This title is directly opposed to the first number in this series, which, as Electric Dragon pointed out, was written for ‘people who USED to be Patriots but now are not’, since that’s what ‘ex-patriots’ would mean. Frankly, as he says, after the England game on Sunday, that suddenly referred to a whole swathe of people who suddenly were, as they say, ‘not singing any more’. Or ‘not having stupid flags on their stupid vans anymore’, as the modern equivalent might be. I don’t know. I don’t live here any more.

Warning, returning Britishist-Living-Abroad: In WhereverYouLive, you are almost certainly permitted to ask stupid questions about how things work because your accent sounds different, so you’re not expected to know the intricacies of the multi-tier inter-linkysystemed super-privatised transit system.

If you are, picking a very random example out of the air, a British person who lives in San Francisco, you will be very used to people in the service industry being gentle with you (while/and/or trying to fleece you) because as much as you feel local, your accent marks you out as a tourist. They won’t mind if you ask a few silly questions about where you’re supposed to stick your card or what the deal with ordering coffee is in this particular establishment.

When you have a British accent and look British and are in Britain, you have NO excuse. Ask questions about how something works, where the money goes, what order you do things in, and people get thrown. And without starting a whole conversation about where you’ve been living for the last two years and why you’ve not been back to keep up to date on the precise etiquette and system back here - and you’re CLEARLY not going to want to engage in that conversation, because you are, as aforementioned, British - you just end up looking like a moron.

Trick? Pretend to be Californian. Works like a charm.

So warning, fellow-people-abroaders, unless you can adopt a very good impression of the accent you’ve been living with all this time away when talking to strange shop-keepers and service-providers with the same accent as your own, expect to be treated like the remedial national failure these people perceive you to be.
Because remember: if someone’s making you feel like that? You probably deserve it.
Welcome back to the UK.

As I noticed coming down on a train from West Norfolk to London, the natives are very particular about contact between some body parts and communal seating areas:

As this picture demonstrates, it is important to keep your feet off the seats.

But resting your abnormally ginormous cock on them is perfectly acceptable.

I was getting all misty eyed as I raised the blind and looked out over the rolling green fields and hills below. We identified rivers, cities, towns, forests and, as we got lower to the ground and circled over London, neighbourhoods, stadiums, landmarks and even the pub at the end of the road we would be staying in that first night.

Twenty two months. I hadn’t ever intended such a big gap between a big move away and coming back to the UK, where most of my family and many of my friends live, but things happened, and intentions clashed against stubbornnesses and almost two years passed before visiting.

So by the time we landed, nostalgia, excitement and the weight of expectation were almost overwhelming my usual desire to punch everyone I’d just spent nine hours in too-close-proximity to and the need to get as much personal space as physically possible.
Well, almost.

Looking out at the beautiful day as we gently lowered ourselves down onto London, I felt pangs of anxiety. What if I had made a mistake giving up the career I was building here in order to take a chance at living somewhere else? What if, really, this is not only my physical birthplace but my natural, real and only home?

I’m not sure if I actually expected a chorus of dancing chimney sweeps and gap-toothed-but-smiling-flower-girls to greet me warmheartedly by name as I walked through the arrivals hall, but, sadly, they weren’t on shift (or were on lunch when we arrived).

Instead, we were met by a lovely minicab driver called Ash - the first person who has ever held a piece of cardboard with my name written on it, and who talked to us just enough to be friendly but not enough to be one of those minicab drivers.

But then, four minutes out of the arrival gate and getting to the overwhelmed carpark lifts, we met our first, loud, vocal welcome to the country:

The resident Heathrow Arrivals Gate Racist, who, silver of hair, polyester of trouser and puce of face, shouted full pelt at a besuited man of British/Caribbean heritage that seemed to work for one of the airlines and had made some unmeaning error trying to get in the lift with him: “YOU JUST RAHN OVAH MAH FAHKIN FOOT. I don’t CARE wevver you KNOW you did or NOT. I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU EVEN FINK YOU’RE DOING ERE. YOU SHOULD FAHKIN APOLOGISE. THAT’S THE ENGLISH WAY”

Now, I can’t deny that we say sorry for a lot of things in this country whether they’re our fault or not, I can’t help but think this wasn’t his point. He seemed to be saying that the man, rather than deny he’d bumped into him, should just apologise, because he was not ‘English’. Trust me, this was his tone.

I stood, my mouth flapping on the other side of the lift. All the way back to my sister’s house in the minicab I was coming up with good retorts. “Oh really, sir? Apologising is the English way? Or is “being a charmless bigot” the English way?” was about the tone of it, though they got cleverer and more DorothyParkeresque as the journey went on.

But I admit that when we passed him in the carpark I just trod on the heel of his flip flops and mumbled that he was “an objectionable cunt” (one of the most satisfyingly damning things to speak out loud, I challenge anyone to deny it) because frankly, I hadn’t the enthusiasm to build a full argument. I’d just got off a ten-hour flight.

I’d like to thank him, though, for helping decide my future residency plans for the next few years.
If he’s the welcome wagon the conservative government have arranged for incoming flights, then yes, immigration may go down. Punching, however, may go up.

[I have had other, more affectionate experiences since, I promise. More of which soon]

When I first came to California, in 1998, it was to study at the University of California’s Davis campus for a semester. Davis is about 75 miles inland from San Francisco, and is a quiet, bicycle-loving cowtown kind of place, with a few bars, my favourite american pizza place in the world, and a college team nicknamed the ‘Aggies’, which is short for ‘Agricola’ which is something to do with farming. There was quite a lot to do with farming. And cows. There were cows, I was told, with holes in the side kept open with plastic hoops so you could look right in, and even open a little door in the plastic to have a poke, if you wanted. And, possibly, if you weren’t there studying with the Theatre grad school prgramme. Still, though. Davis is nice. If small, and a bit, you know, agricultural for your urban-to-the-bone correspondent. Basically when the wind was in the right direction it smelled of silage. But that’s the countryside for you. Nice, but, you know, “country”.

So it stands to reason that every time I got to go to San Francisco during that time (and it turned out to be only about three times - a couple of nights in all) I tended to get a bit over-excited by the scale of it all. It was the biggest major American city I’d ever been in. It was the ONLY major American city I’d ever been in, yes. But also the biggest. I would take lots and lots of pictures, and so would C, who was my roommate on the trip (and at home) and then we would take the film back to Davis, get them developed with doubles of each, and then share all out pictures with each other.

By the time I got home to the UK, leaving California early rather than taking time to travel because we both missed out boyfriends so horribly much (oh, stupid youth), I realised I had about eleventy billion pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration, sorry.
It was only about thirtyteen billion, I think. After you take out the over-exposed or over-excitably-hand-shaky ones.

I had pictures from far away, from up close, from under the bridge, over the bridge, from on the bridge looking up, on the bridge looking down, from either side of the bridge, from a boat, from Alcatraz, from the city, from a beach - pictures of golden gate bridge ornaments, or murals, or … if it was red, and suspensionny and could straddle a great thoroughfare of seamen, I had a picture of it. In multiple. Multiple multiple.

[NB:Not "if it wore red suspenders and greatly straddled semen thoroughfares". That would apparently suggest I spent my entire time in North Beach taking pictures in lapdancing clubs.
And I didn't.
You're not allowed to take pictures in there]

Anyway, since moving here two years ago, my mania for taking pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge has not seemed to have subsided much.

Maybe because, while flying into SFO, it’s one of those first things that you can spot (fog permitting) and say Look! I’m in San Francisco!, and start to feel excited because you’ve reached your destination.

Or perhaps because it is partly because it happens to be my favourite colour - this bright, popping, orange-red standing in contrast against the cloud, or the sea, cloud, or city. Or cloud. But I’m a little obsessed. The study where we take turns in working one framed engineers drawing of the structure of the bridge, another framed map of the seabed under the bridge that makes up the Golden Gate. On the other wall, a set of black and white postcards from the early thirties show the bridge in various stages of construction.

When I’m out walking in the city - which I still am, I just am finding writing about it (about most everything) hard right now - my heart still flips a little when I round a corner and suddenly see its two points rising up over the park, or past another couple of hills and a bunch of neighbourhoods. Sometimes you’ll just be walking along and suddenly it will creep around the corner and pop up like a friendly ghost between two buildings.

And since I always have a little camera on me (unless you are a robber or a brigand and happen to be reading this, in which case I certainly do not, am not going on holiday any time in the near future, and do not know my pin number, sorry), it seems rude not to take a picture. Or seven. Every time.

I’ve made a set of just some of the pictures I’ve taken of one damned bridge - and this, of course, doesn’t include the ones I took all those years ago or the ones I’ve deleted along the way. And I’ve deleted a LOT.

Even from ON the bridge (worst picture ever, yet almost exactly precisely identical to one I took in 1998):

Thinking about it, that original picture was of the railing on the OTHER side of the bridge. Otherwise looks very similar, though.

But then, when people come and visit, they always, invariably, want to take a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. And we ended up doing that quite so much that I made a little guide on Next Stop (ace website, haven’t had time to use it enough recently. Must amend that) about the best places you can take people to a) get a picture of the golden gate bridge and/or b) a picture of them AND the golden gate bridge.

And, while there, I always take pictures too. Because while there are many other things now that remind me I’m in San Francisco (and why I am) it’s such an iconic structure, and ALSO, luckily, such a beautiful thing, that I can never stop myself taking as many pictures of it as my guests. In the morning sun, in the rain, in fog, and, most of all from my second favourite vantage point (after Baker Beach, fact fans), at night:

And occasionally - well, only once, really, but you’ll notice I’m just trying to sneak it in here without sounding all la-di-da - from directly overhead, in the seaplane ride that My Beloved booked to surprise me on my birthday.

And then, recently, I’ve been trying to work out how to get the feeling of crossing the bridge and how excitingly hypnotic it was, I started taking pictures at several second intervals and making them into mosaics (some of the others are in that set I linked to)

And now I’ve graduated to videos. And sooner or later I’ll work out how to put music soundtracks to things like this, and then, I’ll just keep pointing the camera up at the hypnotically swooping cables and snapping away like I’d never seen it before.

I wonder when this golden gate awe will wear off. I hope never.

…. abdominal exercises you can perform using only a resistance thong and a tin of superfoods that will guarantee you your perfect bikini bod within 28 minutes!

There must be some logic to the collection of magazines that crowd the racks of my little neighbourhood gym. In fact, it’s possible to come to a whole set of conclusions about the kind of people frequenting the gym just by going through the glossy pages shoved into the boxes by the ineffectual recumbent bicycle or the you’re-trying-to-kill-me stair climbing machine.

You would quickly come to the conclusion that:
a) You assume this to be a reasonably affluent area with a lot of new parents of a possibly slightly older age, with the preponderance of Parenting, Ladies Home Journal and Martha Stewart Magazine. You’d be correct.
b) The quite overwhelming number of magazines with rich and/or calorific recipes on every page might lead you to suspect that the people who use this gym either don’t really have much weight to lose, or have the self control of GODS. You’d be mainly correct.
c) Women like reading magazines on exercise equipment more than men. Possibly true. Well, that’s one way of thinking about it. You could also presume that d) the men who frequent the place like reading women’s magazines, or e) that San Francisco is so beyond the traditional genre constraints when it comes to magazine usage that such conclusions are immediately nullified or f) that ALL MEN CAN’T READ, but then that’s the problem with drawing conclusions, you can really draw any conclusions you like from whatever information you’re given, if you feel like it. I could draw a conclusion that the majority of the gym memberships were held by ducks because I once found a feather under the treadmill, but I won’t. Not again.)

I don’t want, particularly, to read about the latest results of the “leading consumer diaper tests (number 1 class)”, have long since decided that coming out of a hard hour’s exercise wanting nothing more than to cook one of Home Journal’s traditional apple pies and eat it all at once is a bit counterproductive and, frankly, find Martha Stewart’s perfect robotic demeanor nothing less than terrifying. My problem, which wasn’t one I would have expected, is that the subject covered least in the two dozen shallow bins of magazine is ‘Fitness’. There is little evidence of things on the subject of ‘Exercise’.
Nothing by the title of ‘Health’.
Or “The Magazine of Subjects That People in Gyms Might Like”

I don’t want to sound completely ungrateful. There are (generally) two magazines on the topic.
I end up reading them a lot. I think they’re monthly - or perhaps fortnightly - so by the end of whatever period it is they come out (or until they disappear off home in someone’s gym bag) I have generally read them cover to cover. Each issue. And have for many many months now.

And therefore, I would like to officially take my hat off to the people who write, edit, and commission for health and fitness magazines. They are literally AMAZING. Honestly, they just say the same thing, every single issue, with almost no new information, deviation or recourse to the power original thinking - just a LOT of repetition, in various combinations.

See, it doesn’t seem as if health and fitness advice changes that fast. It is summed up by quite simple principles, really:
“Eat less, move around more” basically covers it, in fact.

There are ways to move your muscles that will strengthen them, there are foods that you can eat that are better for you than others, and there are tips and recommendations for how to exercise so that you can lose girth, raise fitness levels and avoid injury.

It is becoming clear to me that these rules are quite constant. They don’t seem to change as often as you might imagine the editors of these magazines might like. Because all they do is throw the same informational ingredients into a blender, hit the on switch, and then pour whatever results from it into 140 pages of magazine.

If any of those editors, incidentally, from any of these magazines happen to be reading then - and I know you cruise by on a super-regular basis - I have some BRILLIANT new, groundbreaking ideas for features in upcoming editions of your magazine that I believe might be substantially different yet similar enough to anything you’ve published recently to interest you.

Ahem.

7 Revolutionary Tips for Getting YOUR Butt Beach-Ready In 7 days
A set of pictures demonstrating the same moves that were in last month’s feature ‘Five Foolproof Ass-Kicking Bun-Tighteners YOU Can Do At Your Desk!’ but with the accompanying photoshoot taking place on a beach rather than in an office, and with the model wearing a swimming costume, rather than spectacles, semi-formal blouse and ’slacks’.

Beat The Binge: How to Control Those Cravings All the Way To Thintown!
Rules for binge-beating to include: when you want a biscuit, don’t have a biscuit. Have a carrot. And the groundbreaking: “Eat breakfast” and “Drink water”.

How That Celebrity Lady On The Cover Lost The Unfeasibly Small Amount of Baby Weight She Put On Previously
A revealing and exceptionally personal interview with whichever stunning celebrity of childbearing age is on the cover this month, revealing all her top secrets for losing the unnaturally small amount of weight she claims to have put on during pregnancy in an unhealthily short time. These tips will include: a) eating everything you like in moderation, b) morning yoga and c) realising how much more complete motherhood has made her life and suddenly dropping 15 ‘unhappy’ pounds due to the revelation. Tips wil not include the personal nutritionist, in-house chef and trainer paid for by the studio of the next project she’s working on, or the six hours of high-impact cardio a day, during which the baby-weight (now known as ‘baby’) will be looked after by one of three nannies.

Wait, what do you MEAN you’ve done all of these already this week?

Oh, ok, yes. I’ll pitch them again next week.

In the window of the tea shop near my house.
It is a nice thought. I like it.
I mean, I also like “eating” and “paying the rent” so think that suggesting the worst possible outcomes might involve slight unpredictability and a tiny negative impact on your mood is SLIGHTLY hopeful, but never mind.

It’s a very nice idea.

San Francisco is a big bundle of weather at the moment. I mean, it’s usually a changeable place - you can’t depend on it for more than a couple of days (or a couple of hours, depending on the season), but what people don’t talk about quite so much is how you can’t trust it to stay constant for a couple of blocks, sometimes.

I love it.

For some nights in the last few weeks, though, on and off, we have been being kept company by the foghorns at the Golden Gate Bridge. And during the day too, sometimes, when I’ve been sitting and sunning myself at my writing desk, by the open window. Suddenly I’ll hear a long, resonant low noise. Rarely, my chair might even be gently vibrated by its pervasive soundwave. And so I’ll check with My Beloved on what he thinks it’s source might have been.

And yes, increasingly, it turns out NOT to have been him farting, but instead the noise of the foghorns guiding ships through The Notoriously Greyed-up Passage (NB: Not a euphemism, or a title for an OAP pr0n flick. Though possibly it should be)

It never ceases to stun me, though. I can’t imagine how loud it must be to live by the bastards, because we’re between five and six miles, as the crow flies, and I can still hear them as clear and loud and sonorous and resonant as, say, the low notes of a cathedral organ, the north atlantic wind in Fingal’s Cave on Staffa, or My Beloved during a post-Mission-Super-Burrito nap (one of the top ten kinds of nap, by the way. i’ll catalogue the rest another time).

They go. At a level, from here, that is just like you having left your phone somewhere in the flat, but on vibrate. And you kill yourself trying to find it before you realise what it is.

It is a fog horn five or six miles away.

Call me London (I am) but I consider being able to hear something that far away crazy. My Beloved apparently does too - tonight we had this conversation, which was just ridiculous. Well, and badly thought through…

Him: Did you hear that?
What?
Him: That NOISE?
Oh, the fog horns? Yes, they were going off all last night as well.
Him: It’s amazing they can be heard this far away, don’t you think?
I do, but….
Him: OOOH, did you hear THAT one?!
I have been figuring out the Sighyentz of how why this has been happening.
Him: Oh god.
Shut up, I am good at the sighyentz. Anyway, I have decided that it works because it gets carried by the fog, and by the sound molecule in each water droplet bouncing off the sound molecule in the next fog droplet.
Him: I’m not sure that is very good sighyentz
Makes sense to me. It is noise, carried by fog.
Him: Nono, I think the opposite must happen. I think heavy fog would dull noises a great deal.
Really?
Him: Yes. …. …. … Unless, of course, they were at a particular resonation thing.
Yes. Because …. OH WAIT!
Him: ?!?! …
I’ve just realised what foghorns might be for! It would be GOOD if foghorns made noise through fog for quite a distance, in order to WARN things that are some distance AWAY about FOG!
Him: Hm…

It was a breakthrough for me that they might make it sonorous at this length on purpose.
A breakthrough for me. Although not, I believe, for sighyentz. Who have been looking in to the important matter of whether I’ve left my phone on vibrate in the kitchen for a lot longer than I have.

I love this city.

I’ve talked about it before here, about the week we arrived, and, invited to a party on the other side of the city (and it’s not a very big city, about 7 miles wide), set off from our house in the skimpiest of summer wear, knowing it was on the beach and it was already boiling - sun, scorching - at our house. We got on one Muni (tram) that happened to go all the way from one place to the other, with just a little bit of a walk at the end.

40 minutes later, at the beach, we stepped off the tram. Visibility was at about 30 feet. It was mizzling, purposefully. People around us were wearing not only hooded parkas, but jumpers underneath them. And opaque tights. And winter boots. Dogs were wearing raincoats and mocking us, caninically. I saw at least one person wearing a hat made out of a dead animal to protect them from the cold (or it could have been the voices, you never know here). I even saw one person walking through the fog toward me wearing a wetsuit, which I thought was a slight over-reaction to atmospheric pressure. Until I realised that he may just have been surfing. To be honest, the nine-foot surfboard under his arm should have been a bit of a hint.

We arrived at out party, soaked through and shivering, having made the faux pas of wearing summer clothes in winter, just because we hadn’t realised that sometimes, if you pick the right city and have the audacity to cross the bloody thing, both can happen all at once. We were new.

Since then, I have learnt, by the way. I wear at least three layers at all times. On days when it’s changeable and I’m planning to visit several weather-forecast-resistant areas of the city, I’ve been known to wear nine. Four of them cardigans.
Quite often when people ask me if I’ve lost weight, it’s because we took a taxi to their house and they’ve never seen me with so few damned clothes on before.

Over the last few days, the changableness has been particularly stunning.

On Saturday, the weather was beautiful, and we walked from our house over to the Bay Area Classic Yo-Yo Championships in Golden Gate Park - the biggest one in the city; our Hyde Park (or Central Park, or Mont Royale, or The Machair, or Heaton Park, depending on where you’re from. I’m London-born, so allow me my comparisons). We got burnt. To a crisp. But on the way, we walked over the biggest hills in the city, and we could see 30 miles away, to mountains we’ve been meaning to camp in and towns we’d never been able to see from there before.

On Sunday, we took a blanket and books and some bread and went to sit in our biggest local park. This was nice, we thought. So we decided that on Bank Holiday Monday - sorry, Memorial Day Monday - we should summon people to the much bigger, flatter and less naked-hipsters and drug-muffins-seller-infested park (there are children in our party)(And I’m scared of naked hipsters), and there have a picnic.

On Monday, we looked out of our (east/north-facing) windows, saw the same unquenchable sunshine and declared the picnic ON. And then we left the house and saw that, to the north, over the hill where the picnic was due to happen, the cloud was creeping, wet and heavy across the tops with an air I can only describe as: Menacing (For Air).

It was ok, I mean, we’d summoned people, and so we went (once My Beloved had, possibly, laced my on-the-bus muffin with the smiliest kind of sedative), and had a marvellous time in the overcast, lovely park. Got burnt, again, obviously. The sun is MEAN through fog - you know that?
We are still a bit new.

As a matter of financial spring cleaning, I was going through my list of important things to do - important, serious grown-up things to do like order a replacement for my lost atm card, get some cheques with our new address on them: all those reasonable, rational things that mainly you can do online because we live in the future and will probably have jet packs by next week.

I vaguely remember ordering cheques when we opened the account almost two years ago. I lady opened a book of pictures of cheques, we pointed at some in a jetlagged haze of two people who had spent the last few days trying to set up a house while swimming through a treacly sea of bizarre new information. So we ended up with some cheques. Or rather checks. Sorry.

Anyway. Going to replace them, I clicked through. From one page, where I stated the intention to buy some new chequebooks for all my chequebook-requiring banking needs (note to anyone moving from the uk: this will prove to be ‘a surprising amount’) I clicked through to the next, where I could change my address details and confirm them, and the the next. Where I was required to start making choices.

A wall of potential background images for my cheques greeted me. After staring at them for a few long moments, I realised that each one represented a gallery within this gallery.

This was the ‘Refined’ selection, as you can tell by the title at the top.

Although not, perhaps, from the examples of cheques given on the page. The first cheque in the ‘refined’ section, of course, is a series called ‘Beeeee-lieve’, which tops a set of particularly pobsy pictures of daisies and insects and butterflies and a quote from the new testament in friendly curly handwriting.

It ends somewhere further down the page with Thomas Kincade. And we all know how well I gel with his body of work.

I decided that ‘refined’ things were probably not to my taste, and, seeing as I’d already checked the ‘plain’ section and found them wanting, aesthetically. They were just all jumbled, in terms of design and not clean-enough-looking to be considered plain. They all looked like they were printed with a soft waffle-print or wicker design. Probably, I’m guessing, for the sake of ’security’, although fuck knows the rest of the world has managed alright all this time. So instead I went on the search for other serious, businesslike designs for people who have business expenses and pay rents and this manner of thing:

And I found… See on the right there? Care Bears.

Yup. “Here is my rent cheque, landlord. It has care bears on it. No, wait, let me give you the next cheque in the pile. It says ‘WE WUV OOO VEH MUCH’ on it”

There was also Superman.

Of course. Because nothing says honesty and financial steadfastness like a man who can fly with like laser eyes and a metal torso and all that.

Honestly, at this point I was just very grumpy that they would have Superman cheques but not go as far as just having ones that said ‘POW!!!’ and ‘KABLOOM!’ and ‘ZAP!!!’ on in big explosions with nothing else on the cheque. Now THAT woudl be a design I could get behind.

But no. It was either ‘really very ugly masquerading as tasteful’, or ‘just as far as tasteful as you can get, no doubt about it, why bother pretending’. And, given that, I think it’s safe to say which one I went with.

And then I got to the next page. One that offered me different fonts for my address, and different friendly little logos and university crests and team badges and other pieces of clip art that people liberally sprinkle throughout health and safety manuals. More importantly still, I was offered the opportunity to put a nice little message just under where you would usually put the

Which, though I understand they’re possibly difficult to read, being very little and small. Trust me, then, when I say that almost without exception, I cannot understand why - why - you would choose to have one of these.

“I don’t live to work, I work to live!” is something that, actually, would depress me as I wrote a cheque to remove more of the money I had worked so hard for in order to pay a gas bill or some miserable expense. “Go ahead and cash it: I dare you!” is not, something that i feel would inspire any future landlord to great optimism. And ‘Life is short. Pray HARD’ just sounds like a threat.

But then I had to put them all together. Did I want a background of care bears picture of a merman and the words ‘It MUST be friday somewhere!?’ which is a) a mangled cliche and b) shows a basic failing in how datelines and timezones work.

Perhaps I should have settled with a background of an American Eagle with a clip art image of a duck and the words I love Futbol! or maybe keep with the animal scheme with a ‘Horses are my life!’

In the end, I had to settle on background image, logo, message, font and about fifty seven other decisions.

The words ‘FISH FEAR ME‘ and the clip art of a leprechaun starting a fight were, I admit, quite hard to resist. But somehow I managed to avoid them. Well, one of them.

In my UK bank, there’s a little button on the site that says something like ‘order some more dull yet functional cheques’ here, and then you’re done. Not that I’ve had to do it more than the once, why would I? They’re sodding cheques.

Here, however, all in all, the process had consumed an hour. And cost me money (free banking? why certainly. For the first year).
But my HEAVENS we have some special banking paraphernalia.
I can’t tell you what I got, though. It is a surprise, for my beloved.

Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha….