have run into a problem. I recently bought a pack of riculously cheap blank CDs (100 TDK 80-minute CD-Rs at Circuit City for $10.99 - get 'em while they're hot). So what's the problem? Well, although I am now the proud owner of a towering pack of very budget discs, I need to find some sort of cases for them, and I just can't bring myself to pay more for a thin plastic sleeve than I did for the CD it's supposed to be protecting.

So yesterday I spent the day touring SF's electronics and stationery shops in search of these elusive cheap prophylactics for my unprotected shiny discs. And, as I toured shops such as CompUSA, Best Buy, and OfficeMax, I was struck by two things.

The first was that they all had lots of aisles filled with single products. I've noticed this phenomenon in the UK too, particularly at similar barn-like branches of chains such as Currys. My local one in London had an entire row stocked with just one type of scart cable. They were all exactly the same price, colour, size, price and brand, row upon row of identical blister-packs. What is the point in having thousands of the same product on offer? Why not offer a variety of brands, some cheaper, some gold-plated and expensive? Y'know, choice?

Yesterday, besides browsing for CD sleeves, it was USB extension leads I kept finding displayed like this (I know, I know - the glamour! the excitement! the geek!). Every store was selling exactly the same $20 Belkin cables, and each had hundreds in stock, but no alternatives. So I went home and bought an unbranded one from eBay for four dollars instead.

The second, and slightly less nerdy, thing that struck me was that my browsing was essentially pointless. I had been to all these shops before, and pretty much knew they didn't have what I wanted. So why did I go back? Because there was something weirdly comforting about the experience. Sure, they stock some different products, but in the end barn-like shops here are essentially the same as barn-like shops at home - and now these were shops I was revisiting, so they felt like they were mine somehow, they were part of my territory here in San Francisco. And even the strange products are becoming comforting and, well, familiar.

Fresh off the boat

2007-04-28T10:18:00.000-07:00

Things I have learnt during my first fortnight in America...

San Francisco isn't as warm as you think
You know when you're told about something over and over again, but it never quite sinks in until you experience it for myself? Well, welcome to the Bay Area's weather. Granted, it has been almost constantly sunny since I got here - beautiful, clear-blue-sky, smiley face sunny. But as soon as the sun disappears - and sometimes before - it can get pretty cold, with sea breezes giving the chill an extra bite. I kind of like it, perhaps because it reminds me of the weather in Edinburgh. In July. During a heatwave.

Not everything in American is bigger or better
Tissues, for example, are tiny. You'd think the idea of large "man-sized" Kleenex would go down a bomb here, but I'm yet to find any. (Note to self: Possible business opportunity? Aim for porn industry endorsement, work from there.) And, for a country so in thrall to the over-consumption of energy, the electrics here really could do with some work. Lights dim when the fridge turns on, plugs spark when you connect them, there are electric sockets in the bathroom - all of which is doubly disturbing when you notice the absence of an earth pin on most appliances.

Some surprising things are both bigger and better
Coming back into town from Oakland yesterday evening, we were stuck in a big traffic jam approaching the Bay Bridge. With the low sun shining in my eyes, and the hazy white light reflecting off the sea and the polished bodywork of all the enormous SUVs and cars, I realised it was probably the coolest traffic jam I'd ever seen. Kim just thought it was a bitch though.

Brick turns to dust in an earthquake
Apparently wood or reinforced concrete are much better in the event of shaky-ground moments, as traditional red bricks just crumble. There is a garage round the corner from where I'm staying that has a sign stuck to its brick outer wall saying that it may be unsafe in the event of an earthquake. I'm not sure who this sign helps, however, other than the weirdly prescient.

US cuisine isn't all McDonald's and Taco Bell
Well, actually I knew this already. But, having been impressed by lots of the terrific food last time I was in California (particularly the cheeses and beers), this time it's the turn of ice cream. The Bi-Rite Creamery round the corner is home to some killer vanilla (surely the yardstick by which to measure any ice cream maker), but it also offers such unique delights as roasted banana, chai spiced milk chocolate and salted caramel.

Service culture is great - but not all of the time
People who work in shops here are astonishingly helpful. They just can't help you enough. Sometimes they are helpful as if their lives depended on it. All of which is very handy indeed for the casually clueless shopper (me, for example). But not if I am hungover; turns out then that all those questions and all that chatter is just plain annoying. Same goes for mornings.

I'm famous
After years of patiently spelling out my name to people in England who thought my surname was "Laidlow", "Leadlaw", or - on one memorable occasion - "Ladylord", I have travelled halfway round the world to find that everyone here can spell my name no problem. Why? Because a company called Laidlaw is (by its own estimation) "the largest private contractor of student transportation services in North America", and therefore has its name written on the side of most of the yellow school buses here. Fame at last!

Ameoba Records is amazing
I think this warehouse-sized music store on Haight Street may soon become my favourite record shop in the world. And probably the only reason it isn't my favourite already is that I'm slightly scared to visit again too soon, lest I run out of money in my first month here.