In Search of Nice Americans

THE ITINERARY IN A NUTSHELL

DAY 1: 1 AUGUST

Fly to Seattle. The Edgewater.

DAY 2: 2 AUGUST

Explore Seattle. Evening gig: Hurray for the Riff Raff. The Edgewater.

DAY 3: 3 AUGUST

Collect car rental and drive to Olympic National Park. Olympic Lodge Port Angeles.

DAY 4: 4 AUGUST

Olympic National Park. Olympic Lodge Port Angeles.

DAY 5: 5 AUGUST

Olympic National Park. Lake Quinault Lodge.

DAY 6: 6 AUGUST

Drop off car and fly to Juneau to cruise Alaska’s Glacier Country. Wilderness Adventurer ship.

DAY 7: 7 AUGUST

Glacier Bay National Park. Wilderness Adventurer ship.

DAY 8: 8 AUGUST

Glacier Bay National Park. Wilderness Adventurer ship.

DAY 9: 9 AUGUST

Icy Strait. Wilderness Adventurer ship.

DAY 10: 10 AUGUST

Chichagof Island/Baranof Island. Wilderness Adventurer ship.

DAY 11: 11 AUGUST

Frederick Sound/Stephens Passage. Wilderness Adventurer ship.

DAY 12: 12 AUGUST

Fords Terror/Endicott Arm. Wilderness Adventurer ship.

DAY 13: 13 AUGUST

Depart Juneau. Fly to Salt Lake City, via Seattle. Drive to Sundance Resort.

DAYS 14–17: 14–17 AUGUST

At leisure. Sundance Resort.

DAY 18: 18 AUGUST

Fly from Salt Lake City to San Francisco. Drive to Yosemite. Tin Lizzie Inn.

DAYS 19–20: 19–20 AUGUST

Explore Yosemite. Tin Lizzie Inn.

DAY 21: 21 AUGUST

Drive to Los Angeles. Hotel Mr C.

DAY 22: 22 AUGUST

LA insider tour. Hotel Mr C.

DAY 23: 23 AUGUST

Universal Studios Hollywood. Hotel Mr C.

DAY 24: 24 AUGUST

Fly to Nashville. Hermitage Hotel.

DAY 25: 25 AUGUST

Nashville on foot tour. Hermitage Hotel.

DAY 26: 26 AUGUST

Countryside touring. Hermitage Hotel.

DAY 27: 27 AUGUST

Nashville at leisure. Evening gig: Opry Behind the Curtain tour. Hermitage Hotel.

DAY 28: 28 AUGUST

Drive to Savannah. Marshall House.

DAY 29: 29 AUGUST

Savannah insider tour. Marshall House.

DAY 30: 30 AUGUST

Drive to Great Smoky Mountains. Blackberry Farm.

DAYS 31–32: 31 AUGUST–1 SEPTEMBER

At leisure. Blackberry Farm.

DAY 33: 2 SEPTEMBER

Drive to Atlanta airport. Westin Atlanta Airport Hotel.

DAY 34: 3 SEPTEMBER

Fly to Liberia, Costa Rica. Journey to Punta Islita.

DAYS 35–39: 4–8 SEPTEMBER

At leisure. Punta Islita.

DAY 40: 9 SEPTEMBER

Departure.

DAY 41: 10 SEPTEMBER

Arrival in UK. Welcome home!

CHAPTER ONE

1992 – Walkman – dinner selfies – every six minutes – David Bowie and Prince – sabbatical

S

OUNDTRACK

: P

RINCE

– ‘W

HEN

D

OVES

C

RY

’

Ishould be upfront with you. This is not quite a travelogue; it is not quite an autobiography; it is not quite a motivational self-help book; it is not quite a mid-life crisis. Frankly, I am not quite sure what it is that I have written or quite why you are reading it. Nonetheless, I have written it and you are reading it. I have had two books published previously: one was a children’s novel (which outsold Anthea Turner’s autobiography published the same week, as did all other books published that week); and the other was a textbook on brand protection. This should be better than both of them. I’m glad we have got that out of the way. I think we are going to get on just fine.

The reason we are both here is that I have grown restless. Admittedly, it has been a slow growth rate; almost twenty-five years. One of my sperm has grown into a motorist in the time it has taken for my wanderlust to re-emerge. But, in my defence, I have been a bit busy.

You see, I last travelled in 1992. By ‘travelled’, I don’t mean commuting on the 06.29 from Haywards Heath to Blackfriars, or driving on the A303 to Cornwall, or flying to Dubai for ten days of fake plastic holidays. That’s not travelling; that’s just getting there. Despite regular attempts by Southern Rail to thwart me, I have just been getting there every day since, and sometimes back if the train crew hasn’t become oddly diminutive (‘Train cancelled due to temporary shortage of train crew’). The travelling I am talking about here is authentic Jack Kerouac travelling; romantic, carefree, cash-free, traveller’s cheque (do they still exist?) travelling; chucking some denim shorts, some tie-dye T-shirts and a Swiss army penknife (in case I had to whittle wood in a youth hostel in Sydney) into my green Karrimor backpack (do they still exist?) and hitting the road. Going off to find myself in south-east Asia and fulfil my destiny of becoming a musician, an artist or a writer.

1992. That shouldn’t be very long ago. But alas it is. Travelling was very different back then. The backpack space that I saved on iPads, iPods and Kindles (and multiple chargers), I filled with a Filofax (like an iPad but made of paper), a Walkman (like an iPod but boxier), and books (like a Kindle but without backlighting). It was in the dark (or, depending on your age and perspective, enlightened) days when internet was where you kicked a football, when playlists were compilations, and when no one had yet developed the urge to take photographs of their mirrors or their meals to airmail back to their friends to demonstrate their happiness.

Travelling in 1992 involved forgetting (as opposed to blocking) your friends, when having twenty friends was impressive. In Facebook terms, a mere twenty friends would label you a self-harming loser, albeit that the term ‘friend’ has now been redefined to include someone you have never met. After I left England for my gap year, I didn’t communicate with my twenty (well, OK, six) close friends for ten months. I survived. Even they survived. Neither of us seemed to notice the other’s absence. When I returned home, they hadn’t forgotten what I looked like despite my dearth of mirror photographs. Nor do I recall them asking to view photographs of my dinners, which is a shame as I ate locust in Thailand and snake in China (because it was the cheapest dish on the menu and the numerals were English whereas the characters were Chinese). I think you will agree that would have made for an excellent slideshow, for which I would also have made one of my legendary accompanying mix tapes with a witty, pun-filled title such as ‘Low-Cost Meals’ or ‘The Locust Eaters’.

Now I have decided, twenty-four years later, that it is time to travel again. Time that my days are no longer broken down into chargeable time. Time that time becomes my own again. ‘Billable time’ are two words I intend to replace with ‘time out’ or, ideally, ‘What time is it?’ I want to abandon exactitude, accountability, Oxford commas, and precision. For exactly three months. For, you see, I didn’t become a musician, an artist or a writer after all. Instead, when I returned to England in 1993, I truly found myself. And I found that, disappointingly, myself was a lawyer. I hope you will forgive me and read on.

Lawyers generally charge their clients by ‘the unit’. A unit is six minutes, so there are ten units in an hour. Units are recorded electronically by ‘smart-timers’ on our screens using a piece of software called CD Tracker; CD stands for ‘carpe diem’ in Latin, or in lawyer-speak ‘charge the day’. As soon as we start working on a particular case, we click on the appropriate smart-timer, the meter starts running and the client gets charged for our time. Every lawyer is then assessed by their own utilisation rate: for how many units of six minutes every day have they been recording chargeable time? Non-chargeable time, for example tasks such as giving seminars, writing articles, keeping on top of legal developments, mentoring younger lawyers, visiting clients, networking with other lawyers, having a coffee or lunch, or being sociable with work colleagues, needs to be made up, as it is time not properly utilised. Utilisation rate is assessed against a standard, which varies from firm to firm, of at least six chargeable hours a day. The chargeable unit is institutional and constitutional in the legal profession.

I have been lawyering for twenty-four years. If I assume an average of six chargeable hours a day, which any London lawyer will know is a conservative estimate, over twenty-four years (after deducting holidays and weekends), this equates to over 300,000 units. George Best, Oliver Reed, Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse combined would have struggled to get through that many units in their prime. As a result, I am no longer in my prime either.

When I was in my prime and began work as a fresh-faced junior solicitor, there were no emails and no smart-timers. I didn’t have a computer, either on my desk or at home. I couldn’t type. My secretary could, and she had a typewriter and a bottle of Tipp-Ex. In those simpler times, the most stressful part of my day was the post tray. Every morning at 9 a.m. our general office staff would deposit the day’s post in a tray in the corridor. That would be the only unexpected interruption to my day, aside from the occasional (but rare) fax of fading ink. My firm’s then managing partner used to say that he had had a busy morning if he had not completed The Times crossword by 11 a.m. This was only the early 1990s; it’s not that long ago. I could control and structure my day with: meetings arranged days in advance; written advice; or drafting or research time, valuable quiet time to devote myself entirely to a planned task, without disturbance. On the whole, the job was more sedate and less stressful.

But client requirements have developed at the same pace as technology: now they expect immediate advice; compliance with tight deadlines (requiring work late at night and over weekends); they seethe in a way that they never used to seethe; and the cause of their seething is generally a failure to respond to their email within the same day (or, often, the same hour). Lawyers are in the service sector; I am in the service sector; I accept that. The partners in my firm pride ourselves on the personal hands-on service and responsiveness we provide to clients, which our clients are entitled to as they pay a lot of money for our time.

They deserve and receive excellent service, but that comes at great personal cost. When you are selling your time, it doesn’t leave much spare. I am contactable and responding to emails until midnight every day of the week, over weekends and on holiday. Being on holiday simply means doing conference calls from a more difficult venue, with my kids arguing and smashing things in the background. If I don’t provide that service, then my competitors will be only too happy to pick up from where I left off. I recently saw an advertisement on a train from the litigation department of a nationwide law firm who were advertising their services with the following slogan: ‘Now, as in today, as in immediately’. To me, that says it all about the sacrifices now required to attract clients in the modern legal services sector.

It is just the way of the internet-connected world. The genie is out of the bottle, so I don’t complain about it because I have evolved to accept it and, more tellingly, my generation is responsible for it. I have made a good career out of the law; it is stimulating work with challenging clients and I have earned good money from it. It is not going to change now; it is too late. But I do need a break from it. It is time for me to go on a diet: I have gorged on emails and they have gorged on me, but now I have decided to remove myself from email and go off the grid for three months. I am taking a sabbatical. For the first time in over twenty years, I won’t be accounting for every six minutes of my life and it feels good.

So why now, when my career is going fairly well? Why not take my sabbatical, as many do, shortly before retirement?

I have acted on some interesting trials and disputes involving: Formula One teams fighting over who said Lotus first; brewers fighting over who has the right to use ‘Budweiser’ – the Czechs who used it first or the Americans who used it most; faked G-force testing of aeroplane seats installed in A330s, A380s and B777s (when I learned that the ‘brace, brace’ position is not to save you in the event of a plane crash but to ensure that you break your own neck and die quickly); the governing body of cycling, the UCI, and the question of whether they might have been complicit in Lance Armstrong’s and the US Postal Service team’s sophisticated doping programme when they overlooked a positive test of the sport’s most valuable asset; and the missale to thousands of customers by a major bank of interest rate hedging products. I accept that the last one is stretching the definition of ‘interesting’ to the same extent that Facebook is stretching the definition of ‘friends’, but on the whole, my cases have been interesting and rewarding and the time has flown.

But then something happened. Something unexpected. Something tragic. Something epiphanous that caused me to re-evaluate my life.

David Bowie and Prince both died.

Each artist had featured on my ‘Kangaroo Backpacking’ compilation tape in 1992: the avant-garde keyboard-enhanced funkiness (despite there being no bass guitar at all – genius!) of ‘When Doves Cry’, segueing into the pot-enhanced junkiness of ‘Andy Warhol’ (as in hole). Admittedly, Bowie was twenty years older than me when he died, and he had no doubt ingested a number of exotic life-reducing substances which I haven’t encountered so much during my time as a litigator. But Prince was only ten years older than me when he died in an elevator. I could quite merrily continue suing and being sued for another decade, only to keel over in the office lift without breathing pure Alaskan air or inhaling the honky-tonk mustiness of a Nashville bar. Incidentally, the lifts at my firm in which any keeling would be done are made by a company called Schindler. I would like to think that Steven Spielberg would approve of us having Schindler’s lifts, but I don’t want that to be my final amusing thought as I draw my terminal breath. And, as I will explain shortly, the bar is pretty high in my extended family for final utterances.

So that is why I have decided to take my sabbatical now. As Bowie and Prince have expired prematurely, I need to shift my focus away from work for a while, before I do the same. I need to break from the law and remove myself from the south-east bubble. I need to surround myself with ordinary people again, people who don’t take themselves too seriously and would rather, on a Friday night, watch Mock the Week than The Ten O’Clock News.

The word ‘sabbatical’ originates from the Hebrew ‘Shabbat’, meaning literally ‘a ceasing’. Its modern-day meaning is ‘an extended absence in the career of an individual in order to achieve something’. I feel the last part of this definition imposes excessive pressure on me: I simply want the luxury of spare time again and to spend three months getting up just in time to watch Pointless with the kids. But Wikipedia is didactic and tells me that a true sabbatical taker should write a book or travel extensively. Not wanting to disappoint Wikipedia, I have decided to do both. So that is why we are here, you and me; that is why I am writing and that is what you are reading.

My first, unplanned, travel destination, though, is determined by a non-celebrity death.

CHAPTER TWO

Death of an outlaw – divorced dads – new boots – Moby Dick – apparitions – medical negligence – ham sandwiches – blessed fruit

S

OUNDTRACK

: J

EFF

B

UCKLEY

– ‘H

ALLELUJAH

’

‘You’re not all sleeping with Ann, are you?’ I ask apprehensively.

‘Ann’s not sleeping, she’s dead,’ jokes Gerry.

This is how the conversation runs between the former partner of one of my current partner’s five sisters, and me when he picks me up from Cork airport. Gerry has been estranged from the woman he never married, but with whom he still very successfully brings up two kids as a hands-on father, for around five years. His mother-outlaw (if he was never married to her daughter, she can’t be his in-law) has just died. Ann is (now was) also my mother-outlaw, as I am also not married to one of her other divorced daughters, Jackie. It’s a modern family.

Divorce doesn’t fuss the Irish, who don’t bother with social stigmas. Being a divorced man myself, I find their total indifference towards divorce to be surprisingly refreshing. ‘Surprisingly’ because, contrary to what you might think, the Irish are readily able to distinguish between their strict Catholic beliefs and the fiction of some marriages with the sniffy dismissal of a ‘so what’ or a ‘cop yourself on’. ‘Refreshing’ because I live in the south-east of England, where the social ostracising meted out to divorced dads – particularly by wives on the school run, anxious that their own husbands stick around long enough to pay for their next piece of cosmetic surgery and a Kennel Club-bred French bulldog (or whichever trophy dog is in vogue at the time of print) – has a puritanical quality normally reserved for those with sixteenth-century beliefs rather than those with 16-valve Range Rover Evoques. The Irish way is better.

When I first met Jackie’s father, in the pub (naturally), he didn’t know his daughter was back in Youghal, nor did he know she had a new man. In egg terms, his reaction was sunny side up rather than over easy. He turned on his bar stool, smiled at me, and said: ‘’Ave ye gat a nu pair o’ boots der, Jacqueline?’ To be fair, his observational skills couldn’t be faulted. She was indeed wearing a new pair of Uggs. The fact she was also wearing a new partner did not require comment. I liked that.

The Irish way of death is also better, as I am about to learn. Jackie’s mother may have lacked the worldwide celebrity of David Bowie or Prince, but in Youghal she was a megastar.

Youghal is a historic, walled seaport community on the coastline of east Cork. One of its claims to fame, perhaps its only claim to fame (apart from having a lighthouse, which I have always felt was an ambitious attempt to impress tourists), is Moby Dick. Many of the outdoor scenes of the now irrelevant 1956 Gregory Peck film set in New Bedford, Massachusetts, were in fact filmed by director John Huston in Youghal. A pub in the town, overlooking the Atlantic coast, is named after the film. Youghal has a population of 8,000. Most of them have drunk in Moby Dick’s with Ann Foley. Ann had no way of knowing that her liver was not best placed for being a local at Moby Dick’s.

You see, Ann had the misfortune of having a rhesus negative blood type, but giving birth to rhesus positive babies. This was viewed as a bad thing in the 1970s, as some of the rhesus positive blood could have passed through the bloodstream into her placenta and she might have developed antibodies to it. Such dangerous antibodies, if left in her system, could seriously damage or kill the foetus in a future pregnancy. During the 1970s and 1980s, Ann’s approach to reproduction was one year on, one year off, so the likelihood of future pregnancy was high in her case. The development of anti-D immunoglobulin, a product made from donated blood, should have been a positive development to obviate any risk to future babies. For her first four children, it was.

But in 1977, the year her fifth child was born, a batch of blood was contaminated because one donor, whose plasma had been used to make the anti-D, had jaundice and hepatitis but this had been missed due to a sloppy screening process by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service Board (the BTSB). Ann received the contaminated blood, as did Anita Roddick of the Body Shop. To compound the negligence, despite three BTSB employees realising the mistake, no alarm was raised and no action was taken to trace the women who received doses from that batch. But that wasn’t the final mistake made. In 1994, the alarm was finally raised and a national screening exercise for hepatitis C took place in Ireland. Ann was part of that programme and, staggeringly, the BTSB missed the virus in her again.

Ann was oblivious to the state-injected death sentence until she was diagnosed with liver cancer three years ago, found to have been caused by the anti-D immunoglobulin blood products contaminated with hepatitis C administered to her following the birth of her fifth child in 1977. Ann didn’t pander to the social stigma of the ‘C-word’. Instead, she thought ‘so what’, copped herself on, and simply told everyone she was ‘here for a good time, not for a long time’. With the damages award she received from the Hepatitis C Compensation Tribunal, she took herself off to Medjugorje.

I had never heard of Medjugorje. Until 1981, neither had most people outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But then six local schoolchildren, merrily playing in the impoverished former Yugoslav town, witnessed a Marian apparition and well and truly put their hometown on the map. Now, I was also a schoolchild in 1981. I often used to play with my friends in the back fields between Hartlepool and Elwick. There were things I saw which I would tell my parents about, such as sticklebacks, puffballs, an escaped parakeet and even on one occasion a local weirdo who went on to achieve notoriety by also escaping… from a police station before going on to commit a triple murder. There were things I saw which I would not tell my parents about, like a dumped stash of pornographic magazines which Glen Beamson and I found in a plastic bag by the beck, and the breasts of Alison Waters. I feel I should probably explain the latter. One summer’s evening, after nightfall, Jonny Alcock and I had climbed a tree to watch Alison, four years ahead of us at school, and indisputably the best-looking girl in West Park – and most probably in the northern hemisphere, or so it felt to us at a time when we had never seen a topless girl before – taking off her bra in her bedroom overlooking the fields, little knowing that she too was being overlooked.

But I am fairly sure I wouldn’t have come home from playing in the fields to tell my parents I had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. If I had, I would have had the back of my leg slapped for lying and been sent to bed without any tea.

Fair fucks (as they say in Ireland) to the Bosnian schoolchildren, though. They were braver than me; and their parents, apparently, believed them. The children are still alive today; and the apparition is still appearing to some of them, in their adult form. The Virgin Mary believes in punctuality, appearing to one of the schoolchildren, who grew up to become a full-time visionary (my careers adviser never gave me this as an option), on the 25th of each month, while one of the other schoolchildren receives her ‘messages’ (to my regret, my research has been unable to verify that Mary has modernised and is sending text messages of herself in front of mirrors, or of her dinner) on the 2nd of each month.

Although I should not let my own faithlessness and apparition-envy influence you, it seems I am in good company. The Catholic Church has declared the apparitions ‘non constat’, which means that it cannot confirm the supernatural status without more evidence, but will not stand in the way