Nathan Hall in the U.S. South July 2000

Since touching down in the states this is what has happened:

1) I went through the airport Immigration controls and contrary to the guns and dogs and internal search routine I was met by a bored looking girl chewing gum (even her jaw was bored). Her equally condor-eyed friend was x raying all bags but looked so knackered that when my bag went through I caught her with her eyes closed. What if I'd been an international terrorist? KaBoom and Goodbye! Very strange considering that Atlanta is one of the busiest airports in the USA. At another desk a spotty looking youth asked me -- in a robotic southern twang -- a series of pre-prepared questions, taking little notice of my answers and then stamped my pass document. Roboticly. After this stringent grilling I was in! In the US of A officially! Until October the 2nd if I wanted to be! I made my way to the arrivals lounge and Lori was there to meet me.

2) As we left the airport I was hit in the face with a colossal hot flannel -- or should I say the Georgia climate. Every building must be air conditioned to keep them bearable, and so it comes as a great shock when you first venture outside. It's a little like being glazed in a kiln. Remember that I find British summer too hot!

3) Lori then drove us to the hotel which was a decent place. Obviously i was very tired, but through my impending delerium bashed out my first e-mail, on Lori's posh I-mac laptop, like a man possessed, convinced that all memories would be lost on shutdown. Then we went out for some pizza to a really cool place where most people were sitting outside in the gorgeous evening. And my God there were some beautiful people there. Some girls were so superhumanly lovely that the only sensible response was to bang your forehead on the table repeatedly, before spontaneously combusting -- or preferably just exploding in a mushroom cloud over the Atlanta skyline. But I refrained. They all look so disgustingly tanned and prosperous. Mind you one couple did look like a drug dealing pimp and his partner -- she had enough gold on her to have precipitated a second klondike rush. And whoever said that a gold front tooth makes a woman more attractive? Yeech! Only if I'm failing on my mortgage payments, baby.

The beer was really good, contrary to generalisations beamed over to the UK. I got to spend my first dollars which was interesting. We met one of Lori's pals who's been a musician for years and he was a pretty interesting character -- he'd had his share of ups and downs in music and developed a sardonic sense of humour as a result. That reminds me of someone but for the life of me I can't put my finger on it. Never mind! . However, at about 11 pm -- or should I say 4 am your time I nearly passed clean out from tiredness. I'd basically had 6 hours sleep between Wednesday Morning 10am and Saturday morning 4am! At the hotel I crashed out as only one who has spanned continents and time zones can -- hey what do you mean by calling me a pompous, melodramatic ham? Gertcha! (In the immortal words of Chas and Dave)

4) Next morning we went to a coffee house and I remarked at how weird it was to see the USA un-edited -- in real time. The people aren't all running around screaming "Buy! buy! Sell! Sell!" or "Give me your money sucker or I'll blow your Lordship's ass back to Britain". People were just quietly going about their business. We got some cool snaps of me in front of OTT signs like the RED LOBSTER diner, which naturally has a 60 foot pole with a gigantic... one guess!...correct! red lobster perched on top of it. Also the county sheriff elections are coming up and there were signs all over town inscribed with the barely believable exhortation "VOTE FOR RAMBO"! We thought it must be a joke, but just in case, we took a photo of me in front of it. We looked up the blokes website address and guess what? He was for real! His name was actually Rambo. Unreal.

5) All day little things hit me like the traffic lights suspended on poles above the road, and of course all the road signs are different.

6) We went to a gallery in Atlanta and saw some pretty good exhibits -- I particularly liked these strange woodcut designs. Outside of the gallery was a giant globe of metal humanoid type figures linked at hands and feet, so I got a good shot of that. The gallery, as with a lot of Atlanta, was pretty snazzy -- a lot of money is floating around here.

7) Then we headed for downtown and the buildings there were pretty damned colossal, -- however, they were spaced apart enough so that they weren't oppressive. We then headed out toward the city limits and these were a little bit more disconcerting -- the wrong end of the tracks so to speak. lori said "Lock the doors and windows up!" I couldn't believe how long they stretched for -- it is an utterly huge city. Perhaps 20 miles of Car lots and Wooden shack type houses and Scrap Metal dealers and on and on and on and on (I'm not exaggerating), until we finally were out into the country.

8) The drive from Atlanta to Tallahasse was about 6 hours and these are some of the things that caught my eye/dawned on me:

i) the vastness of the country -- miles and miles stretching between towns

ii) the fact that people actually live in wooden houses with porches with rocking chairs on

iii) the snazzy looking police cars;

iv) the billboards bearing messages from God almighty himself e.g. "bring the children in the schools back to me" -- state schools can't officially impose christian services on pupils due to the Constitution

v) the fact that those huge Starsky and Hutch type cars are really a thing of the past -- there's lots of Japanese cars and pickup trucks and 4 wheel drives

vi) the fact that winding the car window down made the car get HOTTER instead of cooler -- freaky shit!

vii) a black guy with a flat bed truck in the middle of nowhere selling watermelons the size of Space Hoppers. We stopped to buy one and got a shot of me holding the green behemoth.

viii) how isolated some of the people are out here in their wooden frame houses -- beyond anything we can imagine in most of Britain;

ix) the total and utter lack of rain

x) The confederate flags and memorials!

xi) Farms full of Pecan Nut trees!

x) A stretch of bizarre trees that seemed to have hoisted their roots up out of the ground in a bid to re-locate to somewhere a bit livelier and then thought better of it after weighing up the pros and cons and just decided to sort of sit there. So strange.

xi) How cool looking their lorries are compared to ours

xii) The young girl in the diner we stopped at, wearing a sticker emblazoned with "God Loves you", and the way she called us "y'all", when this wasn't a movie.

xiii) Huge huge metal irrigation frames in the fields to cope with the drought

xiv) How quickly I'd go utterly insane living in the middle of nowhere in the baking heat

xv) Three youths walking along the road in the middle of nowhere with rifles in their hands

xvi) How over the top the radio stations were wherever we went -- even worse and more crass than our crappy stations -- and the religious channels

xv) The number and grandness of the churches

xvi) We arrived at tallahassee in the dark so i couldn't see much. However, when we pulled into Lori's housing compound it was like some grander form of Ogwen Bank -- thick trees everywhere and wooden two storey houses. And the noise was incredible -- the night was and right now is absolutely alive with insect noises -- whirring and chirping and every type of giant ant sci fi sound affect you care to imagine -- a bizarre but fascinating cacophany. The windows are closed at all times with screens on the outside, and the air conditioning unit takes care of the temperature. If i was to open the windows now, then I imagine that if I sat still for long enough my hair would be awash with crickets, Salamanders and...yeech! oh I don't want to go to there! There was a big bastard bug on the porch last night that freaked me out. I could sense it marking my card with it's antennae. In the back garden this morning I stretched in the heat and looked out into the massive thicket of trees with a pleasant smile on my face (you know, the type that's just begging to be wiped off). I then turned and looked up at the wall to see a Spider the size of a birthday cake and promptly died. Well, it wasn't that big, but big enough that you could actually see the patterns on its thick, oh so very thick legs. Lori reassured me that it was benign -- but bearing in mind that the very sight of it was enough to elict an on the spot bowel evacuation this was too little confort too late, quite frankly! Thanks for not biting me spawn of beeelzebub -- but despite the generous stay of execution I'll still forward the dry cleaning bill to you, you little bastard! On the brighter side there was a minute and very cute little Salamander climbing up the wall. I hope i get to hold one. Taloned Zebra Spiders = heap baaaad! Salmanders -- heap good!