Sharks pass close to your face out of nowhere, teeth poking out of their jaws. In one tank there is a ray laid out like a rug, and so many turtles and fish they are as crowded as the furniture in the Victorian drawing room. Sitting deadly still are two caimans, so well camouflaged among the tree branches and the water, one feels a chill upon noticing them. In the Amazon section, a macaw ruffles itself right next to the visitors, a scarlet ibis sits proudly in the trees, and almost out of view hangs a sloth.

Baltimore has an art-deco insurance building, trucks so big one expects them to rise up and begin to fight each other, and steam flowing out of manholes into the street. In the harbor are warships, a submarine, a lighthouse boat. A giant former power-plant is now a seafood restaurant and a Hard Rock Cafe. For lunch, you can visit the Italian quarter or find southern classics or go to the indoor market. On a three-mile loop of the downtown area, I saw so many abandoned buildings, drunks falling off the curb, caught the smell of marijuana on the breeze, heard a man hold down the horn for fully thirty seconds at the intersection, and was unable to get inside any churches. One woman walked along muttering to herself, a bin-liner slung over her back. Under the large glass corporate building, on the corner of Baltimore Street, sits a preserved historic building. It is empty now, used only to advertise apartments a few blocks away. Close by is a large building in Greek revival style, locked, with nothing to name it, and signs saying trespassers will be prosecuted.

There is a bookshop full of paperbacks, poetry, European novels, where a classical station plays Mozart, and I feel as if I stepped into England for a moment. On the U.S.S. Constellation, two men climbed the rigging without a harness. It was a Monday and many things were closed, such as the museum with the world’s largest Matisse collection and Edgar Allan Poe’s house. The roads are deleterious everywhere, with pie-dish potholes: in the worst parts, one genuinely worries for damage to the car. You have to go slow enough to swerve the chasms without provoking some hothead to honk you.

We drove home the long way. Police speed past as we keep to the limit. The trees are lush and thick, woods standing deep beside the highway. Neat, elegant, Protestant churches, with clean white spires, stand proud against the changes of time. Strip malls of fast-food go by. In a market dedicated to fresh, healthy food, irritating rock music plays. Nice houses spread back as thickly as the woods; in the wealthy areas trees and shrubs are in profusion, blossom everywhere. This is all very far away from the west side of Baltimore, which is so derelict that on every street at least one home was burned out and boarded up. One building had been abandoned for so long a tree was growing out of the front. That too was in blossom.

As we glide along the smoother roads closer to D.C., the sun is going down, the river shines, and the rising towers of the church and business glow together. We sing along to Nina Simone. There are moments of great beauty on the George Washington Highway. Soon enough, we come out in front of the Pentagon. The diggers are busy extending Arlington cemetery, planes are rising, a new moon waxes in the darkening sky.

There are many wide roads through the graves, which line up in undulating rows, seen at some angles they fan out in triangular patterns, making new sets of neat lines. At many points, you cannot see beyond the waves of headstones.

We walked the hill up Arlington cemetery towards the Robert E. Lee memorial, known as Arlington House, past the eternal flame and the graves of JFK and Jackie and their two-day son and still-born daughter, past the standing pool and the graves of RFK and his wife, past the grave of Robert McNamara, and as we rounded the hill, Congress always coming into view behind the trees, and the Washington monument, and at some angles the Pentagon submerged in the leaves, the bells began to chime mechanically, and a yew tree appeared, standing steady in the strong sun and the chill wind, growing at the end of its youth.

The Lee house looks directly down to Lincoln’s memorial, huge and neoclassical, and there is a row of little gravestones—the first of the Union dead buried at Arlington—right beside. Inside there are the usual things: rich furniture, a carved mantlepiece, glassware, a piano. All the thousand acres here were a slave plantation. That is the land that now holds the graves. This house was slave built. The slave quarters are uncomfortably close. The women of the family broke the law and taught their slaves to read. In the 1850s, a will freed many of them. In this house lived the descendants of George Washington’s step-son. Washington’s step-grandson, George Washington Park Custis, inherited Mount Vernon, and built Arlington House. Robert E. Lee married Custis’s daughter there in 1831. And so the American idea of dynasty began.

We took the winding path down and back up to the tomb of the unknown soldier and saw the changing of the guard. The ceremony is remarkably intricate, almost like something devised by bees, which you watch in awe without knowing what it means. One soldier is marching in front of the tomb. A superior officer appears, followed by another soldier. The officer announces the ceremony will begin. We must be silent. We must stand. Next to me, a man rises from his mobility scooter.

The officer marches to the first soldier. The second soldier leaves, now unseen. The officer marches back. The second soldier reappears. All of this marching is done slowly, with almost dance-like movements—the heel is placed firmly and then a slow step is made, before the next heel is placed. Every pause occasions a turn-flick-snap motion, one heel clicking against the other. The turn-flick-snap is slowly done, with a sense of state, elaborate but restrained. Every turn requires two of these clicks: one at the pause, one at the turn. Various meetings, bows, presenting of arms, clicking of heels are made. In the five minutes of ceremony, some hundreds of individual motions and gestures must have been made. Everything has a very precise manner. When the officer inspects the soldier, he moves his head in the small, distinct gestures one associates with imitations of a robot. Everyone watches in silence. Half the people watch through their phone screens as they film it all.

The cemetery’s classical architecture is completely out of place. Nothing in American landscape justifies Grecian and Roman columns. The most American places are the plain headstones, the eternal flame burning in a metal cylinder, the fact that there is always a tour tram going past, or one of those slow-motion, open-sided tourist buses. All this is utterly American, not the classical imitation.

But read the words of Robert Kennedy carved above the pool, from a speech he delivered the night Martin Luther King was assassinated.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

Down in the tidal basin below the cemetery is the memorial for Martin Luther King, where these words are carved: “darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.” Kennedy’s words are close to the eternal flame at JFK’s grave. Americans often deny the depth and extent of their history. But standing in Arlington cemetery, one cannot find this history anything but remarkable. So much is held in so little ground. The out-of-place classical architecture makes sense in the heart of a modern empire, where Aeschylus’s words live with King’s, where classical ideals still live in new forms, and where the ghosts of injustice are as present as the eternal flame.

In the tidal basin the blossom is over now, the trees are in full leaf, and there are always airplanes taking off and coming in to land.

And yet… we had splendid Bavarian food, saw very good art, enjoyed the antique shop and visited a huge second hand bookstore where I got a stack of books, 5 for $5, including the poems of Spenser (I am newly enthusiastic to re-read him, a vain attempt to chase one of the thrills of youth perhaps). I asked the guy at the till how they keep the place going and he had no idea. Pokémon cards were 75 cents each. Don’t they know there’s a global shortage!? I don’t remember another book shop that had trolleys. It served me well. The antique shop had some mass market paperbacks—those were the days when John Dickson Carr and Emile Zola got the same glorious treatment—which were too much for me. But I was intrigued to find that whereas the standard price was $5, an old penguin crime cover with a marvellous skull was $20, just for the skull. They also had buckets of axes and many mounted antelopes and deer. In England, such a town would be fairly uniform.

We went to see Antietam, which I cannot write about because it is simply too awful. There is something bizarre about taking children to a battlefield. Naturally, one wishes them to know history—to know how to think historically, to try to understand the unimaginable breadth and depth of human life, to try to see how incomprehensible it can all be—but to see a child walking where young men once walked, many of them never having served before, not knowing what was coming towards them a few paces away… one cannot think about it. Where through the carnage I moved with a callous composure.

In the museum, we saw Confederate money which depicted slaves working in the fields. I look forward to hearing from those in the comments who previously insisted that the Civil War was not about slavery. And yes, in the cafe we stopped at five minutes away, where the sheriff was holding a meet-and-greet with free coffee and donuts, Confederate flags were on sale, small ones, big ones, some fit for a flagpole. They were all charming and friendly.

The Americans do a marvellous job with their battlefields. The videos, exhibits, self-guided driving tours, memorials, information plaques are all excellent. Civil war battlefields in England are neglected. We tried to find one once and ended up parked in a bare field. When John Adams visited England, he went exploring for battlefields and was appalled to find a local farmer had no idea a battle had taken place there. And the Americans think themselves unhistorical compared to the Brits!

Finally, I have visited a Walmart. Arlington is too uptight for such things. What a wonder! An auto shop, homeware store, supermarket, clothing store, electronics, games and books, pet supplies… and more, all in one: it is a mall in itself, vaster than any shop in England, perhaps by an order of magnitude. I saw an obese boy, maybe ten years old, holding a bag of sweets and saying delightedly “taffy! taffy!” There were huge sacks of cereal—2lb, 7oz—full of frosted flakes and the like. That is presumably the scale families with many children require. The fresh section was quite small, but perhaps it is hard to make that work with the same economics. We had to drive nearly half a mile after the turning to get down to the Walmart. It was, to me, no less interesting than the rest of the visit. What a lot of work and ingenuity such accomplishments require, and how easily taken for granted.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that happened was on the drive home. We took the slow route and saw many wooded suburbs of Maryland. (All those double story porches with columns: what is this style of architecture, suburban Pantheon?) Some of the houses are very bright pink or yellow, one was a remarkable shade of purple. Hagerstown hosts many churches, mostly Lutheran, and with lots of those tall, elegant spires that look like slim old-fashioned ladies, who have lived in the town since their girlhood and do not care for the way things have gone. There were more churches on the drive home, but less elegant. After we saw the sun setting slowly across a great landscape, we turned a corner and there were three vultures picking and pulling at an animal corpse. It was awesome.

The furniture in the diners is either as old as the place or bought to look so. The food choices are all the sort of classics you go looking for. Fried pickles, peanut soup, chocolate meringue pie, southern fried chicken. The signs are often faded. Many houses and restaurants are abandoned, dark, falling down. I saw a Maxwell House coffee pot that could have been older than me, still perfectly serviceable, and with its own charm. That was then. This is then too.

The things that recur most often are churches and gas stations. They mostly come in pairs, and more frequently than I expected, even once I got used to their ubiquity. All those large pick-up trucks you see in places like Arlington and Austin look much at home out here, but I only a few times saw them actually hauling anything. The men driving them certainly look more likely to be making real working use of the loading space than the people in Austin who looked like digital marketing managers. But still, they must all have been on the return journey.

Inevitably, I realised in retrospect, we saw Confederate flags. Not in museums, or at re-enactments, but merely in people’s front yards. You can write whole books about the way this flag has been reclaimed, but it was the flag of a slave state and it is both chilling and absurd to see it flying today. I was reminded of the descriptions in Douglass and Jacobs of whippings, beatings, burnings. I thought of the slave who was hanged in The Bondwoman’s Narrative. I thought of the excellent Civil War museums we visited, the cannons neatly arranged on the crest of the hill, the proud memorials to the great bloody tragedy.

I thought too of the callow young communists who used to turn up to events at university with the hammer and sickle on their t-shirt. No matter to them that tens of millions were murdered, starved, persecuted, or merely lived in grinding misery. The idea of communism was too important. Human ideals are so distracting from human misery, human narrative so supple and sneaky a beast. It cannot be sensible to make the Confederate flag illegal today, but I am one who thinks the victorious Union should have crushed it into the dust of history. There were four million slaves in the South when war broke out. Six hundred thousand men died, a multiple of most other US military death counts. More men than perished fighting the Nazis.

Some of the Confederate flags were in good condition, flapping clear against the long stretches of snow. Some have been falling apart for years. We saw them in a little bucket, in flea markets, ready for you to take home. I completely understand why the South does this, but I cannot fathom what grievance—what sense of cultural identity—they can possibly wish to persist with at the cost of flying the flag designed for a military created with the express purpose of keeping four million people—and rising, rising, rapidly rising—in permanent bondage, raped, kept illiterate, branded. They need a new flag. It’s complicated. But also, it isn’t.

Shenandoah is also a place of great natural beauty. One only need to drive from one town to the next to pass over the Blue Ridge Mountains and feel amazed. We drove to the top of one, through the places where people stay in cabins in the summer. It was vast and splendid and incredibly American—everything I have seen in the movies, right there, in full brilliant reality. We went into the Luray Caverns and were simply amazed by the immensity. The darkness stretched out before us while the lights caught the millions-years-old stalactites and stalagmites, orange and white. Nature is fractal. These structures resembled trees and mountains and rows of monstrous teeth. One of them is called the Ghost of Pluto. Another cave resembles a cathedral. The reflecting lake is something science fiction can never match. Despite being a small place, it has a great vastness of its own.1 Parts of it looked like the landscapes in John Ford movies. It takes more than a century to produce one cubic inch of growth. Even the smallest spike has a timelessness I could not quite imagine. What has poetry against this? What need of human imagination in such a place? That was then and it was now and we were merely passing through.

On the third day, they came to clear away the storm. Streets were cut out, spades and shovels hacked and ground. Someone pushed along a little machine that sucked snow up from the ground and hoofed it out of a pipe, like a vacuum. Cars were brushed and cleared, lest the snow should turn to ice clamps. Squirrels tentatively returned to the trees. The sky was clear and tall and blue. This was mild compared to some places where trees came down under the weight of ice. A million Americans had no power.

After a week, the streets are still piled with hunks and blocks of ice. Slippery sheets stretch out across the sidewalk. By the Arlington Central Library, a Lamborghini is still trapped. On the surrounding streets, so much of the snow is yellow. The dogs of north Arlington still go out to pee, and as it is always below zero (sometimes as low as -13, feels like -18, centigrade) their owners take the chance to put them in doggy outfits. There were half a dozen children sledging near our house, but far more dogs were being walked in cute jumpers.

We drove to Shenandoah where the river is thick with ice and rows of mailboxes poke up from the smooth ice drifts like hellebores and daffodils bowing their frozen heads. One mailbox was branded John Deere, a spring green among the unmoving black and white. Every field was a field of snow, glittering in the sun like a Grandma Moses painting. The icicles are sometimes two feet long and sharp enough to kill. They clutch like witches’ fingers to the eaves of roofs.

In a secondhand bookstore that is holding out against the inevitable I bought two westerns. In an Italian restaurant everyone was obese, including the children. In a 7-Eleven a large man in a camo onesie stood by the door looking glassy eyed. I gave him a nod on the way out and he was friendly, but mildly surprised. There is a red flush to the men’s faces here that I have not seen in other places, something local to the complexion. They go out in their fleeces and camo outfits, happy to go about their business without the need of so many gloves and scarves. The 7-Eleven sold a greater variety of hotdogs than I have seen before.

To be American, one must be prepared to put up with the weather. The English climate is mild. The American climate is intense. It is not so bad to drive through 18°F when you have heated car seats and a warm-air fan. Pumping petrol in the chill is no difficulty when you think of the early pilgrims, the wagons, the shawls. While John Adams sat by the fire in his greatcoat the water upstairs froze solid in the basin. Laura and Mary woke up to find frost on their bedclothes in Little House on the Prairie. Imagine the character it took to be among those who crossed Lake Michigan, horses and wagons, knowing the terrible depths to which others had gone. Imagine the sort of person you must have been to want to go out into the sleet and the rain and the wind, to see your crops destroyed, to see your whole town immersed in ice.

Whether the weather shapes the American character, or selected Americans who could persist with its extremities—the heat, the mosquitoes, the hurricanes, the floods, the fires, the earthquakes: this is a land of the unbearable and unimaginable, constantly being overcome. There is a national character of endurance, arising from the fact that people opted to live in these conditions. They came to lands of extremity and they became people of substance.

Today, much of Arlington remains iced over. The road was ploughed near my office and I had to negotiate the mounds of ice that had been pushed up onto the sidewalk. I went a mile, or less, without proper pavement most of the way, slipping, finding my footing, listening for the reassuring crunch, not the risky crack. What a minor, pettifogging pilgrim I am compared to all those who came before, whose horses plunged into rivers, whose fathers were out hacking at nature, while the mothers raised the children as ice grew inside the window pane. And I grumble that the road has not been gritted properly!

The government shutdown only ended two days ago, so there was no queue. There was, indeed, a great absence of people. We were through security in seconds. I chanced to overhear that a Magna Carta was on display, from 1297. I have not seen one since I was a boy, on a trip to Lincoln Castle, where they have the original 1215 document. I stood in happy awe, now as then.

How seriously the Americans take their history. Magna Carta was displayed at the start of an exhibition about slavery, democracy, and suffrage. They make a direct link between the Barons holding bad King John to account in the thirteenth century and the later marches for freedom in the New World. From a marshy field in medieval England to the twentieth-century streets of Selma.

Call that link a myth if you like, plenty have, or whittle it down to size with pedantic accounts of Magna Carta as a bill of barons’ rights, nothing more. But here is the beginning of the idea that changed the world. No king can breach the rule of written words.1 And America knows it, knows it in the blood, knows it in the imagination.

Upstairs in the rotunda, we saw just how seriously the Americans take their history. I am constantly told by regretful Yanks that their country doesn’t have real history like England. Pish! In the rotunda of the National Archives, behind the sort of huge metal gates once reserved for the holy ends of great cathedrals, we stood in line to see the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

To my children’s relief, the queues were short, so I only had time to recite one or two phrases. What rolling periods, what balanced syntax, what rousing swells of phrase! O, you can hear that the young Jefferson had been an obsessive reader, a man immersed in Milton, Shakespeare, Addison, Pope. This is how you make the world take note!

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Read it aloud. It stirs the blood, every time. Alas, while Jefferson’s words will live for as long as we are sensible enough to remember them, the writing on the document itself is faded. Cruel irony for such strong lines as “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and “let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” Still, the paper holds a mystical charm. We saw John Adams’s signature on the Bill of Rights, as clear as clear could could be. I felt, as I had done in the National Gallery, in the presence of something sublime.

It exemplifies the American spirit that such dramatic respect is paid to these documents, in such semi-religious architecture, and that once you have paid reverence you visit the gift shop, where the Declaration of Independence is printed on a t-shirt and bobblehead dolls of President Nixon are for sale. One does not need to be high-brow to appreciate the miracles of political history.2

One little word in the Declaration captures that spirit more than any other. Candid. “Let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” Candid didn’t mean then what it means now. Johnson defined it as: “Free from malice; not desirous to find faults; fair; open; ingenuous.” Jefferson was asking for a fair hearing: he wanted to be received in the democratic (or, more properly, republican) spirit in which he pleaded.

“Ingenuous” is the most intriguing part of Johnson’s definition of candid. It’s a word we forgot along the way, only talking now of the disingenuous. Johnson tells me it means “Open; fair; candid; generous; noble.” but also “Freeborn; not of servile extraction.”

And that captures the evil dilemma at the heart of the founding, which is discussed in the room where I saw the Magna Carta.

By talking to a candid world, Jefferson was talking to a free world—he was not talking to the enslaved men, women, and children in his own country, on his own estate, in his own bloodline, who would never know the great freedom for which he called. He wrote in poetry, but his Declaration sought to govern in partial prose, to appropriate an old cliché. Jefferson had no intention to invoke this meaning: it is an echo of history, a dictionary coincidence that reminds us of a deeper truth.

The founding documents lie in their rotunda—robed as destinies, in Larkin’s phrase—more and more argued over, more and more disputed. Many of their mighty lines are more and more ignored. But Jefferson is American gospel, as Gore Vidal once said. His words still move the world, just as the Magna Carta still does. The idea lives.

It’s sometimes hard to see it this way, but dispute is what matters. Men more often require to be reminded than informed, said Johnson elsewhere. America is forever reminding itself of the great failures to live up to the dream that Jefferson set forth.

Those reminders still serve as the last best hope for freedom’s greatest country.

These events are models of the American attitude. People arrive early with bags, trolleys, carts. As soon as one of the shelves is half empty, with books collapsing in the middle, someone arrives with a box to re-stack. The whole place was as busy as a hive. It went on and on. Everyone was cheerful. No-one fussed and bothered. Once again, in the country most supposedly dedicated to so-called atomised individualism (a muddle-headed concept), I found myself in the middle of a teeming community. Here is one of Tocqueville’s “civil associations”. Free individuals who can freely associate very often make the best societies and platoons!

And once again, I want to know: why doesn’t this happen in England?

The next day we drove to Gettysburg, to see the battlefield. There is so much road in American roads. They widen and narrow like rivers, now six lanes, now twelve, now, but surely not?, fourteen, with various slip roads, merging lanes, separate roads running parallel behind a wall. Road, road, road, stretching out ahead of you towards the mountains. It suits Mozart’s late symphonies (Karajan) or some Bach piano (Hewitt). The third orchestral suite would do very nicely as well (Freiburger Barockorchester). The best scene in Annie Hall is when they drive along the country roads in Maine and the final movement of Mozart 41 is bellowing like the roar of the wind. You can do this yourself—although I do not go over the speed limit, unlike everyone else in this reckless country, so the Mozart was providing more of a stately accompaniment to the turning trees and the long, long range of hills—and see the way that the American landscape can match up to great music.

We assumed it would be a quirk of American life to do the driving tour of the battlefield, but it is the only way to get a real sense of what happened. As you drive, you get to see how one ridge looks across to another, how hard the dips and rises in the fields must have made it for thousands and thousands of men—impeded by fences and hedges—to charge across to the other ridge. Landscape deceives us with its sense of continuity. But as the southernmost point, you can look back to the Peach Orchard and see where Longstreet’s men had to go, and then the road goes round and you get a sense just how many hundreds of little individual actions have to take place, how easily a formation would become a scattering between those trees. We did not feel the wind, behind our windows, nor did the ground bump and trip as we drove along.

The blueberry pie at the Gettysburg Family Restaurant was sublime. Our one souvenir purchase of the day was a mug from the restaurant, an ideal purchase. And only $7! And while you eat, you can look around and see some of the “real America”—bouffant hair, a Trump cap, those big jaws and rolled shirt sleeves, old small couples who eat whopping great plates of pancakes for lunch, a man too large to fit in a booth. It was like a scene from a documentary. Outside a truck so large pulled up that the retired lady who got out of it had to lower herself quite carefully to the ground. Our waitress told me she works two weekends a month. She has a full-time sales job as well. Tips are now tax-free and she pays her car with one weekend’s earnings. She loves her job. I have had Uber drivers who drive several hours a day on the side of working as a chef. You do not find this in England.

On Sunday, we went to a farm in Bluemont to pick a pumpkin. The Americans, naturally, do not merely ride up, pick a pumpkin, and leave. This is an all-day family event. There is a large farm shop, fresh donuts (worth the trip alone), a huge inflated bouncing area, pig racing, both corn and grass mazes, chickens, goats, a goat bridge, a ninja trail, a rope maze, giant chess, and various other activities. The Americans mill around, and it was busy, but they mill quickly. It is not like in England where people dawdle, as if they were all loitering in their own homes, astonished and offended to find someone else wanting to use the doorway they have taken as their resting place. Americans often seem to get more enjoyment from their day simply by being busier about it.

It was striking to me, once again, just how pervasive is the American culture of activity. They love to get things done, and this attitude often enhances the enjoyment of whatever it is they are doing. They “get more out of life” simply by being busier. They know what Samuel Johnson knew: “difficulty is, for the most part, the daughter of idleness.” If Americans sometimes seem crass or like they take life at an easy stride, it is largely because they are not idle. To the British temperament, there is something vulgar and unsettled about this lack of idleness. And yet the Americans are quite relaxed. Being busy puts them at ease.

Johnson knew that the ability to be busy, to avoid idleness, is the root of human progress. “Whatever has been effected for convenience or elegance, while it was yet unknown, was believed impossible; and therefore would never have been attempted, had not some, more daring than the rest, adventured to bid defiance to prejudice and censure.” It is this attitude, more than anything, that makes America a great nation. The more I see of Americans, the more fundamental I believe this busyness is to their culture and to the way their country works. As Emerson said, “the one thing in the world of value is an active soul.”

The houses are low and flat here, with gently sloped roofs. Frank Lloyd Wright made prairie homes that followed the long horizonal lines of the Wisconsin landscape, and something of that principle seems to be at work in the long-low houses of Austin. Apparently there are no basements, which seems un-American. Some people believe this is because of the soil quality. The trucks here are ridiculously large, and all quite clean. They are city slickers in farmer pick-ups. I asked my companion (who took me for really excellent pizza) about this and he told me about a man he knows who arrives at church every week in the sort of truck that is big enough to haul itself. This chap is a product manager in an office downtown. I’m told a lot of the live music closed during covid, but they had a live band in the airport when I arrived. These were my experiences on the evening I landed.

Alas, today I woke up with vertigo. The room was spinning. I exaggerate not. I had assumed that when they do this in the movies, it was a fake, a trope to convey what was happening. No. It turns out that pretty much is what happens. There were two or three rooms and they were rocking around quite freely. Even when I closed my eyes, the inside of my head was rotating and throbbing. I did the technique I found online, and it made me feel horrific. Later on, I avoided throwing up in Jared Henderson’s car by a matter of seconds. Some Wheat Squares from Whole Foods settled me and I got through the podcast recording by simply not moving very much. (Though I felt dizzy in the middle.)

Cue several hours of trying to find a clinic with an appointment that was in network, various futile prolonged exchanges of details, and a few hours later I have taken some medication, redone the technique, and everything is subsiding.

I hope never to have vertigo again. It was dreadful. But it did give me a sense of what life must have been like for Jonathan Swift, who was struck with bouts of it throughout his life. That knowledge is (almost) worth having. (No, it’s definitely worth having. This is Swift after all.) Whenever something like this happens to me, I think of what it must be like to be old and subject to the whims of ill health. That’s what inspired Howl’s Moving Castle, when Diana Wynne Jones suffered terrible pain from lactose intolerance and had to use two walking sticks all of a sudden.

Still, I saw a little of Austin. I took a Waymo, far less nausea-inducing that human Uber drivers. And much nicer. I am appalled at the way Americans drive with one hand on the wheel. They are so casual about safe driving. Waymo was much more reassuring. The architecture downtown and just over the river wasn’t worth seeing, but I did see it. I saw one nice old tower, but I’m told the old town was leveled to make way for the new.

Once the medicine kicked in, I went for a walk. On the street I passed a man whose clothes were ragged, talking loudly as if someone was listening, about how he sometimes finds things he is looking for in his hands. A lonely moment, and worse in its way than vertigo perhaps. Two men walking home from work (in their semi-formal shirts, but otherwise looking scruffy) were sharing a huge spliff. I saw an Uber delivery robot. It was cautious about crossing the road.

The skateboarders didn’t look as young up close as they had from a distance. On one street I saw two men in a dreadful condition living on benches, a third swaggering all over the street while his dog barked, and a fourth, topless man, being arrested. I didn’t feel unsafe, but I cannot see why people sit outside to drink in that atmosphere. At “Gus’s Fried Chicken, World Famous”1, (under the skin, fried chicken is plain and friendly), I finally heard some real good ol’ fashioned Texan accents, from the older people. I’m told the plain, flat “acceptable” Midwestern accent has dominated everywhere now thanks to television. In the UK, we have the opposite. BBC English has fallen out of favour as regional accents became the norm on TV, noting that they are relatively neutral regional accents. If they weren’t, no-one would know what was going on. I say this not as an insult, but a fact. Many people in England cannot understand the accents in the North, or parts of the West. Even in a place like Bedfordshire you will find old boys who still mumble in impenetrable rustic tones.

Gus’s was interesting in other ways. It seems to be that fried chicken is to a certain part of America what Fish & Chips are to England. Half the men wore caps. Plenty of long fluffy beards were on show. Plastic cutlery (forks only, naturally) and paper plates. The young pretty waitress had scruffy sneakers and a neat cardigan (complete with a tooth-pick in her mouth, which the man next to me commented on) while her slightly older associate was busier among the tables in her Gus’s T-shirt. The young one was clearly hired to fit an all-American archetype and the fact that she makes conversation everywhere she goes—the kitchen, the bar, the table in the corner—is what is expected. A little delay (just a little) is tolerated for a little atmosphere. And the pace is still kept up. While I saw more than enough of my waitress, the others really did wish to order more sides, get a refill, have some pie. Nothing is too much for American hospitality. It never stops. The films did not lie to me: America is busy even while it eats.

Let’s hope that when I wake up, the world has stopped spinning and the shutdown doesn’t mean I can’t get home…

The Wheat Squares, by the way, have cane sugar in. Obviously.

To begin with, there were half a dozen birds or so. They flit and dart, making no noise. Over the next ten minutes, they are joined by dozens and dozens more, perhaps two hundred. Their flight becomes more patterned. They make loops and figures of eight. Sometimes they crowd above the tall chimney; sometimes they bulge away from it.

Occasionally, one or two birds dive into the chimney; mostly they circulate. At one point, they went so far away, we thought they might spend the night in a nearby chimney. The flock moves in a way that seems intentional, but it’s like watching Brownian motion. You cannot guess how they will be formed in the next few seconds.

Then comes the circle. All the birds, with more and more twittering, started rotating in a great “O”, wider at the top, as if imitating the shape of the Guggenheim Museum. Round and round the chimney they turn, tweeting more quickly. We chat about how this must be it, they must be about to go down.

Then they flex out, make more figures of eight, more wide flights away. Twice more this happens. And then the circle moves faster, tighter. They cohere. The descent begins just as the colour goes out of the evening light.

As they fall into the chimney, a little trickle at the bottom of the large funnel, it looks like a film being run backwards, of smoke escaping in reverse. The coordination required for a dozen birds to descend so closely to each other into the chimney without getting hurt is extraordinary. It almost feels like a visual trick.

The feat takes two or three minutes. And we are left with the remains of the evening. It was worth their prolonged efforts and communications. It can be 70° warmer inside the chimney than outside.

“I wonder if they have a leader,” said my neighbour who lamented the lack of human co-operation. Research suggests not. The birds fly by physical distance rules, maintaining a particular range from each other. These rules enable different sized groups. The higher the density, the larger the group can be.

Of course, the birds do not decide any of this. Swifts have no politics. They convene no forum, make no rules. They fly by instinct and coordinate locally. Order emerges spontaneously.

Watching the swifts, I was reminded of all the co-operation I have experienced in Arlington since I arrived three weeks ago. Neighbours arrive with dining chairs they went to pick up, having seen them going free in a Facebook group. One couple not only loaned us tools, but put up a curtain rail. Local children quickly organise to play games together.

Many of these kind people ask us what it is like to move here at this time. I see fewer of the police and soldiers than them. I am less aware of the news. But I do see people taking care of a community pool, leaving unwanted items in a collection spot for others, adopting kittens, passing on useful information.

When I go to restaurants, I think of all the human co-ordination it takes to make it possible for me to take a short bus ride and eat delicious Chinese food. I see this organic order at the library, on the metro, in the museums. Humans are indeed co-operative, often without planning it, without any leader. As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations,

This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.

The spontaneous order of humans provides us with so much more than the swifts’ flight into the chimney. We are co-operating all day, every day, even when we are not aware of it. Even when we think the opposite is happening.

Happy Labour Day.

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American kitchen paper comes off in half sheets. The clingfilm is pre-cut, so you don’t have to perfect the art of ripping it off in bedraggled clumps. The sliced meat is sold in zip-lock plastic, so it can be kept fresher for longer. The butter is sold in sticks, which are the right weight for many recipes. No more measuring 4oz, just drop in a stick of butter. There is simply no excuse for this lack of convenience in England. No excuse at all. By making a thousand daily tasks like this much simpler, the Americans accrue to themselves a great amount of time and ease, and prevent a good deal of localised irritation.

The organic chicken we ate at supper cost a mere $13. In England it would have been more than £20. We have been gifted or collected from people looking to get rid of things: a comfortable leather chair (in which I write), a large and good quality table, a radio which is tuned to a very good classical music station (it simply plays the music, without all the inane commentary that has taken over Radio 3 like a weed), a lamp made from an old coffee tin. Community spirit is strong here!

Three different neighbours have brought us cookies. Some homemade, some from an old firm in Maryland. They are devilishly good. I am also able to attend to when the lid of the cookie jar is not on properly, a new form of parental surveillance. I, of course, am the one eating most of the cookies.

One neighbour also gave us homegrown tomatoes that smell so good it’s like they were grown in the countryside.

Although the Arlington library is so slow to put books on reserve it would be quicker for me to walk to the next state to collect them, they do loan out board games, which is a blessing for the children. Amazon Prime is slower to deliver in sleepy south Arlington too. Between that and the lack of a proper bookstore in close range, it is simply much slower to get my hands on whatever I want to read here. The Barnes and Noble in Georgetown is fine, but not well stocked. Politics and Prose is far away in a part of town I otherwise have no call to go to. As far as I know, there is no private library akin to the London Library. This is an unexpected barbarism at the heart of America.

Homestyle baked beans have three times the added sugar of Heinz baked beans, which are not available in many shops, even though Heinz is a great American enterprise.

The Americans love rules. They make their own rules, as is the nature of self-government. Unlike the English, they do not seem to relish the power of being a petty bureaucrat, and nor do they wish to have something to complain about, so the great web of social regulation works more harmoniously than in England, where one person is more likely to want to find a means of being in charge of another, or is more likely to enjoy the superiority of a grievance.

When I complained to First Direct that they were impossible to deal with and had screwed up my address twice, they told me they “acknowledged my feelings” but that there had been no “bank error”. Not only is this literally how parents are advised to talk to children, it is an affront. No, I did not tell them to drop the third “i” from Virginia, thank you. And anyway—do they really think it is my job to tell them how to spell the word Virginia? For God’s sake. A few hours later, my wife called to change her address. They made an error there too. Then they deleted part of her address. So she also had to call them multiple times. That evening she had to call them to get her card unlocked because they thought her Macy’s purchase was fraudulent. Glad as I would be to provide further employment to the people who monitor First Direct’s phone calls in order to send defensive emails about their data entry skills, further complaints shall not be made. International calls are expensive and it is clear they are merely concerned with their own out-of-date processes. Just let me use the app, you fussy relics. I wish they would all stub their toes.

Above the trees at night, we watch the bats. My family went out to see the nesting swallows dive and swoop at twilight. One more mosquito bite and I shall land in Bedlam.

In Wisconsin, New York, and Virginia, I have had the same experience walking the suburbs. The houses are not uniform, and so the streets are more interesting. In so many English suburbs, the houses are all the same. Sometimes they are of the same floor-plan, or a set of floor-plans. They are built to the same “style” too, which is just rectangles and boxes with some features of architectural styles — the idea that any modern English suburb is neo-Georgian is like calling a Lego model neo-Georgian. I am not a vegetable just because I wear cauliflower greens on my head. Walk an American street, though, and while you see some sameness (the Cape Cod style, the Sears style) and so on, what you get is essentially a jumble. Where there is uniformity, it is in attitude: my plot, my house, my way of doing things.

It was the hell of a weekend. We have all been ill. Thanks to the great inefficiencies of the property management company who our landlord relies on, we have no hot water and no laundry. Also no key for the laundry block. We shower at the swimming pool. A kindly neighbour lent us their laundry key. We cannot use the dishwasher. The children cannot have a bath. On Sunday evening, children fed, wife in bed eating plain crackers, I walked up to the diner and read the paper. I came home through the woods reciting Robert Frost. I saw a rabbit and a series of unfamiliar birds: bright yellow, speckled grey, a flash of red. It was a brief outing, but a splendidly American one. The Washington Post had a good article about how George Washington became America’s first great leader. There is something perfect about the combination of reading the paper in the diner and walking home through some (brief, tame, with a path) woodland.

I told the man behind the desk at Walgreens that English pharmacies do not sell cigarettes. “We had to get a special licence.” No doubt. “And we sell wine.” He laughed. This is unthinkable in England, and perhaps in some other states. But it is probably better this way. People will buy those things anyway. Why not have it all in one place? I got a bottle of ibuprofen which cost $11. I was astonished that Americans would pay so much for a generic. Then I realised: unlike the British packets of sixteen pills (and nowhere will sell you more than one or two packets), this bottle had one-hundred-and-fifty pills! About what should a prurient mind be more concerned? That cigarettes are not restricted to the shop over the road, or that I am now allowed to buy ten times as many ibuprofen pills as in my home country where that is deemed a suicide risk?1

At the farmers market, one head of celery costs $5. I thought farmer’s markets were a rip-off in England and I think so here. I hope I shall never see the day when I pay $5 for a single head of celery.

Hostas grow so well here. Huge clumps multiply. They flower in profusion. Their leaves are a little scorched now, but they still look magnificent. They are an Asian, not American, plant, but they fit in perfectly in all the yards and lanes. They grow, as they ought to, in large quantity and make a great display.

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At the intersection, an older woman with a wheeled shopping-trolley was looking at my book. “Who isn’t apologising?” The book was No Apology, by Mitt Romney, which I had picked up in a small bird-box library where locals leave books they are done with. “Oh he ought to apologise.” When I asked why, she tipped her nose up. “One of those rich snooty pricks.” That was a euphemism she used a few times, including about “the British”, but she didn’t hold it against me. Although her political opinions were freely expressed, strongly held, and in some ways the result of America’s unorthodox media system, (she is, on some topics of international affairs, a little crazy), she was a pleasure to talk to. And quite unexpected: she was neither right-wing nor left-wing when you added it all together. We went round the supermarket together and talked about the brands. I did the voice over from the classic Maxwell House advert in the coffee aisle and she sang a commercial song she remembered from her childhood. She also told me some history of the area. This morning she walked past my window with her dog (a delightful cocker spaniel) and we had coffee together for a few minutes. I got the French blend with some bamboo filters. It was splendid. Our new vintage cups are a delight.

We are living in one of the many parts of Arlington that has old red-brick houses everywhere, built in blocks. The sun comes down strong but cooled through the tall trees. Because there is no nonsense here, unlike in sweaty London, although the cicadas sing all afternoon, the house is cool and pleasant. An area this historic in England would be impossible: not only prohibitive government rules about what you can and cannot do, but local busybodies running “preservation societies” to snoop on people and make trouble with the council. Here, you simply have to have a storm door, proper windows, an air conditioning system and so on, otherwise the weather and the insects would be impossible. The house is old, but it has good air-conditioning, unlike brand new houses being built today in London, where temperatures can hit 104 Fahrenheit. England is simply not a serious country on topics like this, preferring to whine about its possible and ideal solutions rather than find practicable ways to stop everyone from overheating. If the climate were less hospitable to such time-wasting behaviour, we would be able to have the best of both, like the Americans.

Food is expensive. I shan’t write about the politics of the recent inflation, but food is expensive. Because American food is so often “enriched” — I couldn’t find pouring cream without cane sugar added to it — going round the supermarket is a double job of monitoring prices and trying to find something that is what it appears to be: bread without honey, honey without additional sugar, yoghurt without syrup, crackers without sugar, and so forth. I have been eating ranch dressing every day. John Adams once said (of Jefferson and the other Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress) that “all Virginia geese are swans”. Eating an American salad, one knows what he means. For five dollars in a diner you can get a better salad than in some quite fancy places in London. So fresh, crisp, large, and tasty.

The local houses have a freecycle system among the owners. “We have so little space here” one lady explained. We have to laugh. We are living in something twice the size of our London flat.

God bless thrift stores, and the American attitude of self-reliance, where one citizen is always ready to help another. We got a Cuisinart coffee maker and a Le Creuset baking dish. And one of the other customers helped my wife carry her things to the bus stop.

First thing, from the kitchen window, a rabbit, sniffing and stretching, ears suddenly alert.

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WholeFoods was out of chocolate covered almonds this evening. All of the whole grains were fully stocked. I would guess that between a third and a half of the food they sell has sugar added in some form. Almonds coated in dark chocolate and with added peanut butter are quite delicious.

We bought ours beds at Mattress Firm where I discovered that the assistant (who was really excellent, I cannot recommend them enough—the store on Langston Blvd) is a big fan of Gulliver’s Travels. We chatted briefly about Nigerian literature and he recommended Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels to me. He says he is not a big reader but his daughter passes him many books. As I left, he said it was time for him to re-read Swift.

He reminded me of a barmaid in rural Nova Scotia who I spoke to recently. Her favourite author is Bulgakov. She (and he) had more lively, earnest conversation about books than you will find at many literary gatherings.

Although it has generally been easy to move to the US (there are many ways around not having a Social Security Number while you set up utilities and so forth), not having a US mobile or address (we move in soon) is actually the most limiting factor. I am on WhatsApp here with my British number but that is oddly insufficient. The one thing we cannot get sorted is wifi.

I saw an advert which claimed that 60% of American cats are overweight. They were selling some sort of healthy or slimming cat food. The advert included Garfield heaving his belly while the vet talked about lasagne. But really, how does a cat become obese?

It is hard to know whether oatmeal here means oatmeal or porridge. They call it steel cut oatmeal, but is that what Laura and Mary would have eaten? I doubt it.

I am told that Murder, She Wrote was not filmed in Maine, but in northern California. This was quite disappointing.

Talking about how there are no unmarked vans here (whereas in Britain there are many rather unpleasant looking such vans), my wife joked that everything is called something like “The Great American Fence Company”. The next day we saw some fencing outside a bar which was branded “Superior Fences”. Then a truck for the “Patriot Garbage Disposal” company. A friend sent a picture of a white van with a huge American flag on the side.

CVS sells survival guide magazines.

The monarch butterflies are three times the size they are in England.

So many people have been astonished to hear that we had no dishwasher in London for the last eight years. It is common to see the statistic that only half of UK houses have dishwashers. That is unthinkable to the people here. When I tell them that UK energy prices are too high for most people to use their dryer, they are just nonplussed. The Americans do not hang their wet laundry in the house! The closets and cupboards are far, far larger. It makes me laugh. My son mistook one of them for a small bedroom.

At one reception, noting the prevalence of dog treats everywhere, I discussed why there are so many dogs in Arlington, despite the relative lack of open space for them to run around or attend to their business. And yet, the streets are largely free of mess. I was told, by the receptionist who is from upstate New York where it makes more sense to own a dog, that the streets of Arlington are regularly cleaned by city street cleaners. This attentive attitude is everywhere. Restrooms in all sorts of places are much nicer to use than in England. The Americans in Arlington, Virginia do not see cleaning and clearing as drudgery, but as a job to be swiftly dispatched, a point of pride. And so it is done without much fuss or complaint. It is a sort-of Mary Poppins attitude.

The dogs are also well-behaved. More than once, a dog-owner has made their animal stop and sit while my children walk past. This is unthinkable in England. There is much more politeness of all kinds here. Cars stop swiftly, willingly, and with a smile when you cross even a large and busy road. When I am tired, I am almost wearied by the extent of the greetings and pleasantries. We English like to think of ourselves as well mannered, but we are not—not by Virginian standards.

At home, people are often surprised by the extent of my interest in and enthusiasm towards America. I am supposed to be “quintessentially British” in some way. (The quintessence of Britishness is surely in not defining yourself or your Britishness too carefully.) Today, after joking that “the British are as cold as their weather”, someone told me that I am not very British, but quite American.

Britain would be a happier country if its people flew their flag(s) as regularly, normally, and proudly as the Americans fly theirs. The liberal tree requires patriotic soil.

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In the CVS at the end of our block (are there any blocks without a CVS?) they sell bite cream off the shelf which has so much steroid in it you would have to visit a doctor to get hold of it in the UK. We are using it with no qualms.

Watching daytime television here, you see adverts for mid-life medical products, insurance, and food—the food adverts just never end.

The homeless people are much more visible than in London, and they have much more stuff.

When we visited the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, a group of National Guard soldiers on the Mall gave our children army stickers. They were polite and amiable and joked with the kids.

Even the plain crackers are made with honey. Lettuce is sold in boxes. Californian fruit is superb. The median quality of most things is higher than in England.

Although Arlington is very built up, and in some parts almost treeless, it has many nooks and crannies of prettiness, many leafy areas, and a lot of parks and playing fields. The children’s parks make much better use of the space and include wooden armchairs for the parents, something often lacking in England. My wife and daughter described an insect so large and rattling I have only seen things like that in animated movies.

Although rent is high and has been rising, especially since Covid, for a comparable amount of money you get something much bigger than in London, usually in nicer condition, and with a washer-dryer, air-conditioning, and cheaper utilities.

The airplanes make little or no disturbance because they fly in along the river.

Americanism are creeping into our speech (on the weekend) just as we immediately became used to their filter coffee, which we prefer to the Americano you get in England.

I thought I needed a Social Security Number before I started work, but in fact I cannot register for one until the first day of my job. This is perhaps the only administrative problem I have faced. Everything is easier here. Uber seems cheaper.

Capitol Hill Books provided me with: The Wealth of Nations, Of a Fire on the Moon, a Library of America edition of Robert Frost’s poems with letters and lectures (this simply had to be purchased at my earliest opportunity), a John Dickson Carr mystery, and the Hibbert biography of Samuel Johnson. It was just as good a shop as I remembered and I need to live as far away from it as possible.

At the laundromat, I saw far more men than women. By the time I left, it was about even. The young men looked at their phones while the older men stood like supervisory fathers watching their machines. I was one of two or three white people out of a group of twenty or thirty. Very little English was spoken, apart from by a man who seemed only to speak to himself. I did my laundry, including drying, for about $5. About two-thirds of the machines were in use at 10am on a Saturday. Many people brought their own little bottles of detergent, decanted at home. One man kept refilling his bottle at the sink and pouring the water into the machine. The two children who were there did all their chores willingly and pleasantly. Everyone there worked fast and according to habit, so it was easy for me to learn what to do by observing them. I asked two people for help: one seemed unable to reply, one was very friendly and showed me where to add the detergent. The Lutheran church across the road is enormous. Next door is a pawn shop advertising “CASH FOR GOLD”.

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It is exciting simply to be in America, where the heat means the pine trees really smell of pine, and saying good morning to the breakfast server results in a good humoured conversation, and the birds are so unafraid of pedestrians that you can stand close and watch them quarrel over a bagel or see them hopping and gliding from tree to tree, close enough to watch their head tilt as their colours shift in the sun. We have had good close viewings of a Northern Cardinal and one of those astonishing American robins.

The first British-American difference we noticed was at the airport. At Gatwick, you put a pound in to get a luggage cart, which you later get back. We got three. At Boston you pay $7 per cart ($6 at Reagan). We got two at Boston and one at Reagan.

On our first full day in Arlington, we took three journeys on the Metro and each time someone voluntarily gave up their seat to our obviously exhausted children. This has happened at bus stops too. At Boston airport, there was a respect for mothers and children (young families board first) at security and the gate that simply doesn’t exist in the UK. People are just nicer here. Maybe I am comparing London to a smaller place, but I do think London is grumpy because the British are grumpy. (Yes, I am grumpy.)

Americans want to work. They pick up stray litter. They respond promptly. It is said that the English are good at queueing, but we are good at standing in queues, whereas the Americans keep the queue moving.

In the area of north Arlington we have been staying in, you see more people walking their dogs than pushing a buggy or walking with a child.

Behind the main roads, which are full of cars and businesses and look fairly ugly, there are rows of good-old-fashioned American houses, with white fences and basketball hoops set up in yards. North Adam Street is excellent from start to finish. Hostas seem to grow wild here. Black-eyed Susans are out in huge bright clumps. The lightning is striking and impressive but makes little impression on the locals. Flood warnings are laughed at, and seem to be often wrong.

We asked two armed guards outside the White House and Treasury where we could find a bookshop in D.C. They blanked. Then we stopped a nice looking man: blue suit, glasses, waved salt-and-pepper hair, and a general demeanour of the typical mild-mannered American gentleman. He blanked too. A minute later, he ran back and crossed the street to direct us to Second Story Books at Dupont Circle. He was charming. At Second Story I got two biographies of Jonathan Swift. It’s a very good bookshop.

The transit system is hard to understand at first but the buses are excellent, easy to use, and very regular. Although higher prices on the Metro make it cleaner and less crowded than London (it costs more depending on how far you ride, more so than the London zones as far as I can tell, and the day pass is some $14; children do not ride free, which is an outrage), it is also less intuitive to work out what your journey will cost.

The escalators run so slowly here. Un-American speeds.

Walking around in this humidity is horrible. How did the founding fathers get anything done in their wigs? They founded a country in this weather!? Presumably the weather is why so many Americans drive everywhere. I walked for half an hour during the hottest part of the day and the person I was meeting was shocked that I had done so and intended to do so again. I was grateful to be given a lift by them. This is not the only person who gave or offered me a lift on first meeting.

Presumably Americans are used to adding sales tax in their head. Why the charade? Is this what Burke called scenting tyranny on every breeze? I notice this afresh every time I visit. In general, conversations have been unpolitical. The intensity of American politics has been entirely absent from all my discussions, apart from one taxi driver who ranted about corruption. It is much easier and more rewarding to talk to strangers here, even accounting for my traveller’s advantage.

Three pastries and two cups of coffee set me back some $23 in one place. (And I was expected to tip.) It is quite easy to get a decent salad. But Americans seem to be happy just to eat a large bowl of lettuce. What some American eateries call a chicken sandwich, I call a chicken burger. Graham crackers are not crackers: they are biscuits. The WholeFoods roasted, unsalted, Californian almonds are wonderful. But some two-thirds of what they sell in that store is junk food. It might be organic, with a homely brand, but it is still junk food.

The British love to scorn; the Americans love to smile—, but they can also be brusque. This brusqueness is often in the service of efficiency. One lady in a government office was relatively sharp with me when I was five minutes late (confusing system for poor English traveller), but she then turned out to be proactive and helpful and really solved a problem for me. In Britain, bureaucratic brusqueness is a much more negative signal.

At breakfast in the hotel we befriended a southern lawyer and his son who had interned in Congress. They were smart, delightful company. I was struck by how the son called the father “Sir”, and the father called my son “Sir”, in the friendly manner of eighteenth century British speakers, one of the cultural survivals that we English have lost. We chatted in the roaming manner of fellow travellers—books, history, parenting, local culture, traveling anecdotes, which are the best cereals—and the time fell away in the relaxed nature only an early breakfast in good company can obtain. Contrary to the persistent English stereotype (like those stupid jokes about Oscar Wilde in Four Weddings and a Funeral), Americans are intelligent, curious, interesting people. In America, one thinks in conversation about the subject at hand; in England, people are thinking what other people think of them. I expect my views of these opposing traits to converge over time, but not entirely.

Staying in a hotel room with children is an adventure and a trial. There are moments of high hilarity and moments of screaming irritation. Although they tire more quickly, children are more adaptable and accepting. Sometimes, they sit at the large triple window and watch Arlington the way they watch television. However early we open the blinds, there are cars on the road.

Here are my previous notes about visiting Arlington (another part of town). Here is New York. And Wisconsin.