Five months in, and another landmark should arrive in the post here at some point over the next week, with the arrival of my first American credit cards. This is something I’ve unconsciously resisted, having been brought up with a Scottish Presbyterian upbringing view, that any kind of debt inevitably leads to immorality, an eternity in hell, and possibly even Papism. I managed to get through my student years without accumulating a single penny of debt and, even now, it’s something of a badge of honour that I have always paid off the entire balance on my credit card each month. Thus, the suggestion that I acquire more debt (ok – potential debt) is something I viewed with a jaundiced air.

However, the steady and inevitable loosening of my British ties makes it probably inevitable, assisted by my current credit card company giving the impression that I might as well be on the surface of the moon, as far as customer service goes. You and I may think we’re in the third millennium, but the Royal Bank of Scotland might as well be scratching away with ye olde quill pens, before popping their epistles onto a galleon, going by the speed of their customer service department. A simple query about my credit card, submitted by email, took almost a month to get a response – which arrived here in Scottsdale by snail-mail, written on papyrus. I am tempted to run up an enormous debt, safe in the knowledge that I would probably have died of old age before they actually noticed.

So, Chris is now apparently arranging credit for me. I’m not quite sure how she’s doing it, since I don’t have any actual income here at the moment, have only lived here for a short space of time, and effectively possess no credit record at all. Perhaps this is actually a good thing, and they treat no credit record as a totally clean one? The good thing is, this will actually be an American card with an American address – and will thus be usable by PayPal.

As regular readers will be aware, I’ve had a few recent clashes with them. I finally received an admission that their rejection of my credit card was not, contrary to all their previous claims, because I didn’t know my own address, but was because I was using a British credit-card in the United States. [My bank confirmed that PayPal never even attempted to verify my credit-card] I’ve now set up an international account with them, using my old Tulse Hill address, which it accepted quite happily. How long this will last, I don’t know – I expect a PayPal-sponsored SWAT team to come crashing through the door any morning now, and arrest me for fraud.

Even more ironically, while making such a fuss over the precise wording of the address on my credit card statement, thanks to our business PayPal sent us one of their debit cards, which we could cheerfully wave around all over the place. I refuse to use it on principle, figuring that this is too much like climbing into bed with the devil. When Satan comes a-calling, he brings an unlimited line of credit. There are those who reckon that the Mark of the Beast, as described in Revelations, is actually the barcodes you seen on almost every product nowadays. Personally, I reckon it’s more likely to be your PayPal login id.

Summer is a-coming in, loudly sing cuckoo… Not here in Phoenix, where the cuckoo was recently found dead of heatstroke. For it may be only April, but the temperature earlier this week cruised past one hundred degrees Fahrenheit – to put that into perspective, it’s more than the highest temperature ever recorded anywhere in the UK (98.8F, in Cheltenham on August 3rd, 1990, fact fans).

We still have plenty of time for it to get even hotter, so some kind of survival plan has to be put into action now. “Not going outside for five months” certainly has its appeal, but I do need to leave occasionally, if only to stock up on supplies of black cockerels – I will shortly be embarking on a program of daily sacrificial rites, to appease the gods of air-conditioning and hopefully ensure there are no breakdowns. If that happens, I will climb inside the freezer and pull the door shut as an emergency measure, not coming out until the repairman has visited.

That might be some time – come summer, aircon engineers here in the Valley become like gods themselves, with all the fickle omnipotence that implies. Even at the best of times, people here have a tendency not to turn up when they should, so I dread to think how long we might have to wait for a repairman. To speed up the process, after two days, we’ll move in to the local mall; after three, we’ll recruit Chris’s elderly mother to pretend she has some kind of terminal illness; and after four, daughter Emily will be on offer as part of an incentive package. Both her and Robert have been heard saying how cold it is in the house: I sit there, in a pair of shorts and nothing else, and marvel at those who possess nuclear fuel for blood.

If I haven’t yet been out to experience the heat in the middle of the day, what I have encountered has been quite enough. Last night, went to the baseball, and was looking forward to seeing it in air-conditioned comfort, since the stadium here has a retractable roof specically for this purpose. But for some reason they didn’t close it – like a hundred degrees isn’t warm enough to merit it – and so the crowd were forced to swelter like 28,000 barbecuing T-bones. I should mention here, that Phoenix may be the only place you put steaks on the barbecue to keep them cool, and where “medium-rare” is achieved by waving the meat out of the window for thirty seconds. The idea of storming the swimming pool (yes, the baseball stadium has one of those too!) was highly appealing.

In addition, the stadium lights brought in every flying insect in the state – I kept expecting two small Japanese women to appear, and see Mothra circling lazily overhead. Speaking of lower life-forms, such inconveniences were minor beside the joy of taunting two opposition fans who were being particularly obnoxious, especially after their side jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the first innings. By the end of the game, when Arizona had whipped Atlanta’s ass 13-6, virtually the entire section was, very pointedly, cheering in their direction for each home team hit. Ah, there’s nothing quite like taunting loud-mouthed, arrogant rednecks — at least, when you’re on your home turf, something which Steve Buscemi recently failed to grasp.

So the sun beats down outside, I hide inside, attempting to remain “pale and interesting”, and packing all my dark T-shirts away until October. A quick check of the paper reveals that the high in London yesterday was a mere 56F – guess you’re all still huddled round carcass bonfires to keep warm. Me, I’m off for my nineteenth cold drink of the day. I’ll cope…

After last week, where I came to the conclusion that I had become my parents, I have decided that I am not really cut out for this child-rearing lark at all. This conviction was forceably brought home to me on Sunday afternoon, when three small children, belonging to Chris’s step-daughter visited for their annual Easter Egg hunt. They were the human equivalent of a mountainside full of snow – very pleasant when stationary, but when it starts to move, you’d better watch out, and lock away all valuables. I have nothing but the deepest respect for the parents; or, indeed, any parents who manage to get through eighteen years of child-rearing without once reaching for the nail-gun [“Mummy, why am I limping in a circle?”] as an effective tool of child-control. Children should be seen and not heard. Or better yet, neither seen nor heard, and a combination of duct-tape and the cupboard beneath the stairs would assist mightily in this goal.

However, they’ve gone, and I think we have a good chance of getting the urine stains out of the cushions, so I am left to contemplate my birthday. This sees me perched precariously in the middle between thirty and forty, precisely half-way through my alloted three-score-and-ten, and wondering how I managed to make it thus far without being beaten up by someone I’d managed to piss off. Such as Jimmy Saville – the story of which will hopefully appear here in the next week or two, I’m just waiting for Demon’s legal department to approve it.

Chris, the darling, threw a surprise party for me on Friday. I should really have guessed, given the ones she organised in 1999 (James Bond) and 2000 (toga), but for some reason, didn’t, and went innocently off to her sister’s house on Friday afternoon to install some memory. When I came back, the house here had been transformed into an alien grotto – this year’s theme was ‘Men in Black’. So everyone was appropriately clad in suits and shades, while Area 51 posters decorated the room. A fun time was had by all, with the highlight perhaps…but if I told you, then I’d have to kill you. Suffice it to say that plotting will begin now for the end of July, when it will be Chris’s turn. Bwah-ha-hah… [Laugh largely aimed at investing her with an appropriate sense of paranoia for the next three months]

Birthdays are supposed to be a time for taking stock. The problem is, if anyone had told me five years ago, that I’d be living in Arizona, writing programs for a jewellery supplies web-site, I’d not have believed them. I should therefore be loathe to predict where I will be in another five years, except for the fact that I am, at the moment, deliriously happy. It’s taken me a good few years to achieve Nirvana – and, boy, what a long strange journey it’s been – but I can now state with confidence that if I’m sitting in exactly the same situation in another five years, I will be every bit as content as I am now.

Indeed, perhaps even more so, and without having to raise a finger to change my life, since the kids will, by that point, be all grown up and saving whales and stuff. This will leave Chris and myself to roam the world, laptops in hand, selling beads remotely and perhaps writing the editorial from an Alp somewhere above Salzburg. Does that sound like a fine goal for my fortieth birthday?

I have met my parents, and they are me. This somewhat disturbing revelation came home to me last week, when I was typing away in the office here, grumbling to myself about the crap music booming out from Emily’s room, and listening to Punk and Disorderly, a compilation featuring such acts as Blondie, The Stranglers, The Sex Pistols, etc. Y’know – proper music. But I suddenly realised that punk happened 25 years ago, and what I was doing was, in chronological terms, the same thing as my parents listening to Bill Haley and the Comets when I was Emily’s age. And they said that was “proper music” too…

Fortunately, this realisation was tempered by a few secondary realisations – not the least being that what Emily listens to is, indeed, crap. There is something strangely disturbing about hearing a thirteen-year old singing Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi?, the latest single from Christina Aguilera (or, as Chris likes to snarl, Christina Aguisluta), blithely unaware of what the title means, or that it’s about a prostitute in New Orleans. It’s hard to work out what’s worse: the massacre of poor, innocent, defenseless old songs, which never harmed anyone in their lives, or her original tunes. Put it this way, Aguisluta’s apprenticeship on The Mickey Mouse Club didn’t go to waste; I await her cover of It’s a Small World with trepidation.

I also like to think I can hold my own with the youth of today. While my own tastes are for industrial bands like Nine Inch Nails (and I can freak most teenagers out by hitting the truly hardcore stuff such as Ultraviolence), I know who Limp Bizkit are – why they are, admittedly remains something of a mystery, but that information appears to be strictly on a need-to-know basis. Had a nice conversation just last night with John, one of Robert’s friends, about Metallica and he played me a cheerful little ditty off one of their albums, which was all about the meaning, derivation and usage of the word “Fuck”. It was amusing, in a way only teenage boys can truly appreciate, although there wasn’t much of a tune to it, as my parents would no doubt have tartly observed.

Mind you, while I am listening to the abrasive tech-noir noise of Frontline Assembly, Robert has got Robbie Williams’ easy-listening sounds on, which would seem to be somewhat miswired – hell, even my mother likes Robbie Williams. [To his street-credit, Robert did also borrow my Eminem CD – giving me a strange but unmistakeable feeling of satisfaction.] And it’s usually Emily who has to come into our room late at night and tell us to turn the stereo down, rather than the other way round And that’s despite my tolerance for N’Sync, stopping at about the 2.5 dB mark – there’s no such thing as “quiet enough” there.

Our ability in areas like movies also help to lend us credibility: the discovery that someone older than 25 actually saw Scary Movie comes as a revelation to some teenagers. Though whenever Robert tries to talk us into seeing a film, two words prove sufficient to shut him up: Battlefield Earth. He didn’t just see it at the cinema…he went back and saw it again, and we aren’t going to let him forget it in a hurry. I look forward to introducing him to Showgirls, so he can appreciate what an enjoyably bad movie should really be like.

Things like this give me hope for the future. And when they talk about the awesome new actor called Chow Yun-Fat, I think we may perhaps be permitted a small smirk.

Yes: poof balls. I think this is one product found in the local supermarket here, which will not be making its way across the Atlantic, at least not under that name. They’re harmless enough – both literally and figuratively being simply soft foam, moulded into the shape of footballs, etc. for indoor use – but you can only presume no Britons were involved in the naming of it. It’s certainly something to point out to any visiting Brits, just as Chris was mightily amused to discover that we keep faggots in the frozen foods section at Somerfield.

Over the past four months, I’ve come to appreciate keenly the truth of the statement about Britain and America being two nations divided by a common language. This is not necessarily a bad thing: road-rage is a lot safer when the recipient of your abuse doesn’t understand what you’re saying, especially in a country where the carrying of guns is one step short of mandatory. Smile as you stick your V’s up at someone, and greet them with a shout of “Oi! Tosser!”, and you’ll probably get away with it. How I sniggered the first time I heard “wanker” crop up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer – albeit in the Dick Van Dyke-reborn accent of Spike.

I think the crossover is perhaps easier the way I’ve done it, going from Britain to America, because of the huge amount of American culture that we got to see in the UK. I imagine pretty much everyone knows that Starsky and Hutch slid across the hood of their car, filled it with gas and locked criminals in the trunk. Actually, I never recall either of them shutting perps up like that, but if they had, it would have been in the trunk. And definitely not in the boot.

You might think that simple things like chemical elements would be common on both sides of the Atlantic. But, no. At position 13 on the periodic table in Robert’s chemistry book is something called aluminum. Note that carefully: not aluminium, but aluminum. This explains why, when I asked for aluminium foil in the supermarket once, the expression on the poor assistant was about what you’d expect to get, after explaining the Theory of Relativity to your faithful pet spaniel: a desperate desire to please, mixed with absolute and utter incomprehension. [Interestingly, aluminium was the accepted spelling in the States up until 1925, when the American Chemical Society decided to change. Never let it be said these editorials aren’t educational] You gradually get used to this – last time I went in, I was mouthing “garbage sacks” all the way round the aisles, just in case I couldn’t find what I used to call rubbish bags.

Even where we have the same word, pronunciation may not necessarily be the same. Garage: is it GA-rage or ga-RAGE? Man-DA-tory or MAN-da-TORY? We may be easily amused, but many are the happy hours Chris and I have spend debating such issues. It’s not an argument as such, because neither of us have the slightest intention of changing – and I wouldn’t want Chris to change, any more than she would want me to change. For what seemed normal in Britain is now a badge of my difference and independence; when you get complete strangers suddenly asking where your accent is from, it freaks you out the first time, but eventually, it becomes something to which you warm.

Personally, I wear such differences as a badge of honour (note spelling, with a “u” – much as this Yanqui spell-checker might disagree!). Warm beer, fish and chips…and an interesting pronounciation of the word “vitamin”. Doesn’t it make you proud to be British?