November 2

New Orleans is not like the rest of America. And by "America" I mean a gross, oversimplification based on the four per cent that I've seen. If the other 96 per cent is like New Orleans however I would be surprised. Nawleans is kind of a country all of its own. A few people I've met who live here say it's like living inside a surreal, blissful dream. The weather is beautiful, the streets are somewhere between Montpelier and Havana, the food is consistently great and the people are a laid-back, happy-go-lucky bunch. It's so nice here, so spookily pleasant, that part of your brain tells you that it's all an illusion and the whole fragile charade is liable to come crashing down at any moment. Which of course it is. We're below sea level here. All God has to do is fart in the bath and New Orleans is finished. The city's motto is laissez les bon temps roulez. This could be construed as a plea. No one knows how much time this place has left in general. Can they at least be good times?

People are unstoppably friendly here. You can't help but meet people. Even if you were a pathalogically unsociable mouth breather who had a perpetually running nose and a full neck beard you would still find friendship in New Orleans.

We went to a perfect jazz and blues club that night. It was the kind of smokey dive that as a jazz and blues fan you pray you will one day run into. If jazz and blues clubs were porridge this one was just right. I met a 70-something guy in a smoking jacket (said he wanted to "bring them back"), who owned a popular blues club in New York for 20 years. He had been good friends with Lightning Hopkins - a blues hero of mine. Apparently Lightning never owned a telephone so if you wanted to contact him you had to call on his barber who would go off to find him. That Lightning!

I also had someone offer to buy me a drink in what can only be described as an incredibly hostile fashion. Chance, a be-Stetsoned man from Texas, moseyed up to the bar and said he'd buy me and my friend whatever we wanted. Being English and therefore preturnaturally polite I think I asked him "are you sure?" one too many times (twice). "Boy," he growled. "If you ask me that one more time I'm gonna knock you the fuck out." Chance was many things but he wasn't a fabricator so I accepted my drink quietly.

Incidentally New Orleans is the only place I've been where the bums and tramps shamble up and sing jazz standards to you for money. They sing them pretty well too.