Saturday 2nd August to Wednesday 13th August, 2008 It appears that meeting a partner, life, sex or otherwise on the internet Stateside is as frequent a practice for many people as is a trip to the supermarket or to collect their mail and in the relatively short time I’ve been over here I’ve already met and heard of several examples of relationships formed within the unbounded realms of cyberspace. Whilst at this stage of my life I have no desire whatsoever to find a ‘soul mate’, most certainly not to the extent of asking a machine for assistance to do so there was one thing that I was beginning to feel starved and deprived at the absence of. Kicking something, and so, having finally decided that Stephen’s attempts to arrange a friendly game of soccer for ... read more

Tuesday 29th July, 2008 It happened at 11:42 am. Paul Wood, the company Chief Executive had minutes earlier arrived in the office from his Princeton, New Jersey base as part of the company’s ongoing goal to achieve OSHAS accreditation, an internationally recognized standard for health and safety management. His task for the afternoon was move around the office quizzing workers individually about their knowledge of the company policy with regard to all things health and safety and all morning staff had intermittently been quizzing each other from the double sided list of questions from which they’d been told his questions would be asked, like a bunch of excitedly worried pupils at exams time. No one wants to look dumb in front of the boss, even less as though they couldn’t be bothered attempting to avoid looking ... read more

Thursday 10th July to Friday11th July, 2008 It’s a well known fact Stateside that the most common cause of visits to the doctor and days off work on the sick during the first six months that any expat’ spends in the United States is as a result, either directly or indirectly, of what is generally termed ‘Sporting Withdrawal Symptons’. It isn’t that sport doesn’t exist out here, it does almost to the point of saturation, it’s simply that what we in the UK recognize as national sporting pastimes are barely recognized nor acknowledged. American sporting interest focuses around three main team sports; football, another example of incorrect terminology with 95 per cent of the game actually played with the hands, baseball, a glorified form of rounders and the one everybody is familiar with, basketball. When I ... read more

Monday 30th June to Saturday July 5th The fourth of July is a big day for Americans, in fact it's by far and away the biggest day of the social calendar. A day more than any other when they celebrate their overbearing sense of national pride combined with their Independence from us Brits by essentially doing two things; i) bedecking anything and everything in stars and stripes and ii) getting pissed out of their tiny little minds. Anything goes and if it wasn’t for the boys in blue no doubt a lot more would too, the only irony of it all being that the main identitifying source of pride of any nation, it’s mother tongue, isn’t even their own. They stole it from us. To mark the occasion in tandem with warming my new home ... read more

Thursday 19th June to Sunday 22nd June One of the major plus points of living in a place such as California in a country that exists by the Live to Work ethic as opposed to my own favoured Work to Live theory is that there are so many things to do and see, if not within driving distance then at least within a reasonably priced flight cost and time that can easily transform any particular weekend into a little mini holiday all of its own. This weekend was to be my first excursion beyond the city limits of Los Angeles. With the start of the school holidays and Marisa's subsequent graduation coinciding with Lisa's birthday week the Kirby's had hired an apartment in the desert town of Palm Springs, situated two and a half hours drive ... read more