Brits! Allow me to introduce you to a new world! A world where you can enjoy the spring and summer without getting a house full of bugs, insects, and wasps. Yes, it is possible. By simply installing a screen or fine-net you allow light in, prevent insects from getting in, and prevent parrots from getting out! Brits should be amazed to discover that Americans have had this technology built into their houses for at least 30 years. God bless America. Not only do they understand the joy of AirCon, but they have screens in all of their windows.

If I ever move back to the UK I will create a huge chain of stores that sell nothing but window screens and cheesesteaks. If you can think of a title for this company (apart from “Screens and Cheesesteaks”) then let me know. I’ll cut you in.

The stereotype of Americans being car-obsessed and driving hugely over-powered, oil-pissing, monsters is without question, let alone guilt, sadly true for the most part. I’ve never seen more obnoxiously brutal, huge and wasteful SUVs as there are in this city. Even in the old parts of town, where the roads are tiny and utterly fucked (no road tax here) they drive 6 litre V8 powered behemoths like they’re on airport runways.
The car is everything to most people here, and if you can’t drive there, it probably isn’t worth going. That includes bars and pubs. Out in the burbs, where “normal” people want to live, no only are there no pubs, but they’re are frequently no pavements! They’re not just unaware of pedestrians, they seem actively antagonistic towards them. But why the hell would you want pavements anyway ? What are you, a commie queer ?
So, how do the vast armies of jocks and Sharons get to those huge, soulless beer barns that pass as bars ?
The answer is so simple and so obvious that it’s a mystery we didn’t think of it before – they just drink and drive! The best of both worlds.

Luckily, in the city, especially and old city like Philly, they have public transport. In fact, it’s pretty bloody good too. The locals all slag it off for the same reasons that Londoners slag off TFL, and they are just as wrong. TFL is superb, as is SEPTA. Whilst SEPTA doesn’t have anywhere near as comprehensive services as TFL, by some mysterious means, they manage to make the buses stick to the timetables. Incredible, but true. All you need to do is look up the next time the bus is due and leave the pub a few minutes before. Bingo – cheap chauffeur service. The city also provides a plethora of cheap neighbourhood bars within walking distance. Thank god.

Even though we have our own gas guzzler ourselves (with a 3.8L engine – bloody hell) rather than find it the key to liberation and happiness that the advertisers claim it to be, it’s been a very useful, very expensive, pain in the arse. And we didn’t even pay for it.

If you go into a hardware store (shop) over here and ask for rawlplugs, or multiway mains sockets, or polyfilla, or a spanner they won’t know what you are on about. Fortunately, the hardware store situation here is exactly the same as it is in the UK; you have a choice between local, family-owned places and one of the various megastores.
Just like the UK, the megastores are badly designed, full of uninterested, mouth-breathing, dullards, and concentrate on quantity rather than quality of crap. Just like the UK, the local places are full of helpful, friendly, geniuses and stock the obscurest of widgets. Just like the UK, the local places are permanently on the point of bankruptcy.
Anyway, thanks to the incredibly nice staff of Stanley’s Hardware and thanks to my late grandfather-in-law, I now have a bunch of tools and enough knowledge of the way things work over here to enable me to give derisory comments and tut at previous cowboys work whilst making a complete bollocks of screwing some shelves to the wall.
The electricity situation here is bizarre. Here is a list of things that will amaze Brits, and that will appear normal to the average American:

• They have mains sockets by kitchen sinks and in bathrooms over here.
• The traditional plugs fit in either way round.
• Not only are the light bulbs screw-in, some fuses are too. They’re also frequently made of glass.
• Frequently the mains sockets aren’t earthed.
• You can buy 3 pin to 2 pin adapters where the earth pin has a little metal tag that can be screwed into a nearby earth.
• Their old wiring is called “knob and tube” because they used little porcelain knobs and tubes to feed the bare wire around the house. Our house still has some “knob and tube” in the roof. Being a Viz reader of course I refer to it as knob and bollocks wiring.
• Sometime a house can have both 110 and 220 volt mains.
• The plugs aren’t fused.

Nonetheless, after walking around the house with my tool box, doing some drilling, checking the shelves with a spirit level and ignoring the plaster-dust generated, I’m feeling like a real man.

P.S. I’ll be back in the UK on the 21st! I’m so excited!

Our first weekend in the new place is well underway and, to be perfectly honest, I can’t remember a time when I felt happier (excluding nights out in New Cross of course). We both love our new house, our bed, our new town, our lovely birds and even our neighbours seem friendly. The only thing missing is you! If you come and visit we’ll guarantee that you have at least one night that will justify your plane fare.

There are other reasons why I’m happy:

• I resigned from my job on Friday!
• We filled in a tax return which means that not only are we eligible for a $1200 “economic stimulation” payment, but I also got a rebate for $500 owing to my stupidity when filling in the tax form.
• I start a new job with a very cool company on the day after my birthday.
• That will leave me with enough time to come back to the UK for a week!
• The tax rebate will pay for it!
• Wooohoo!
• There’s a pub down the road called “Union Jack’s.”

After a stressful day at work, we moved our mini aviary into our groovy new pad which I think means that we have actually moved in! The birds are now sleeping, I’m posting this over our cable Internets, we’re drinking some of Carlo Rossi’s finest, and the house looks like a right tip – I couldn’t be happier. Pity I have to be in work at 5:30 tomorrow morning to jump through a loads of hoops, whilst rounding up some undomesticated geese.

We still haven’t actually managed to move into our new house yet. The latest reason is that the gas works decided to cut us off yesterday and so the place is colder than a witches tit. Despite that, we have a sofa, a lovely bed, some shelves, a jug of red wine, and a cable. I waited in all today for the cable guy to arrive for his appointment, which was between 1pm and 3pm. He arrived at 4, and together with the backup he called upon, left at 7:30pm; the Internet access still wasn’t working. Now, I’m no craftsman but I know a bloody cowboy when I see one, but it really wasn’t his fault. The fact that he was a borderline cretin also wasn’t to blame. Comcast and Verizon make BT and NTL look like skilled professionals.

However, one thing that keeps us both happy is that we both really love our house. It’s exactly what we’ve both dreamed of, and the only worry is a deep-seated fear that someone is going to take it away from us. Everything there feels right, and we can’t wait to move in there with our mini aviary.

Following an enormous amount of stress, last minute panicking, and worry, we now

have our own house!

OK, in reality some bunch of money lenders actually own it but at least we’re not going to be paying someone else’s debts off with our rent for a while.
We have now achieved our goals of:

1. Moving to America.
2. Getting a job.
3. Getting a house.

In less than six months! Not bad eh ? So can I come home now please ? Only joking…I think.

Let me tell you, it’s pretty bloody scary buying a house, especially when it’s more than 3000 miles from your friends and family. But we both have a really good feeling about this place, and it is a lovely, lovely, lovely house. So come and stay people! Please ? You’ll like it! And we miss you!

Recent events had shaken our confidence in whole deal coming off and so we had done very little (or “bollocks all” as they say in my country) to prepare ourselves. After “closing”, and after Fred, our most excellent mortgage/real-estate dude, had bought us a slap-up lunch at LeBus, he dropped us back to the in-laws billet. I had a sudden panic that he was leaving us alone in a new world where we had our own house, without a big book of instructions on what to do. “Don’t leave us!” I said, pathetically. But he did, and after we made a few phone-calls we decided to go to Ikea and buy the bare minimum of furniture to make our house into a feasible home.

As shocking as it may seem to some of you, and despite Michele and I being married for over 10 years, I have never been inside an Ikea. Based on the superlatives used by past and regular patrons I have known, I was expecting something between Xanadu and Shangri-La. But it turned out to be a furniture shop! In fairness, we encountered an unnaturally helpful and friendly guy in the bedroom section (called Ira) and the gear in the place did look really well made, and it was really cheap…

but…

We needed a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. And we obviously wanted it delivered. Did I mention that there was a lot of it ? So we took the list of stuff we wanted downstairs so that we could pay, and tell them where to send it. But that’s not good enough for Ikea. At Ikea you have to show your dedication to the Ikea way by finding the shit yourselves, pulling it off of shelves, and conveying it to the checkout. After paying you then have to convey it to a delivery desk nearby, where staff take care of storing, delivering and installing your shit.

As we were trying to find one of the two sofas we had ordered I realised that me and Michele humping furniture from one place to another in the same warehouse was utterly ridiculous and so instead I found a nearby member of staff. We’d already been told, admittedly in apologetic tones, that we were indeed required to be involved in this superfluous leg of the furniture’s journey, but by now it had dawned on me that if Ikea wouldn’t get our substantial purchase from one place in the warehouse to another without us being involved then they should really stuff our substantial purchase up their Swedish arses.
Pointing this out to a member of staff resulted in the assignment of Monkey-Boy to our aid. Reluctantly he got us to the checkout and then fucked off sharpish. So, once the cashier had run up our substantial purchase I asked if I could speak to the manager before we settled the bill. He was irritatingly nice and agreed that if we knew what we wanted and also wanted it all delivered we shouldn’t really need to drag it across a warehouse, presumably as penance, first and summoned someone else to help him drag it to the delivery section… where three other members of staff moved it to a different rack in preparation for delivery tomorrow.

Tonight Michele’s mum bought us a bottle of Cava to help us celebrate. We did, and I still am. Come and visit us!

A bloody great question mark dropped onto our mortgage plans this week. Obviously, as it landed ten days before we are due to move in to our new place, it was about as welcome as a dose of syphilis. This caused a great deal of stress and anger, as you can surely imagine, but things seem to be a lot happier now – and not just because we’ve had a lovely night out at one of our favorite over-priced eateries on Main St. In fact, it’s all currently looking quite positive on all counts.
As much as I miss London, our excellent friends and our excellent family there, nether of us think that moving back there would solve anything; we’re going to give this thing a proper go.

For the first time in my new cuboid career I worked at home today. There are a bunch of reasons why, but by parrot-bed-time I was feeling utterly rejuvenated. Not only because I got a day working with parrots, but also because I wasn’t in that fucking depressing office. I actually managed to get more done than I would have done in my cube.

The parrots are all superb company during the day, even though the two ekkies are a couple of little buggers. More about that another day.

Work has been particularly annoying this week, culminating in a busy and stressful Friday. In my book that’s just not on, and the end of the tether is within groping distance. Sadly, and as much as I’d like it to be the case, MegaCorp are not entirely to blame. Significantly, but not totally.

So tonight when I got home at 7pm, leaving many of my colleagues enthusiastically grafting in the office, complete with communal pizza, whiskey, and the Dunkirk spirit, imagine my joy to find a letter from the HMRC [for the uninitiated, this is the UK organisation of Tax Bastards] waiting for me on my favourite chair. So, I drank some more, ate a crab-cake, sat down, pumped up the tunes, and ripped open the envelope. Even if it was a bill, I’m 3000 miles away.

It’s safe to say that I have never had good news in a letter from the revenue…until this evening! It was only a letter telling me that they’ve credited my account with a substantial amount of cash! In fact, once converted to the pathetic currency of the US, it’s enough to make me consider dangerous options such as leaving a chod on my work desk and fucking off. It even caused me to do a little dance!

Of course, I’ll spend this weekend doing work as before, and I’ll work on Monday, but it’s nice to know that it’s optional.

No longer can I deal with tedious office stress. It’s quite simple: all I want to do with my life is spend most of it with Michele and parrots, in a place with a roof and internet access, and be able to go outside regularly. Red wine and nice cheese would be a welcome bonus, as would eating out. But that’s it. No cars, posh furniture, jewelry, or gold, just peace and quiet with Michele, parrots, and some intellectual stimulation. That’s not much to ask is it ?

MegaCorp, and most other employers for that matter, expect their employees to be not only satisfied with dedicating their lives to “The Firm”, but they also expect you to be grateful!

The most significantly significant moment for me this week was during our first “team building” meeting [yeah really]. The CEO was explaining a bunch of things about our relationship with MegaCorp since the take-over. Personally I found it genuinely fascinating, and not the least bit surprising. He ended his talk with a sentence that illustrated exactly why I feel like I’m in the wrong place:

“I mean, we all want ******[MegaCorp’s] stock price to increase!”

Well, no! I don’t! In fact I get a considerable amount of pleasure from watching their share price crumble. I want them to fail. Even if it resulted in all of their employees losing their jobs (which it wouldn’t) I genuinely believe it would benefit more people on this planet in the long run. No, I won’t try to justify that statement 🙂

Back to parrots. It turns out we have three of the loveliest parrots that ever lived. Each has a personality as beautiful as their feathers; and let me tell you the feathers are pretty bloody beautiful!

More about our fluffy companions another time.

Meet Leia, Pepper and Winston: our new parrots. Or at least the plan is that they will be our new parrots tomorrow. All three are currently residing in an excellent local parrot rescue, and all three are due to be re-homed with us tomorrow. There are some people that may think taking on three new parrots just before we move into a new house is a stupid idea, and I’m one, but sometimes it’s best not to ask questions and just accept what is going on. Michele is, as anyone who knows her will suspect, very, very excited indeed. Anyone that knows me will also suspect that, despite my reservations, I am too.

Work has been draining every last drop of power from my poor aged brain and so yet again I should apologise to the people I haven’t managed to email recently. Sorry, really. It’s not that I’m not thinking of you, its just that I want to sit down and write properly, which is impossible. Ideally we could meet up for a drink in a comfortable boozer, but that’s quite tricky with a 3000 mile bus ride in between.

On the good side, this evening has been about as perfect as either of us could have wished. We were both craving a curry because our local place recently closed down and we haven’t one for over a month; British readers will understand the gravity of this terrible situation. So, tonight we decided to go to visit a place in Germantown called Dahlak , partly because we were excited by the idea of Eritrean, Ethiopian and Indian food, and partly because it sounds a bit like Dalek. The only problem is that this part of Germantown is widely regarded, by people who don’t live there, as being pretty hairy.

When we got there, the whole area looked exactly like Deptford (South East London) and consequently made us feel quite at home. The restaurant was a beautiful, cosy, oasis of middle-class, red-wine drinking ,nice food eating, friendliness and I can’t tell you how good the whole experience was. Brits, bring your beautiful British pounds over here now – you’ll love how much they’ll buy you. We got the bus home and the entire experience was as close to living back in London as we could have hoped for.

Stay tuned for parrot updates. Good night.