A condign end?

Yes, I felt a huge gush of relief but I'm a retired hack. Was there something else that might be said?

I reflected on all the traditions and gentlemen's agreements Orange Man has ignored or broken (refusing to release his accounts, hurrying through the the supreme court appointment, using the White House for his campaigns, etc, etc).

Well there's another tradition coming up: OM being allowed to loll in the White House for another ten weeks. Why not send in a couple of cops with instructions to show him the back door and to hand over a pre-paid voucher for some hotel out on the Beltway?

With this explanation. Biden urgently needs the space to meet his number one priority: creating the beginnings of an active solution to Covid. The country cannot afford to wait ten weeks on this; another hundred-thousand citizens could die in the interim. By going quietly Trump would be making his own - admittedly reluctant - contribution to preventing this needless waste of life.

Nothing in his life, it was said, became him so much as his departure from it. Thanks Will.

View from the east (where the sun rises)

I confess, it’s been impossible to break away from the computer. I have gorged on men in suits telling me about Maricopa County, asked VR to define a run-off and risked colour-blindness (one eye blue, the other red). Here’s what I’ve learned.

It’s amusing that the UK is ahead of the USA in time. That, fully awake, I could conceive, draft, correct and reveal a post while the USA slumbered. And that the USA could never catch up however superior its non-stick frying pans. That there would always be a five-hour dawn gap between backward, tractor-dominated Hereford and vibrant, drug-charged New York.

But you wouldn’t know this from YouTube. The men in suits appear never to sleep, never to take off their make-up. And the chat-show hosts crack one-liners – seemingly – at 3 am, the time many people just give up the ghost and die.

Are you aware of the crime of sedition (Conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch.)? Traditionally practised by ragged-trousered, bottom-feeders with Das Kapital in their back pocket. In the USA things are different; one inciter wears a recently-changed white shirt with cuffs just so, and may not even yet shave. He just happens to be the son-in-law of the guy who is nominally in charge.

I once watched a televised US football match between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys. Green Bay is in Wisconsin (almost in Canada) and the temperature was -17 F. Several GB fans out of suicidal bravado were stripped to the waist. It comes as a surprise that such people also vote but they do. Perhaps with prosthetic fingers.

Yeah, seriousness is happening and things seem brighter. But you know all that. I’m still with you but differently.

FLASH ! People are letting off fireworks in sleepy, backward, isolated Hereford. A very expensive bottle of Chablis awaits. Thanks America, for doing the decent thing.

The other US: Say it ain't so, Joe

 Why the US must be saved from the abyss - a personal view

☼ The moon was but a chin of gold
A night or two ago,
And now she turns her perfect face
Upon the world below. – Emily Dickinson

☼ Basket catch at Forbes Field by Roberto Clemente

☼ Joyce DiDonato: mezzo in excelsis, teacher, wit

☼ Zinfandel, once a house red, now something grander.

☼ Andrew Cuomo, NY governor. For political honesty

☼ But how strange, the change
From major to minor. – Cole Porter

☼ Sublime sleaze of the Larry Sanders Show

☼ FDR - a traitor to his class. How bloody ironic.

☼ Wynton Marsalis (tpt): Telemann to bop.

☼ Fall.

☼ …Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had. – The Great Gatsby.

☼ Two martinis, a lobster, bottle of “California Chablis”, a plastic apron. Klein’s restaurant, Pittsburgh.

☼ Jewish Y, Pittsburgh: Classical music’s stars for peanuts.

☼ By Continental Trailways the length of Pennsylvania to a new job.

☼ Leonard Bernstein on Melody.

☼ Groundhog in our garden.

☼ Gore Vidal vs. William Buckley Jnr on TV

☼ Weight of the NY Times, Sunday edition.

☼ Mount Lebanon’s public library.

☼ How long it would take to spend Citizen Kane’s wealth

☼ Simone Biles defying gravity

☼ Never open a book with weather. First of Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules for Good Writing.

☼ Cardinal in our garden

☼ To create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. Faulkner

☼ Air conditioning.

☼ Star of The Wire – Baltimore!

☼  I was raised to be charming, not sincere. Stephen Sondheim

☼ Snapper soup before it was politically incorrect. With sherry.

☼ Rarity of filling stations among the redwoods

☼ Paradoxical disappointment of Niagara Falls

☼ Stopping grounders with my own glove.

☼ Willingness of youngish, corn-fed woman to kiss me. Socially, of course.

☼ Price of gas.

☼ How easy it was to pass the driving test.

☼ When Obama was elected: the glow.

☼ For fun at the diner: name the states, name the state capitals

☼ In the 1980s, discovering the north-west wines.

☼ There will be no whitewash at the White House. Little did he know (tee-hee). But – and it was a big but – he invited the Ellington band to play there and clearly enjoyed them.

☼ Undefined sadness as the radio antenna of the SS France, travelling east, seemed almost to scrape the underside of the Verrazano Narrows bridge.

☼  Exhuming all these memories – and more – via blogging. 

The other US: Even the quahogs were friendly

Before moving to the USA in 1965 I lived in a flat 5.7 miles from Trafalgar Square in the centre of London. You could fairly say I was Londoner. I knew none of my neighbours and they didn't know me. Had I died, my body would have mouldered for days, weeks possibly.

It sounds like deprivation but Londoners wouldn't have it any other way. You live in London you look after yourself. On the underground you read to discourage casual conversation. You hurry for the same reason. Deluded or not, you see yourself as part of an elite.

In Pennsylvania my neighbours cared. My friends at work cared even more. A holiday loomed. My best friend said his parents always spent this holiday with a family who had a beach cabin on Misquamicut Beach, Rhode Island (see pic); why didn't I join them? A round trip of several hundred miles.

I hunted for clams, called quahogging. A relaxing hunt where movement is almost imperceptible. One wriggles one's toes in soft wet sand until they detect something hard. It's a clam; drop it in the bucket. Do that again one-hundred-and-forty-nine times.

Back at the cabin, men opened the clams, dabbed ketchup and laid them out on trays the size of car bonnets (US: hoods). Elsewhere several stones of meat (US: a British stone is 14 lb) were being barbecued. One served oneself beer, comforted in the knowledge that it would never run out. Later, on the beach, we tossed a football (a smaller version of a rugby ball) and discussed the Celtics.

Look, I know hospitality occurs in the UK but it’s more formal. The cabin-owning family at Misquamicut had never seen me before. All they needed was my abbreviated first name (“Hi, Rod.”) and confirmation I was at my ease. Ahhh.

The other US: Listening for the heartbeat

A faithful commenter, robin andrea, asks about my favourites place in the US. The question is complex; often people matter more than scenery.

DORMONT A leafy Pittsburgh suburb (see pic). Beatlemania was fading but neighbourhood kids saw me as a Fab Four John-the-Baptist. I bought a glove and we played make-up baseball. When VR was giving birth to our second daughter a mother from an adjacent apartment taught me how to use the washing machine. The landlord gave me a bottle of bourbon at Christmas.

WATCH HILL, RHODE ISLAND Tranquil good taste. An overwhelming sense of privilege at the tiny under-populated harbour. The rich don’t cluster so I was left alone with my thoughts. Instead, the place spoke to me.

SAN FRANCISCO Everything was slightly better than the clichés said it would be. The waiter at the Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant contrived to suggest this wasn’t a tourist destination. The Golden Gate Bridge toll system was typical: you paid to get into SF, not to leave.

DRIVING THROUGH THE WEST VIRGINIA PANHANDLE Luckily I had not yet seen the movie, Deliverance. Otherwise I might have stayed away. The residents eyed us from their stoops – a sort of silent dialogue which I didn’t care to interpret, But beauty abounded.

BOSTON Seemingly detached from the rest of the USA, and feeling ineffably superior. In one of its swankier restaurants, a diner said my face reminded him of someone. I said I had been likened physically to William F. Buckley, the right-wing columnist. The diner said this comparison should never have been uttered.

MOIKE’S BAR, MOUNT OLIVER, PITTSBURGH A strange meritocracy: speak briefly or not at all. I felt I needed a chaperone and only went there with a friend. Cheap beer; hot sausage sandwich impossible to eat tidily.

Boo Orange Man! You know not your own land.

The other US: "Tears run down my little cheeks"*

It’s impossible not to write about the USA just now. Europeans must forgive me.

In 1965, poverty-stricken in London, a daughter just arrived, my career (That ironic word!) still fledgling if not egg-bound, I decided I’d like to live/work in the USA. VR supported me even though – for family reasons - it would be far more of a wrench for her. Getting there lasted a year. Eventually I convinced the US Embassy I would not live on the earnings of a prostitute. I flew out just after Christmas, stopping for an hour in Reykjavik. Which is in Iceland.

Many Brits envied me but for the wrong reasons. They thought I was going for the money. I wasn’t. Just as well since I lost money on the six-year stay.

Why did I go? Well, I was, and am, a wordsmith and my working vocabulary expanded enormously. Words I roll round my tongue even now. One job I applied for (Glad I didn’t get it.) was in Duluth. Just say it, it ain’t the Home Counties, Pavements became sidewalks. I watched the Pirates play the Cardinals. I yearned for the Grand Tetons even if I never got there.

I went for spoken wit. Novels suggested that ordinary working stiffs in the US spoke a terse language that appealed to me. Not all did, of course, but some were word perfect.

For central heating. I’d have died without it.

For friendliness (noticeably lacking in London). The idea sounded like tourist office fluff but it happened within one hour of my arrival.

For space. In my apartment (which wasn’t a flat) and all the way west to San Francisco, where I subsequently worked for a week.

Orange Man has poisoned these memories. I want them back.

More follows.

* Daughter PP (Professional Phlebotomist), aged 3.

One of my yesterdays

Why did I, aged 30, impoverished, married and father to a young daughter, plan exhaustively to leave the most absorbing city in the world - the city where I best fitted in - to find work in the USA? Does part of the answer lie in Bull Durham, a movie set against minor-league US baseball and released years after I returned from the USA?

Perhaps.

But am I that mad keen on sport? Journalism was more important, it's all I've ever wanted to do for a living. Books are more important, from classics to trash and back again. Language - French and German as well as English - is more important. The urge to write fiction. The more recent urge to sing.

As I switched on Bull Durham VR said shrewdly, "It stars Susan Sarandon." True, and she looks gorgeous. Then VR admitted Kevin Costner, the co-star, is also a tiny bit sexy.  But Bull Durham is more than its stars.

For me the story is well told and satisfying but probably impenetrable in the UK. Most important it's minor-league, close to my suburban life in Pennsylvania for six years. The characters are generic and I've known their likenesses in the companies that employed me, in the softball team I used to watch. That straining to be competitive which is absent in the UK. That wish to be self-reliant. That directness. That slightly frenzied attitude towards leisure activities.

Durham is a real town in North Carolina. The Bulls’ stadium is slightly run-down and thus believable. I recognised several truths. Once we were settled in our Pittsburgh apartment, the USA ceased to be a world theory and became the neighbours and the parking problems. Watching Bull Durham I was briefly back in that other home.

Cheap time travel

Mike, it was an honour

Mike Raftus, a great friend during my six years in the USA, has died.

I first met him on the magazine I joined in Pittsburgh. A New Englander through and through, he wasn't entirely comfortable in western Pennsylvania. "Pick you up from the Y?" he said, possibly as one alien to another. We listened to jazz at a swish joint in Squirrel Hill and I was mildly shocked that a glass of beer could cost $1.25. At Riggs Lounge on Northside the price was 25 cents. Not that I really minded, I was doing a lot of listening.

He was 6 ft 7 in. tall and his style of speech was laconic. A terse, well-written screenplay, except it was entirely natural. He hated showing surprise. Later, emerging from a bar on Sawmill Run Boulevard he stared across the road at a hideous gin palace with a Wild West frontage. "That looks like the kinda place you could spend a lotta money... on nothing." It was the pause that made it.

His passion was WW2 planes, something I knew about since my father belonged to the Royal Observer Corps in the war. Later I was to be an usher at Mike's wedding in upstate New York. Strictly Catholic; when the others moved towards the rail I was to stay back. The family's ecumenicism pleased me.

He taught me US etiquette. We'd been throwing the football about on Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island. I indicated my glove and baseball. Mike looked severe. "You don't do that on the beach."

There’s more but now he’s gone I won’t overload him with detail. Written snapshots are better. I felt honoured he’d picked me out and our friendship stuck. For me he opened up the USA as if it were a book.

OS goes overboard

How OS became Americanophile. Christmas in Philly, aged two-ish.
The wreckage in the foreground is what remains of a Cornish Rock Hen
 which OS has mangled, now, genteelly, she's washing her hands in the
water glass. Afterwards we took her into the garden and hosed her down

Younger daughter, Occasional Speeder, was born in the USA although doesn't remember much about it. As a birthday treat (one of the big ones) she's over in New York at the moment and posts the following:

Decision made to divorce parents today. If they hadn't selfishly taken me to the UK when I was four I'm pretty confident I would be living in Brooklyn, in THIS house (pic of brownstone), with THIS dog (some kind of puggish thing) with THIS view on my doorstep (you can guess). Bastards.

Just to set the minds of kind-hearted US citizens at rest this is an example of histrionic exaggeration which I've taught both daughters to practice and for which I'd score her an over-generous 6 out of 10. She's ignored opportunities for further snideities and I'll be reminding her of them when we drive to the Christmas market, in Düsseldorf, in a few weeks time.

In fact OS has solved a problem. Today as usual I rose at 06.25 am and Hereford was in total darkness. It happens at this time of year, I believe, although the vagaries of the natural world are of little interest to me. Yesterday Hereford caught the tail-end of Hurricane Ophelia with the sun turning a dusky red but you won't see me posting about either of those meteorological banalities. Humans have far more potential.

In my eighties I laugh less and today I fully intended to elaborate on this in a piece cut-and-pasted from The Anatomy of Melancholy (By R. Burton but not the famous one). OS's proceedings for divorce brought a wintry smile to my face and an even crueller intention to rain on her parade with a single word: TRUMP. Then I reminded myself I am a parent, I have both advantages and obligations.

I'll make do with "the rest is silence" even if in WS's case, he lied.

A new world; the New World

"Stay at the Y," I was told when I reported for work at my new employer in Pittsburgh, late December 1965. Y stood for Young Men's Christian Association.

The USA differed in everything. Britain, now 2500 miles away, had YMCAs but I had no idea what went on inside. Possibly hymn singing and the throwing of medicine balls. In Pittsburgh the Y (see pic) was an inexpensive hotel. But as I walked down the corridor to my surprisingly generous room, old men, clearly retired, languished in the doorways of their rooms. All wore plaid shirts and trousers that started just below their armpits; they watched me speculatively in my three-piece suit, an odd bird.

Later, after a walk, I returned and asked for my key. The receptionist was talking to a visitor about jitneys. The word was new to me and their conversation left me no wiser. What mattered, however, was the visitor's behaviour; regularly he spat decorously into a tin that had contained peanuts. When he left I asked the receptionist if the visitor was ill in some way. Lungs? He laughed and his explanation was impenetrably idiomatic; eventually I worked out the spitting was a sequel to chewing tobacco.

Then it was New Year's Day and the TV in the lounge showed American football, a sport I had never seen. Coverage of the game lasted four hours. Then, quickly, another game began, another four hours. Then another. Dimly I realised the first game had been on the Eastern Seaboard, the second in California, the third in Hawaii. Coverage had followed the availability of daylight.

In my room I opened my portable typewriter and started an airmail to VR, then still in Folkestone, UK, with her parents. I had lots to say.

How did I do it?

In old age excess reflection can sap you. You replay bygone scenes and note you were a different person. More energetic, more courageous.

I had this romantic view of the USA; Hellenophiles, usually better educated, are said to feel the same about Greece. I was influenced by movies which dwelt on domestic detail: huge front lawns (without fences), newness, meals that would have fed hundreds. More persuasive still was the Saturday Evening Post: coloured shots of barbecues, families sitting in cars with room to spare, mothers with tightly permed hair wearing skirts that jutted as if made of sheet steel. As I read more I learned that Americans drank dry martinis and Schlitz and were rich enough to book motel rooms in order to practice adultery. Britain, in contrast, was wearily and slowly rebuilding itself post-war.

Aged 28 I decided to work there. Many British journalists had done so and I'd read their accounts. The preparation took over a year. I discovered 41 magazines which fitted my modest work experience and typed 41 CVs, reasoning that not taking advantage of the photocopier would prove I was a hard worker. To each CV I attached a head-and-shoulders photo of myself wearing a bow-tie. Then the searching application for a work visa at the US embassy. Resisting the shocked reaction of my mother-in-law. Dispersing the contents of our London flat. Booking a cheap one-way ticket with Loftleidir of Iceland, the only airline still offering translantic flights in propellor-engine planes.

What astonishes me now is my confidence and the will-power needed to resolve a dozen major logistical problems. These days such qualities are in shorter supply, used up in the mid-sixties perhaps. I doubt I'd get on with that bumptious RR; I'd calculated, not in vain, bumptiousness would be expected of me in the US.

Brit writes like Brit

Recently bought Volvo 122S with daughter, now Professional Bleeder, then aged seven

Working in publishing in the USA, 1966 - 1972 I wrote regularly to my mother. In the previous extract (Pennsylvania: The Jobs Market) I mentioned intrigues about head hunting. This later reflection is I'm sorry to say, insufferably smug.

September 4, 1966. The economic news from England seems very depressing and makes me feel guilty of being accused of getting out while the going was good.

Here, of course, I am complimented for my prescience; (saying) I came here through curiosity frequently raises (incredulous) laughter... Americans are not to blame in taking this attitude, there are lots of English people who have come here purely for the money.

I hope I can say that for me the added salary is a pleasurable sideline though I am not refusing my chances to increase it. (Did I say say insufferable smugness? How about unbearable?)

L has predicted that after two or three years here (salary rises will make it) impossible to leave. He is wrong but one thing irks me. When I apply for a job in England I'll bet that employers, apprised of my US salary, will smile smugly and say, "Ah, well, money isn't everything.", as if money was all the US could offer, and as if there was an inevitability about living in England for anyone with integrity. (Uggh, you pompous bastard.)

Writing to the UK forced explanations:

Tomorrow is Labor Day which, paradoxically enough, is a holiday. We plan to Volvo off down the Ohio river towards the town of Marietta; the scenery is claimed to be pleasant. (That’s called damning with faint praise.)

And:

If I have ceased to mention the weather... it hasn’t changed at all. Last week the daily high was 85 deg. Rain brings little relief.

Pennsylvania: the job market

Working in publishing in the USA between 1966 and 1972 I wrote regularly to my mother.

August 17, 1966. M, editorial director with my then employer, leaves to launch his own magazine; wants me to join him:

□ M approaches me, saying that the secretary and editorial assistant have agreed to join him, and that he is prepared to pay me $8000 (my present salary is $6600). I say I'll think about it

I decide not to go.

That evening M rings up and I tell him. M says he thinks I am a better editor than L (the present editor he tried to poach) and that he will offer me $10,500. I hedge.

I ring L and he laughs: "Hold him off until tomorrow and it'll probably be up to $15,000."□

For reasons I now forget I turn M down. Had all this not happened the big news would have been I'd got myself a car:

□ ... a 1963 Volvo 122S... twin carburettors... radiator blind.... two speed wipers... white-wall tyres (!)...  Nobody at the office can understand why I chose the car although all admit it looks well.□

My mother wants to know what I’d like for my birthday:

□ I’d like something swankily English but can’t think what. Yes I know: a new pocket address book with leather back... The basic article is fairly cheap so it should be possible to have a totally luxurious one, one of the sort I could never afford if I were buying it for myself. Don’t hurry – it must ooze quality.□

The end of the letter is characteristic:

□ Time to stop now - it's the Pirates vs the NY Mets on TV and the Pirates are still heading the National League.□

Discover them or re-live them

Straight away I liked the honest strapline on Jonathan Sa'adah's How Many Roads? - Photographs of the Sixties and Early Seventies. Historians toy with broad divisions of time; the rest of us, conceivably passing through the oughties equivalent of the Renaissance (Middle Ages anyone?), must follow the calendar. Time - the sort we live through – can be a messy construct.

As it happens that strapline exactly covers the most mobile period of my own life. Escape in 1959 from a gloomy north-of-England adolescence, six years in London, six years in Pennsylvania, back to the Great Wen in 1972.

Which means I saw the sixties - or the part popularly identified as such - from a foreign country. From the lap of luxury too since I was, for the first time, centrally heated and more than a little innocent. The USA proved to be more exotic than Saturn so how was I to know that Watergate, Kent State, the public rendering of We Shall Overcome, and - above all - the furtive jowls of a certain Milhous weren't typical everyday phenomena. Some of it only fell into place when I got home.

And now, thanks to Mr S, that frequently revolutionary period is re-created  in vivid b&w. Milhous is there, trapped on a telly screen like a catfish, jowls expanding. Youth in large numbers, doubting that dying in south-east Asia might justify over-optimistic Washington rhetoric. Rural America at home round the Fosters and Maple pot-belly stove; restless America moving to the next vista, often in a German camper-van. A veritable slice of American pie.

If the past is where they do things differently, the sixties is the past in spades. Buy How Many Roads? from Beth's blog, the cassandra pages.

Full stop. Capital letter

There are certain, rare moments in life when what went before stops dead. When what follows is quite different. Marriage is one obvious junction and ours occurred in 1960. This was Wednesday, December 28 1965. I suspected life would change but it’s taken forty-nine years to say just how much.

In the New York Port Authority building (above) a barber, shaving me with a cut-throat razor, noticed a neck rash and suggested a massage. The rash was not unexpected. More than a day before, wearing a three-piece suit. I had travelled by train from Bradford to Glasgow. A bus had transported me to Prestwick airport on the western Clyde. A propellor plane took eleven hours to fly to Iceland, and seventeen hours to Kennedy. I wore the suit to avoid carrying it, I sweated, a rash formed.

In my pocket was a bus-ticket to Pittsburgh. The carrier was Continental Trailways not, as I had romantically hoped, Greyhound. Romance, curiosity, daring and a year's hard work had brought me to this point. I was about to start a six-year stay in the USA by my own choice.

Six years in a foreign country. Forget the common language, the USA is far more "foreign" than say France and Germany where I had lived for short periods. Its foreignness shaped my life.

When I returned I saw Britain differently. More international, less comfortable. Less charitable, better informed. Secular. More cramped. I was more communal and (inexplicably) more confident. Less prone to cliché. Better informed about industry. I supported US world views until leftwing friends (rare in Pennsylvania) compensated.

There's more but the romantic 1965 innocent with the sore neck had gone for good. A carpet rolled up. But how many other carpets since? We’ll see.

WALK 5. Pennsylvania

 I have disturbed you all too much. Here's a good walk. It revealed things, charmed me and suggested that a (then) recent act of madness was going to turn out well.

I was appropriately clad in a three-piece black/white speckle bought in Savile Row; elastic-sided ankle boots that caused a soignée woman at the Carnegie-Mellon Bank to laugh: "I've got slippers like those." I was leaving Northside YMCA to explore my new home town, Pittsburgh - in effect to explore the USA. I looked exotic and confirmed it every time I opened my mouth.

Northside was exotic itself. Huge wedding-cake houses, once the home of steel industry magnates, now in decay. My new employer occupied one of these mansions.

However it was the detail that said "foreign". Stumpy upright tubes along what I would have called pavements but which I would have to re-identify as sidewalks; I knew them to be fire-plugs, familiar from movies but quite, quite odd in reality. Untidy power lines, casually strung from posts. Road surfaces so pock-marked they appeared Third World.

I walked by a park of sorts, then took Seventh Street. So utilitarian, as if this huge country had lacked the energy to dream up proper names, Crossed the Allegheny river which proved the reverse. Looked right to the point where the Allegheny met the Monongahela (These names, these names - one reason for coming) and saw what I later learned was The Bridge to Nowhere – incomplete, brought to a temporary halt years ago, now a municipal joke.

Spent the rest of the morning among the books in Kaufmann's department store. Hundreds of titles I'd never heard of; sustenance for years.

An unadventurous morning but the adventure had been to take the Icelandic Airlines prop plane from Prestwick in the first place.

Did I get it right this time?

This is a very dangerous subject. I raised it as a comment years ago and, after a tense half-hour of existence, it was deleted. Yet I feel I need to repay a debt.

I'm talking about Jews. No doubt I've come into contact with Jews in the UK but very rarely as Jews, if you know what I mean. British Jews seem to prefer not to advertise their ethnoreligiosity. Fine by me and I sympathise. Antisemitism is unfortunately still rampant; were I a Jew I might well opt for silence.

Things were entirely different when we lived in the USA. There Jews - and we seemed to meet plenty - were as extrovert about their origins as the Irish. Our elder daughter befriended a Jewish girl at school and her parents invited us to a dinner party. Lobster was served and I was clearly failing to get out the good bits. Ed, the paterfamilias, took my plate and showed me how. "The Brits," he said, "aren't much good at anything these days." I said we were rather good at choosing our servants. Ed roared with laughter and said, "Brits one, Jews zero."

Jews seemed to crop up a lot in American publishing and I began to realise that Jewishness was a far more important element in American humour than I'd realised. Incisive yet self-deprecating, they'd got my number.

A few nights ago BBC4 put out a programme about the Jews' enormous influence on musicals - shows and movies. It was easy to see how the music linked up with Jewish culture. But many of the lyric writers were also Jews.

We'll have Manhattan,
The Bronx and Staten
Island too.
It's lovely strolling through
The zoo.

Lorenz Hart. As I say, a debt of gratitude.

Hey, you're a consumer now

When I started work in Pittsburgh on January 2 1966 my nearest were still in the UK. I was alone, living at the Y. Never YMCA, by the way, always "the Y". Later I was to attend recitals at "the Jewish Y".

Not really alone. The whole of suburban Pittsburgh, both genders, all levels of income, took me to its collective bosom. Guiding me not to parade my atheism, not to reveal I'd belonged to a leftie trade union, not to pronounce it schedule instead of skedule (They failed; some out of pure transatlantic good-heartedness adopted my pronunciation), not to sign cheques with an illegible signature.

Most of all they urged a more generous attitude towards spending. They were horrified when I bought second-hand paperbacks; thought I'd catch something. Alarmed when I looked at apartments in "unsuitable" areas. Appalled I'd gone for a party-line telephone. Laughed helplessly when I furnished a bedroom and a lounge with a package costing $300 (£187).

They couldn't understand why I was delaying getting a TV because I lacked the money. Some lurched away when I bought US wine at the state liquor store. Hard liquor they understood; to them wine = wino.

I'm in danger of sounding ungrateful. Those same people took me to ball-games, invited the family to barbecues, introduced us to take-away pizzas (both take-aways and pizzas were quite novel), offered to lend me money when I had to fly home for my mother's funeral, and agonised over the fact that our younger daughter - born over there - hadn't been christened.

But I'd moved from the world's most expensive city where poverty was chronic. Adjustments took time and some never happened. Our daughter flew back to the UK in 1972 still unchristened.

Disappointment? Not a chance

Most of us hate admitting we're disappointed. Often we've spent money, waited ages, had a hair-cut, bought new clothes. To go through all that and fall short; you feel so foolish.

Especially with places. Even Paris didn't match my youthful imagination. Venezuela was humdrum. Mauritius offered the dullest food. Better to come upon somewhere unexpected: Dompierre-le-Bouton, Montreal, Kuala Lumpur in the fifties. But the unexpected denies us anticipation and that's half the fun.

Eventually New Zealand filled the bill. But decades before one place had met and exceeded all the hype. That our hotel was on El Camino Real (The King's Highway) was a good start.

San Franciso 1969. We may, as the song says, have left our hearts there.

It helped that I arrived as a golden boy. I had taken over a project that had languished for years: the editing of a long, long technical manuscript: in bits and pieces and with hundreds of illustrations. My boss's expectations were low. Finally the MS was ready and he was ecstatic. "Check it out with the author. Take your wife. Hire a car." Guess where the author lived.

We had lots of spare time. There was no toll driving north on the Golden Gate Bridge, only driving south - into the city. How blessedly snobbist.

We ate abalone on Fisherman's Wharf; you'd be jailed for that now. The redwoods were as tall as they said they were, remote and still. You could get legless tasting wine for free at the hacienda-style vineyard shops. Cannery Row. The Cartmel peninsula. Zig-zag Lombard Street (pictured). All the tourist junk; nothing let us down. Great heartfelt songs afterwards.

But best of all: the relief at not having to make excuses. We'd got what we'd hoped for.

Our mythical US home

BIG NUMBERS Our first address in the USA was 3214 Annapolis Avenue. My mother asked: are there more than three thousand houses before yours? Annapolis Ave was a mere 300 yards long, so no. A colleague explained: 3214 was a guesstimate location which presumed an imaginary 1 Annapolis Avenue at the centre of Pittsburgh.

This never sounded like an American system. French, yes. Perhaps even German. But too niggling for Americans. Also, during our six years' stay, I never found a use for this ghostly information.

Such addresses appear in Blogger's new word verification system, sometimes running to five figures (typical, I'm told, of LA).

Movies we saw at Borderlines Festival
Barbara. Absorbing, austere story involving two doctors in 1980 East Germany faced with emotional/professional dilemma.

Quartet. Dustin Hoffman's unhappy directorial debut. Broken-back plotting based on unbelievably lush home for retired musicians in UK. Waste of Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins.

The Conformist. Admirable but not lovable account of ambiguous Fascist assassin in Italy, pre- and post-WWII. Jean-Louis Trintignant superb only exceeded by Bertolucci's  inventive and visually beautiful direction. Made in 1970; some say "greatest film ever made". New to me.

Starbuck. Sperm donor hero in amusing Canadian funsie. Flirts dangerously with sentimentality but saved by French dialogue (with sub-titles).

PROGRESS Memorised 13 lines (out of 37) of Lady Percy's speech. Bath a great help.