November 14

My time in America is running low. While I've been here I've done and said some amazing things. I think I am leaving the country in a better state than when I found it. Change has come to America. But now he is going home. Mr Obama, you are welcome.

Some guy showed my friend and I a book which tells you what your personality is like according to what your date of birth is. This is usually the part where the narrator says how cynical he felt, but then he looked up his own date of birth and was astonished at how on the money it was. Well that's exactly what happened. The only difference is that I wasn't that astonished because it wasn't really on the money. It was okay on some things and wildly wrong on others. For instance it said that, as somebody born on May 26, I am "proud of my status as the voice of the working class". The makers of the book were really sticking their necks out with that one. Who could that possibly apply to? Martin Luther King? Radio 5's John Gaunt?

The only part of the book's reading of me I liked was in the "faults" section, where it said I was "escapist and guilt-ridden". That's fantastic. I'm like Ronnie Biggs or Josef Mengele living in a Latin American timeshare. Why do my ghosts still torment me?

One more point about these books. These books are stupid. When they're assessing your strengths and weaknesses as a person they follow a formula: People born on this date tend to be x. But be careful as they are prone to x20. So, for example, if you're "fun loving", watch it because you are also potentially a hedonist, probably binge-smoking opium in Trump Towers right now. If you're "creative" you may also be obscure and introverted , prone to drifting off into your own private Twilight Zone for days. If you "enjoy the good things in life" you're liable to overindulge, if you're "organised" you're pushy and if you're "tall" they'll probably say you're impossibly gangly at times, freaking people out with your vine-like limbs.

That evening in a bar we met a group of people who travel around the country, painting and decorating aquariums and marine mammal enclosures in zoos. They always have work because at any given time, on any given day, there is always, somewhere in America, a penguin pit in dire need of a fresh lick of paint. They get to roll in and create a bunch of crazy, psychadelic designs all over the walls. I'm finding it hard at this moment to think of a better job. Even their van had enormous paintings of oceans and fish all over it. When Albert Camus stroked his chin and asked "what is happiness?" someone should have pointed to that van and shouted "That! That van right there!"