Monday 24th March

We flew BA from LHR to SFO. My extreme height and my cantankerous spine obliged me to shell out for a premium economy seat, or whatever the BA corporate euphemism is for seats allocated to the lowest rung of the bourgeoisie. The extra outlay entitled us to a modicum of deference from staff, miniature toothbrushes, sleeping masks, hot and cold running movies and a seat pitch you could just about swing a mouse in. When the dullard in front of me fully reclined their seat ten minutes into the flight, I could retain feeling in my legs and had to stretch to read their choice of newspaper. I could also amuse myself by blowing gently onto their hair.

The booze also flowed freely, almost taking the fear out of scudding through the stratosphere at 500 knots in an aluminium tube packed with jetfuel, strangers and complementary copies of the Daily Mail (Note to Flaming Cross: Why would anyone want to read about the wretched and banal minutiae of life at home when they're supposed to be on holiday?)
In a mere eleven hours, we were transported in a soaring arc across the Atlantic Ocean, the Canadian tundra and the Pacific North-West. 40,000 feet feels high over ocean and prairie. When the flat patchwork quilt of Alberta suddenly stops at Calgary and the Rockies leap up to meet you, it feels less so.

Having experienced immigration officials at Chicago, I'd braced myself for more of the same; balls-out aggression with the possibility of water-boarding and invasive searches from paranoid sociopaths in uniform, none of whom could find the UK or Iraqistan on a map. Perhaps something of the Summer of Love remains in SF, however, as the border turnkeys were almost cheerful in their approach. Our papers were processed and our fingerprints scanned in a heartbeat, and nobody wanted to search my bags for RPG's or wish me, 'Gut luck, Tommy.' I was almost disappointed when noone gave me a flower to wear in my hair.

We were met in San Francisco by our Bay Area fixer, Rachel. An expat Brit, her accent is still somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, inching slowly westwards. The glottal stops are still firm, but each sentence ends with an upwards tweek as if a small current has just been applied to a delicate area.

We'd rented a SUV in order to truly savour native culture. We wanted a vehicle as obese, ostentatious and inefficient as possible in which to cover thousands of miles. Naturally, and true to our fixer's prediction, the airport Alamo man tried to mumble and humble us into an unnecessary and pricy upgrade to an SUV big enough to carry an infantry platoon into Basra. I don't quite remember the reasons, but it had something to do with the holiday period, stock rotation, snowdrops on petals, whiskers on kittens and the fact that a guy my height would look out of place in a vehicle weighing less than three tons and incapable of towing a bus.

TBC