Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway sloe gin

The Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway starts on the outskirts of the picturesque town of Hythe in Kent. Since the late-1920s, it has connected the historic Cinque Port with the smaller seaside towns of Dymchurch and New Romney and, eventually, the vast single split of Dungeness. 

Dubbed ‘the world’s smallest railway’, it leaves Hythe against a background of suburban back gardens belonging to flat-roofed terraced and semi-detached houses of the post-war prefabricated Orlit-type (pebbledashed cream and brown against the harsh seaside elements) and small-scale shops offering fishing tackle, traditional fish and chips and TV repairs. 

At first, the route roughly follows the A259, a long-distance coastal road that links Kent with Hampshire via Sussex. At Hythe, the Dymchurch Road section of the A259 snarls up with daytrippers on a sunny summer’s day, taking sun-lovers away from Hythe’s pebble beaches to the sandy vistas of Dymchurch and St Mary’s Bay. 

A quieter, slower route out of town for walkers, horse-riders and cyclists – punctuated only by the distinctive whistle of the steam train – runs either side of the Napoleonic-era Royal Military Canal, which reaches 28 miles into East Sussex, and runs roughly trackside until it hits the housing estates and bungalows of Burmarsh. Here, the train splits, striking out through flat, sparsely populated Romney Marsh. The bushes that overhang the canal on one side of the path, and separate the walker from the smoke of the train on the other, offer an abundance of blackberries and sloes in the summer and autumn months. The observant walker might also catch a glimpse of an exotic, curious animal or two from nearby Port Lympne zoo or the crumbling Roman remains of the Portus Lemanis fort, which sit beneath medieval Lympne Castle. 

Climb up onto ‘the Roughs’, the low-lying hills that flank the canal – today forming part of the Ministry of Defence’s estate – and dense undergrowth reveals a crumbling sound mirror, a remnant of experimental early 20th century technology designed to defend this stretch of coast against invaders. 

Although today the light railway mainly carries pleasure seekers and the occasional commuter – plus the all-important festive figure of Santa paying a visit at Christmas-time – it too once played an unlikely part in the Kent coast’s frontline defences. 

A typically jaunty Pathé newsreel of 1944, entitled ‘Toy Train Goes to War’, shows tourists replaced with soldiers aboard a special armoured train: during the Second World War, the light railway was taken over by the war effort and placed into the services of Operation PLUTO (Pipeline Under the Ocean), which sent fuel under the English Channel from Romney Marsh to support the allied forces in Normandy. PLUTO infrastructure was cleverly disguised as coastal bungalows; the remaining structures which are in residential use are now known as ‘PLUTO houses’, and are another historical curio of the quirky British seaside.

Folkestone Warren sloe gin

Fight your way through tangles of brambles, nettles and blackthorn bushes, and keep your footing on the narrow, uneven paths that lead down to Folkestone’s Warren, and you’re rewarded with access to the town’s most attractive beach.

The Warren is a bay at the foot of the white cliffs, looking across to the low-lying coast of France on a clear day. Despite being geographically close, it feels a world away from the Folkestone’s most popular beach, Sunny Sands, where the raw bodied and raw faced holiday people observed in Ted Hughes’ poem Work and Play

Are laid out like wounded
Flat as in ovens
Roasting and basting
With faces of torment as space burns them blue.

Although out of town, the Warren is well worth the trip. As part of an exposed coastal landscape that has been remade by landslips over the years, the cliffs are shored up by a wide concrete apron constructed after the Second World War. When the tide is right, regular rows of concrete groynes create the impression of a series of private beaches, both separated from the promenade above and cut off by gently lapping waves to the side. At low tide, the concrete is coated in a springy carpet of vivid green moss that’s treacherous under foot. At high tide, fishermen cast their rods out to sea and concrete steps provide the perfect entry point for swimming in the English Channel, which turns a Mediterranean turquoise under the summer sun. In winter, when stormy grey waves slap unpredictably against the edge, it’s wise to keep your distance.

Although the Warren is home to a small campsite – and the occasional illicit camper and hermit residing in shacks built into the cliffs – it’s mercifully free of crowds. It’s overlooked only by a couple of Martello Towers, a lone clifftop café at Capel-le-Ferne and a clifftop artwork, Siren, by Marc Schmitz and Dolgor Ser-Od, inspired by the improbable early twentieth-century wartime technology of concrete listening ears, and installed as part of the 2017 Folkestone Triennial.

It wasn’t always this way. The Warren, which had a reputation as Folkestone’s ‘Little Switzerland’, was once a destination for daytrippers and pleasure seekers, served by its own train station.

The Warren is separated from touristy Sunny Sands by an expanse of rocks, popular with fossil hunters. Sifting idly through the beach’s mixture of sand and pebbles reveals its own treasures, though: pebbles made from brick in various shades of red and yellow, worn smooth over the years, and translucent, gem-like ‘sea glass’, delicately frosted ovals of white, green, brown and blue glass created from decades of discarded bottles being thrown around and ground down by the tide.

Follow the cliffs in the other direction, past Abbot’s Cliff nudist beach, and eventually you’ll reach the port of Dover. The Folkestone to Dover trainline, too, takes this route, through the cliffs and past the Warren. Though short, it’s a dramatic ride, as the train emerges suddenly alongside the sea. Although spectacular, the route has its perils. In December 2015, storm damage closed the trainline for a full nine months, a reminder that the conceit of man’s control over our island coastline is illusory at best, and that its shape, form and the nature of our relationship with it is something we should never take for granted.

The Star and Garter: secret history of a nightclub

I can vividly remember the first time I went to a nightclub. I was 18, had recently moved to Manchester and followed the flow of freshers to 'indie' club 5th Avenue, where I had my bum pinched and objected to a lanky youth 'playfully' stealing the hat off my head: not the greatest introduction to going out at night. I can also remember the second time I went to a nightclub, because I went alone, unable to convince fellow students to walk five minutes down the road to the Star and Garter, in the bleak and unprepossessing red light district behind Piccadilly Station. I spent the rest of the evening talking to strangers, engaging in what I probably thought at the time were deep conversations about things like the influence of Albert Camus' The Outsider on 'Killing an Arab' by the Cure.

At the Star and Garter's flagship night Smile, billed as the longest-running indie night in Manchester, I realised for the first time that other people of my age liked the same kind of music as me – and what's more, that it was actually possible to dance to this kind of music (or in my case, shuffle awkwardly whilst staring at the floor and/or jump clumsily up and down to more energetic songs). As a club for people like me, who might not otherwise go out, it's been sad to see the venue gradually wind down Smile after the night celebrated its twentieth birthday last year, with the long-term future of the building looking uncertain. Proposals to add a platform to the east of Piccadilly Station as part of the Northern Hub scheme – construction is due to start in 2016 – would see trains pass window-rattlingly close to the already ramshackle Victorian building, leaving its future as a club unviable. Although several different proposals have been put forward for the distinctive triangular building's place in the development, from relocation (urban legend has it that the building was already moved once, in the mid-nineteenth century, although the council disputes this), to rebuilding, to extending the station around it, none seem feasible in the long-term. As current licensee and upstairs resident Andy Martin says: “You can't hide us behind a station and expect to have passing trade. It will either fall down or be out of business within a year of the platform opening – and if it closes Wetherspoon or another chain will take it over (although no big business in their right mind would).”

Andy, a former computer game reviewer, grew up under the influence of bands like the Smiths in Blackley, on the northern fringes of the city, surrounded by his siblings' record collections. Like mine, his first memories of Smile conjure the joy that comes from realising that there are other people who feel the same way as you about the songs that have soundtracked your life. “There was a circle of us all jumping up and down to 'Teenage Kicks',” he reminisces. “I'd never had that in a club before – a load of people who didn't know each other just loving a song. We all shook hands at the end. It was very polite.” However, he also admits that, like any other club, its basic function is the same: “It's a meat market. You go out and notice people and the guys wear cheap aftershave.” He observes that the traditional pub layout of the Star and Garter, with seating downstairs and a function room upstairs, helps facilitate this: “A massive USP is the club being on two floors. You can go upstairs in a darkened room and dance around and come downstairs with whoever you've pulled and realise you've made a massive mistake and go upstairs again.” The only difference to other clubs is the clientele. “We attract intelligent people here,” says Andy. “People who are now GPs, archaeologists, psychologists and who work for the CPS. I've helped every single one of them into a taxi. Thick people stick out here like a sore thumb.”

Andy's involvement with the Star and Garter initially came about through another cult band, Nigel Blackwell's Half Man Half Biscuit, following a gig at long-departed Manchester venue the Boardwalk in 1996, where he got talking to the band's manager, a “cantankerous old Scouser” selling t-shirts. To cut a long story short, Andy “fluked it with Half Man Half Biscuit” and ended up putting the band on the following year. A friend had heard good things about the Star and Garter, which could be hired out for £50, and the gig attracted a gaggle of “forty-something-year-old men forming mosh pits”.

Andy later started working behind the bar and, when the Star and Garter's owner started looking for someone else to run the pub, Andy and sound engineer Dermot O'Dea took it over. Andy made a few changes such as extending the opening hours of Smile, replacing skittering vinyl with CDs, employing long-running DJ Andy Woods and hosting one-offs such as album launches; previously, says Andy, “every night was like a Manic Street Preachers fan night – City Life said it was like gatecrashing a house party, just playing songs to mates”. Then followed the “halcyon days” of Smile, when the NME made it club of the week, there were queues around the block by 9.30pm and the club got so crowded that Andy had to operate a one-in-one-out policy. “Our USP has always been that we're off the beaten track,” says Andy. “There's no passing trade so it's an effort to make it. You have to know what you are going for and what night is on. You don't go for the massive selection of craft ales at the bar or the cocktail list – you go because you like the Smiths or the band playing.”

However, the Star and Garter has always been far more than just Smile. It's had its own line in nights dedicated solely to one artist – from the Belle and Sebastian disco started by Roxanne, who later moved to Glasgow and now plays in Veronica Falls, to evenings dedicated to Depeche Mode and Pixies. Most famous is the Smiths night, which has now been going for twenty years and attracts everyone from teens to hardcore fans in their sixties.

The Star and Garter has also been a place for unsigned bands to get onto lineups with more established punk and metal bands. It's been a stepping stone, too, for several bands who now sell out far bigger venues, from hosting Low twice in the 1990s – where everyone sat down – to Jeffrey Lewis. Even Status Quo played there in 1999, after the venue was shortlisted for their Under the Influence tour. “It was the most surreal experience of my life,” recalls Andy. “150 people dancing to the Quo – it was like something out of a Michael Jackson video. And I had to record United versus Juventus for Parfitt and Rossi while they played.” A similarly surreal experience was heavy rock band ArnoCorps' 2012 gig, where 150 fans arrived dressed as Arnold Schwarzenegger. “It was like really good Smile party – everyone happy,” remembers Andy.

The Star and Garter has also acted as a showcase for local musicians and comedians, including at an open mic run by Akoustik Anarkhy which was attended by Manchester luminaries such as Badly Drawn Boy, the Longcut and Nine Black Alps. Andy remembers it as “glorified karaoke without the words on the screen and just mates doing cover versions on guitar” – including Andy's own renditions of Half Man Half Biscuit songs. Another night, Anti-Hoot, played host to unknown comics as well as fondly-remembered Bolton poet Hovis Presley. A poster paying tribute to Presley, who died prematurely in 2005, now hangs on the wall, featuring excepts from his wryly romantic poem 'I Rely On You', which pops up as a reading in local wedding services.


Pre-social media, the Star and Garter also functioned as a meeting place for unlikely special interest groups, from holding Anti-Nazi League meetings in the 1980s, to accommodating the 30-strong West Bromwich Albion supporters' club of Manchester, to hosting a PSV and HGV drivers' club which “used to show slides of 1950s buses to a ripple of applause”. With its haunted house looks, the Star and Garter must have provided a particularly fitting venue for the Vampire Society, whose members sat and read excerpts of Dracula. Most recently, the venue hosted Smiler, a spin-off group from the Rod Stewart fan club, with special guest Don Stewart (brother of Rod) making an appearance. And he's not the only person with a claim to fame to have visited. Andy has a special Smile poster signed by Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks as well as members of Half Man Half Biscuit, TV stars and, most obscurely, people who made music for vintage computer games.

The Star and Garter has also itself been a screen star. Although it's purported, probably incorrectly, to have featured in Manchester film noir classic Hell is A City, it has definitely appeared in Cracker and the Body Farm as well providing as the locale for a John Simm fight scene in Prey and a murder in Prime Suspect. Unfortunately, though, its seedy location could well be the Star and Garter's downfall. Big plans have been proposed for decades for this area, hemmed in by a train station, a taxi rank, a major bus route into the city and a collection of forbidding, slime-ridden railway viaducts, from the Whitehall of the North to an inter-city hub at derelict Mayfield station to an urban park. None have yet materialised, although Andy says, “there's nothing wrong with the area other than that it's never been invested in”. The Grade II listed status of the building, too, doesn't help, with the building suffering from damp and work needed on the roof yet no grants for like-for-like building work forthcoming. But it's part of the fabric of the area, and Andy's picked up snippets of information about its history and former inhabitants over the years, from its first licensee, a Miss Wetherspoon, to being a hotel with its own living quarters and dumb waiter, to housing a brewery and, later, a “trainee MASH type place for the home guard during the war”.

The Star and Garter's recent decline has coincided with the ascendancy of other areas of the city such as the Northern Quarter. Part of the problem, says Andy, is that Smile's audience has grown up – and “the new generation suddenly got hit by a massive choice of places to go, so Smile became a fallback”. Andy explains: “When we first started there was the Night & Day, us and the Roadhouse – we were the small venues. Then the council threw a load of money at the Northern Quarter and every Tom, Dick and Harry started opening a bar. It was even mentioned on the news.”

In the meantime, as both the Northern Hub and, further down the line, HS2 loom over its future, the Star and Garter soldiers on, continuing to host regular "cheap and cheerful" punk gigs. Alternative karaoke night Guts for Garters is proving popular, along with new music showcase and indie-pop disco Light it Up (Saturday May 10), '90s nights A Different Class and This is Uncool, queer party Bollox (Friday April 18) and guilty pleasures rock night Party Hard (Saturday May 3). Other upcoming events include a fundraiser by online Morrissey fanclub the Mozarmy (Saturday April 26), with special guests including Hayley from Coronation Street. It's also hoped that Smile can be resurrected for doorman Ian's 70th birthday in June.

As Andy says, the Star and Garter might not be renowned for its cocktail list or craft beer, but as the city gains in sophistication it's all too easy to lose out on opportunities for genuinely life-affirming communal music experiences. What we lose if we lose the Star and Garter is the bread and butter of Manchester's night life, the type of place where you can go just for the sheer joy of the music and any pretensions to post-industrial glamour or the array of drinks behind the bar are only a secondary concern.

The Shrieking Violet issue 19 (and third birthday party!)

The Shrieking Violet is three, and issue 19, a bumper edition, can be read online now! The printed version, printed by marc the printers (b/w with f/c cover) will be launched at a special birthday party at Atelier[zero], Manchester's pop-up canalside Olympic village, at 2pm on Saturday August 11. Come along for rowing boats, a ball pool, a 'library with no books', purple (Angel Meadows blackberries) cake and more! Event invitation.

This edition's cover is by Hannah Bitowski, who lives and works in Liverpool and is based in artist-led gallery the Royal Standard. She works in a variety of media, with a penchant for screen-printing and mask-making. This illustration was inspired by a selection of themes Hannah currently draws from: masks, the abstraction of portraiture, facial geometry and the cosmos – particularly inspired by Johannes Kepler, a 17th century mathematician and astronomer who was infatuated with the idea of God existing in geometry, with all answers of the universe coming from there. Even though his theory of the platonic solid solar system was wrong, Hannah thinks the theory in itself, and his attempt to fit geometry into all things, great and small, is enough to warrant praise. This piece attempts to merge the similarities between ritual and reality, myth with maths.

Here's what you'll find inside:

Manchester-based filmmaker Richard Howe continues his series on mental health in the movies by looking at Jesus' Son, directed by Alison Maclean. Richard is currently editing the film Realitease, which touches on mental health. Watch the teaser at https://vimeo.com/45743438 and tweet Richard about films @rikurichard.

I visited the National Football Museum to find out how it compares to Urbis, and see what it has to offer a non-sports fan.

Anouska Smith, a crafter and maker with a beady eye for sparkly things at www.junkieloversboutique.com, offers a guide to her favourite Manchester tea-places. Spot her somewhere in the Manchester suburbs finishing up those cups of tea or trying to avoid the puddles on the side of the road.

Simon Sheppard has contributed an article about a very eccentric fellow named Pierre Baume. Following a career change, allowing him to indulge his passion for modern history, Simon qualified from Liverpool University as an Archivist in 2008 having previously gaining a BA Hons in History from UCLAN. Simon hails from Bolton, but is currently living in Manchester, where he spends his spare time partaking in his new ‘hobby’, Real Ale.  To accompany Simon's article, Manchester-based illustrator, musician and DJ Dominic Oliver has imagined what Baume might have looked like...

Liverpool-based writer and journalist Kenn Taylor, who has a particular interest in the relationship between culture and the urban environment, considers some of the implications of the privatisation and fragmentation of our railway system.

James Robinson is a photographer and dabbling videographer. He studied philosophy in Manchester and now lives in London, where he plays bass for indie pop-rock band Being There. James is very proud to provide the Shrieking Violet with its first animal feature. The title, Perros y gatos, was inspired by a sticker album he bought on a school trip to Spain.

Joe Austin has written a tribute to three post-war murals in London and Coventry, by Dorothy Annan, Gordon Cullen and William Mitchell, and highlights the often-uncertain future of public artworks like these. Joe is a qualified architect, originally from the Midlands but a naturalised Londoner for the last 22 years or so. Joe's interests are wide (his blog best illustrates his scattergun mind), but generally revolve around writing, design, architecture, art, culture and history.

Liz Buckley has reviewed Stanya Kahn's exhibition It's Cool, I'm Good in the Cornerhouse galleries. Liz is an Art History graduate living in Salford, and will be starting an MA in Gallery Studies in September at Manchester University.

Godfrey is a rough excerpt from a novel by Matthew Duncan Taylor that may or may not be published next year. Matthew is a journalist who currently works for the Winsford and Crewe Guardian newspapers. He plays in the south Manchester-based bands Former Bullies and Great Grand Suns. Some short stories he has written can be found at matthewduncantaylor.blogspot.co.uk.

Sarah Hill is a Manchester-based artist, and the founder and creative director of Video Jam. Sarah has written an introduction to the project. If you are interested in getting involved, contact her at sarahfrhill@gmail.com.

Issue 19 finishes with a recipe for delicious apricot and poppy seed bread from Shrieking Violet favourite Bakerie in the Northern Quarter.

Read it online here:

Open publication - Free publishing - More architecture

Download and print your own copy here. Printed copies can also be picked up from the Working Class Movement Library on the Crescent, Salford, and the Bakerie tasting store (the Hive building), Lever Street, Manchester and Piccadilly Records.

To request a copy in the post (free) or to contribute to future editions email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com or join the Shrieking Violet Facebook group.

Revisiting the Irwell Sculpture Trail

Exercise, muddy feet and fresh air are among the less celebrated benefits of viewing works of art, but visiting the Irwell Sculpture Trail is a chance to experience all three at the same time as seeing works by locally and internationally renowned artists. The 33 mile sculpture trail, which follows the River Irwell from Salford Quays all the way to Bacup in Pennine Lancashire, has been around for over a decade now, but recent reinvestment means that, as well as restoring some of the sculptures to prime condition, new, interactive features make the experience far more than just looking at art and going for a walk.

The sculpture trail started in Rossendale in Pennine Lancashire following a lottery bid and gradually expanded to reach as far south as Salford Quays, with artworks leading the visitor through the history of the industrial towns and cities that grew up alongside the River Irwell and the changing uses of the river and surrounding areas. It's a story not just about the Irwell, and the trains, canals and mills that follow its course (the trail regularly meets other waterways such as the Manchester and Bolton and Bury Canal, and the clusters north of Bury can be conveniently reached on the East Lancashire Railway), but local people, incorporating memories and experiences into several of the sculptures. However, some of the artworks on the sculpture trail fell into disrepair over time, and have only recently been restored. Diana Hamilton has been project manager for the Irwell Sculpture Trail since 2007 and is setting the direction for its future. She explained: “It's a really unwieldy project as four local authorities are working together. In the past there was a lack of thought when commissioning and a lack of understanding who would be responsible for maintenance, and that's a problem right across public art. Now there's a new mindset when commissioning public art of making sure there's a maintenance plan.”

Working with the Arts Council, an audit of the trail was carried out, looking at the state of the sculptures, the pathways and the access to the trail, and a five year plan developed. Diana explained: “We discovered some sculptures no-one knew about and incorporated them into the trail. Some people had walked past a sculpture for years and not known what it was. Some of the sculptures melted back into nature and naturally disappeared. Some had been vandalised and some were never meant to have a longer lifespan than they have.” The lack of public information previously available had also meant that some sculptures were very hard to find, and some of the trail went through private land or land that flooded. Suggested routes have now been changed to avoid private land, and the Environment Agency is looking at the land that floods. Diana said: “The trail has gone through a real period of change. It all happened organically. We heard people's frustrations about not being able to find the sculptures so turned the trail from a linear trail into clusters.”

A consultation was also held and, while there had been opposition to some of the sculptures at first, Diana says the artworks are now part of their communities: “There was so much local opposition to Tilted Vase in Ramsbottom, and Halo in Halsingden when they were planned, but people love them now.” Each area has a steering group, including representatives from tourist information and community groups, and they have a practical role commissioning temporary artworks alongside the trail. Some of the sculptures came about through the Section 106 planning clause, and councils along the trail made a commitment to spend the money on the arts, often involving the community.

Many of the artists lived in the area where their contribution to the trail is based, and artworks reflect local stories. In Whitefield, near Bury, the artist talked to park rangers and discovered there used to be 'fancy birds' in the park in Victorian times, leading to a simple but effective artwork entitled Canaries in the Park, which comprises still, hard-to-spot model birds sitting still on the railings, and acting as silent spectators in the bowling green. The colour scheme was drawn from tropical sweets from the local sweet factory. Some of the birds have also been adopted by the community and adorn the town's rooftops.

Other artworks give a sense of place. Diana describes Lee Quarry, near the Stacksteads cluster, where bikers interact with the sculptures and use them to perform tricks, as “an amazing performance space”, saying: “It's like being on the moon. You can use the sculptures to find your way around. They give you a sense of where you are.”

New signs and interpretation will help visitors make the most of their visit to each cluster, and QR codes have been added to the sculptures which anyone with a smartphone can scan to hear local stories as well as recordings of the artists and videos of events which have been held alongside the sculpture trail. Diana gives a macabre example: “An old mill owner used to throw children into the river in Salford when they were no longer needed and you can still see the gravestones along the river. There are little nuggets of stories like this to bring the trail alive. Children love gruesome stories; it adds another layer to the experience.” Visitors can also take part in a monster hunt in Rossendale and a geo treasure hunt.

However, you won't need a fancy phone to enjoy the trail. Diana says: “It's all very well if you have a smartphone to use a QR code but we also want to satisfy the rambler in their sixties and seventies. There's a really wide audience, from families with small children to ramblers on their annual expedition. We're keeping all these audiences happy.”

The Irwell Sculpture Trail works closely with other venues along the trail, and sculpture trail activities will tie in with events such as Bury Light Night and the chocolate festival in Ramsbottom, as well as the Olympic torch passing through Rossendale and Bury. An exhibition in light boxes at Piccadilly Station is currently linked up with the Ghost Cam at former stately home Ordsall Hall in Salford, one of the attractions which hosts sculptures along the trail, and performers from Salford's DIY Theatre Company have been bringing alive the Salford section of the trail. It's hoped future events will also include guided walks.

Diana said: “The sculpture trail is a free day out that gets people out and about and walking outside. Because each cluster of sculptures is part of a bigger project, people visit other areas they might not have been to before. Visitors might pick up a sculpture trail leaflet in Salford and end up in Rossendale in Lancashire to see more sculptures. Some people just go to visit a particular sculpture, but others might want to make a day of it and go for a walk.” Among the most popular sculptures are those at Clifton Country Park in Salford, which draw on the park's past as the site of a colliery. Diana said: “So many people don't know there's a country park in Salford, but the park treats the sculptures as an asset.”

With the relaunch of the sculpture trail website, and publication of a free, 32-page brochure in March, there's no better time to visit. The brochure, which will be available from local tourist information points, features information on each sculpture, including road names, parking, bus stops, toilets, places to eat and nearby attractions such as museums, and the website will host a route planner, ordnance survey information, news about events around the trail and resources for schools.
The sculpture trail works with other organisations involved with the environment and public art, and Diana is looking forward to collaborating with the Environment Agency. She said: “We want to experiment and challenge the idea of public art and public art commissioning. The Environment Agency is working on the Irwell and getting rid of the weirs, but they're not allowed to get rid of any of the material from the site so it needs to be reused, which gives us an opportunity to work with environmental artists. There is so much potential along the trail.”

Plan your visit to the Irwell Sculpture Trail at www.irwellsculpturetrail.co.uk.

This interview with Diana Hamilton took place during the writing of an article on the Irwell Sculpture Trail for Creative Tourist, which makes more detailed recommendations of some of the highlights along the trail in Greater Manchester: www.creativetourist.com/features/get-dirty-look-at-art-the-irwell-scupture-trail

The world outside Manchester part 3 - The Oslo to Bergen railway

The Oslo to Bergen railway links Norway's two biggest cities, a journey through nearly 8 hours of eyes-glued-to-window scenery of fjords and mountains. As the train leaves the suburbs of Oslo behind, rich green forests spread quickly over the landscape. Coming up close to the train lines, thin trunks look like sticks, as if they could be picked up and snapped in half but, as they climb up the hills, the rows of tree tops give the feathered, soft appearance of a shag pile carpet so dense that, if a giant hand was to appear and grab a handful of trees, it would be as noticeable as plucking one strand from a head of hair. The fjords are seemingly endless, beating the train into the distance, dark blue, glossy expanses with a slightly rippled sheen like fabric pulled tight.

As the train leaves the outlying towns behind, the landscape gets more and more barren, almost desert-like. It dims to khaki, with mossy, lime green rocks strewn across the floor, and the trees thin until the hills evolve into bald mounds, veined with the patterns of rock. Electricity lines swinging across the hills are the only sign of man, aside from small, scattered huts clinging to the rocks with withered Norwegian flags blowing in the breeze. The fjords become choppy, splitting into streams and waterfalls and rivers and the colour of the fjords changes as frequently as the sun goes in and out. Sometimes, the water is so clear and turquoise blue it looks as if it's been dyed the colour of animal pools at the zoo, with blue and green waves swirling at the shore, and frothing where they catch on rocks. Sheer cliff faces end in deep black water whilst others lead nowhere, stopping suddenly as if someone's roughly snapped the bottom off.

Snow starts criss-crossing the hills, appearing in primitive shapes like chalk carvings, and mountains break though puffs of cloud. In mid July, they're still snowy on top. The train rattles through long tunnels, contained by wooden snow sheds on steep ledges, gaps in the wood offering fragments of what's going on outside. The train enters into a tunnel in sunshine and, when it emerges, the sky is grey and still as if a curtain's come down and is just hanging there. At Myrdal, we're allowed out to stretch our legs and the whole air is wet and chill like it's made of raindrops.

Then, suddenly, the landscape is tame again. The water pales to dark calm green and silver. Valleys reveal rolling farmland with sheep lazing in the sun, and children wave from houses. Some passengers have slept through the whole journey, or had curtains pulled across the window — they do it on a regular basis, saying that although you can fly, by the time you've traveled to the airport it's just as cheap and easy to get the train. I don't see how it's a journey of which you can ever tire — just as dramatic as the landscape is the speed at which it changes, even just across the course of a few miles, without taking into account the seasons or even the changing qualities of light at different times of day — I'd love to see the journey again in the winter months when everything is ice and snow.

The Shrieking Violet Issue 8 — a public transport special! (And a mini-tribute to Alex Chilton)/ Salford Zine Library

Here is Issue 8 of the Shrieking Violet — a public transport special encompassing trams — Alessandra Mostyn has described and drawn her favourite tram journey, Finglands buses — Dan Russell offers a mini celebration of Finglands buses accompanied by a collage and trains — I visit Manchester's second train station, Victoria.

Now it's spring, daytrip season has officially started, and April Preston visits the classic seaside resort Blackpool, whilst rollercoaster enthusiast Dave Robinson recreates the thrill of 'woodies' (wooden rollercoasters) with a guide to Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

There is creative writing by Michael Cassidy and a recipe for spicy vegan hot cross buns by Rebecca Willmott.

Adam Faulkner offers part 2 of his guide to contemporary French music and Alexx O'Shea reviews a night of electronic music at the Briton's Protection.

The cover is by Sophie Wilson, an illustrator currently based in Telford, who has a charming range of merchandise for sale here.

For optimum enjoyment, this fanzine should be read whilst listening to the song Choo Choo Train by the Box Tops. Their lead singer, Alex Chilton, who had a number one record in 1967 with The Letter* (an astonishing 1 minute 53 seconds of pop perfection, all tooting horn chords, swirling organ and shimmering strings over Chilton's gravelly almost-blues growl) at the age of 16, went on to form the powerpop group Big Star, who were my favourite band throughout my teenage years (I spent my schooldays trying to learn their songs on guitar). Alex Chilton died at the far-too-young age of 59 last month. I was very sad, so I suppose this fanzine is kind of dedicated to him. The B-Side to Choo Choo Train, Fields of Clover, is also one of my favourite ever songs (actually I think it's quite a lot better than the A-side).

*

Issue 8 can be downloaded here in pdf form.

Additionally, paper copies might be left in some of the following places: Good Grief (Afflecks Palace), Koffee Pot, An Outlet, Oxfam Originals, Fred Aldous, Oklahoma, Piccadilly Records, Bread and Butter, Cornerhouse, Manchester Craft Centre, Nexus Arts Cafe, Kings Arms.

To have Issue 8 or any back issues* sent to you in the post (free service), email your name and address to Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com.

*Here is a page which has the download links of all the back issues too.

The Shrieking Violet can be read online here, although the pages are in printing rather than reading order.

Open publication - Free publishing

Issues 1-7 of the Shrieking Violet can also be read in Salford Zine Library, which is in the Engine House at Islington Mill.

Michael Portillo's Great British Railway Journeys

Having read finally read the DJ Stuart Maconie's portrait of the north of England, Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North (a Christmas present I gave my dad, both parents being avid listeners to his Radio 2 show, a year or two ago) whilst visiting my parents in Kent for Christmas, it was a delight to find another guide to the north was being broadcast on my return to Manchester.

Great British Railway Journeys, which was shown this week, is a daily, half-hour documentary in which Michael Portillo takes the train from Liverpool to Scarborough in sections, exploring the country's first passenger railway line, which was opened in 1830, accompanied by the writing of 19th century train fanatic George Bradshaw. At 6.30pm, it's a welcome and educational alternative to Hollyoaks.

On the surface, the two projects couldn't be more different — Maconie's a northerner, from Wigan, with a background in music journalism who presents radio shows on fairly obscure music, and Cambridge educated Portillo was once a controversial Thatcherite MP, but both offer affectionate portraits of the north that made me feel that, if I was the type of person who made new year's resolutions, I would resolve to get to know the north better and spend my weekends daytripping and taking more excursions by train.

Interestingly, although Maconie grew up in the north, both broadly approach as outsiders. An exile to the home counties, the north Maconie returns to is in many ways greatly different to the one in which he grew up (especially the regeneration of the big cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and, most of all, Leeds). As the title suggests, Pies and Prejudice aims to in some way demystify the north and its rich heritage for southerners, many of whom have rarely ventured far north of London.

Maconie's book also considers what it is to be northern — he seems to suggest there's a north west-north east divide almost as great as the north-south divide, with those from the north east considering themselves the 'true northerners' (as he points out, 'it's a long way away — not on the way to anywhere except Berwick or Oslo in a slow boat'). He touches on rivalries such as historical Yorkshire-Lancashire friction more than Portillo, who moves seamlessly from Cheshire to Lancashire to Yorkshire.

Witty and opinionated, and written in an almost hyperactively detailed, dense style, Maconie's book isn't afraid to challenge and offer controversial opinions. In contrast, Portillo's a far more laid back host, offering an inoffensive presenting style and generally content to let the people of the north tell their own stories.

He approaches a great range of interviewees, who exude a passion for the place they're from and what they do. These include workers at an Eccles cake factory, milliners at a hatmakers in Denton and Manchester historian Jonathan Schofield. A chicken keeper in Todmorden spreads the word of the town's grow your own food movement, knitters of fishing sweaters in Filey demonstrate how their craft has been handed down the generations and a jolly, smiley train spotter in York admits he's generally in his 'own little world' . Portillo gamely joins in various activities, having a go at folding his own Eccles cake, creating a trilby and even learning Scouse.

One way in which both Maconie and Portillo present the north is through their culinary traditions, from Wigan's renowned pies and Uncle Joe's Mint Balls to the black pudding and flat bottom muffins Maconie samples in Bury, and the Indian food he eats in Bradford and Oldham. Fish and chips crops up over and over again in Portillo's programme as encapsulating the difference the railways made to people's lives - as he says, they entered 'every corner of people's lives'. Landlocked cities such as Manchester became inland ports, and people who would have previously only been able to eat locally caught freshwater fish were introduced to 'cheap and fast' meals such as cod and chips.

Both Pies and Prejudice and Great British Railway Journeys are immensely educational, and obviously meticulously researched, covering historical events in a city's life and how they relate to today, in Manchester's case from the Peterloo Massacre - detailed by Maconie - to the IRA bomb.

They also made me want to spend more time going on holiday in my own country, and realise how much there is to explore so close.

Michael Portillo's Great British Railway Journeys can be watched on the BBC iPlayer here.

The series continues at 6.30pm on BBC2 next week, with Michael Portillo heading north to Scotland via Cumbria.

Letter from America

If you can gain a first impression about a place from its public transport, as I touch down on American soil my ideas of America as a land of patriotism are confirmed.

Flags add colour to small suburban front gardens, fluttering over row after undistinguished row of pastel coloured clapboard houses as we head towards the ground at John F Kennedy airport. They are magnified through the windows of the subsequent train that whizzes me towards New York (later, I discover that even the miniature sailing boats on the Central Park boating lake sport their own tiny red, white and blue emblems on their small sails). A small version of the famous stars and stripes is emblazoned on the outside of each Metro carriage, too, like a marker on a neat silver bullet.

Listen: Take Him Back To New York City - Herman Düne (I don't have an IPOD, but if I did this is what i would listen to, and I advise you to to enhance your reading pleasure)

Inside the train, we’re encouraged to support American peanut vendors, but we’re also constantly reminded in bilingual English and Spanish advertisements of the need for medical insurance. I’m never far away from somebody who’s slipped through the safety net of the American dream.

Americans may seem open and keen to engage with others, smiling at me and at each other, but some seem to be living in a different country entirely. An elderly woman in sparkly silver disco slippers, frizzy brown hair askew as if she’s been dancing all night to the tune of her lost dreams, trying to recapture her youthful expectations of the promise of the big city, shuffles herself and her ‘Fritos’ down next to me. She’s more likely just awoken, alone and unwashed, and tells me I look just like someone she once knew, somewhere, a long time ago. Some of the contents of her crisp packet escape her witchily long, scarlet fingernails, and catch on her mismatched outfit like the unexpected baubles of day to day life.

She’s a member of that transient class that carries their life around in a shopping trolley, ready to be upped from their spot under a park tree or in a disused doorway at any moment and transported somewhere seemingly promising, that has yet to move them on.

I’ve been out of JFK airport for less than half an hour, but already feel like I’m in an Amriki Baraka play. A character with a worker’s cap, grease and paint splattered on his hardwearing looking trousers, accompanied by a clownish sidekick in neon clothes and braces, sits himself and his boom box down next to me, and starts advising me on the sexual prowess of black men in great detail. After deciding that I’m mute, and asking round the carriage, including admiring a young woman with impractically long and pristine fingernails, he watches his fellows countrymen with resignation. Gurning to themselves, whether in pleasure or disapproval, deep in their own private worlds of thought, he concludes that no one wants to talk today. He doesn’t seem to know where he’s going and reluctantly says goodbye, deciding that one station is as good a point to leave and step outside as any.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going either, but Americans seem drawn to anyone with a map and the slightest trace of a lost facial expression as if by magnetism. ‘It’s so hot’, says a suited man, in the effusive, expressive manner of those for whom English is a second language. Attaching himself to me as an impromptu tour guide, he tells me his office is round the block and tries to reassure me that the weather is unseasonably warm for a time of year when the temperature should be in the seventies.

It’s true - the heat is wafting up from the streets and the front page headlines of discarded newspapers, and Manhattanites are riding the subway even for just a few blocks when usually they’d walk, confirming that the heat wave is making our bodies feel like we’re sweltering in the hundred degree range of the Fahrenheit scale.

I can feel my feet frying in my black plimsolls as I walk past a dog shop in the shady side streets of Greenwich Village that is offering $200 dollars off puppies. On display in a double fronted window, crotchety canines fight on one side and snooze in a heap in the other. It’s been another long day in the city that never sleeps.

Listen: New York Counterpoint - Steve Reich

After trying to get my head around the money - tiny dimes turn out to be worth ten cents, despite being smaller than five cent coins, and prices are quoted without tax - I head to the seaside, at the famous Coney Island in Brooklyn.

I breathe in its sweet and sour atmosphere of scattered popcorn and trampled hotdogs, amusement rides and old fashioned attractions that have seen better days. Coney Island has an air of impermanence about it. Like Blackpool pleasure beach, regulars fish for crabs from the pier and blasé teenagers while away their afternoons, but don’t stay.

Listen: Williamsburg Will Oldham Song - Jeffrey Lewis

Coney Island is at end of the line, literally. From the subway window, fragile Ferris wheels tower above the water, their future hanging in the balance and the basis of ‘Save Coney Island’ appeals and burlesque roller-skating benefits.

A man warns us that we’re decadent and damned, espousing his religion into a microphone as he paces back and forth against the backdrop of a beach hut, an improvised altar against the shimmering cut glass of sea and sky.

Another mimes the words in Spanish to a cheesy Latin song, as his friend in lifeguard colours sings along to a ghetto blaster. He clicks his fingers whilst moving from side to side and smiling, gesturing towards a woman sitting on the floor that she is the object of his serenade. She seems unmoved.

Listen: Coney Island Baby - Lou Reed

Larger than life is part of the everyday American experience. It’s in the brash neon signs of Times Square where consumerism and branding is enlarged into something impossible to escape from. It’s in simple things like hot-dog stands on fire. It’s in those who take it on themselves to stand up on a soapbox and become the orators of the street, assuming to speak for the rest of us and our salvation.

It’s even in the work of artists like Claes Oldenburg. His pop art vinyl recreations of fast food, like ‘French Fries and Ketchup’, or his giant BLT, complete with a wooden toothpick stabbed through the slices of tomato, is trash promoted to gallery status at the Museum of Modern Art and recreated in the cartoonish fabric of children’s indoor play areas.

You can see the seams of the vinyl, the grain of the shiny, wipe clean fabric. It’s super size before it even became a global term that ate itself into the consciousness of any outsider’s impressions of America.

Jeff Koons goes a step further and places the creations of convenience America, like vacuum cleaners fresh from their mass produced packaging, in a an air-conditioned gallery setting.Listen: A Love Supreme - John Coltrane

The streets, too, are living, breathing cultural stages. I walk down Charlie Parker street in the Lower East Side, stroll down the Bowery and wander through Chinatown.

I nap in parks such as the East Village outdoor sculpture garden to jazz buskers. I read the free newspapers, full of sex advice and adverts for women, that come from boxes on the street. One publishes the dimensions of all its girls - 48HH - 27 catches my eye - and advertises a ‘Brazilian gang bang’.

I daydream about writing for The Onion or the Village Voice and tell the time by a musical revolving alarm clock in the children’s zoo of Central Park as parents and nannies stop to photograph it.

Holden Caulfield’s beloved skating rink is under a giant funfair for the summer, but I watch red, green and yellow striped turtles stretch orange patterned feet as they bask on rocks in the sun in the park’s manmade lake, and try to persuade a man that my fascination stems from seeing in the wild a creature I’ve only seen in garden ponds and zoos before.

Listen: I’m Waiting for the Man - The Velvet Underground

I’m surrounded with Man Ray and Edward Hopper’s empty, evocative visions of New York in the Whitney, whilst the contemporary classical music of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble sends strings scored by John Adams scything through the air around me. It turns out to be a free Friday night gig, and I stay to watch a contemporary Yo La Tengo, Philadelphia’s misnamed A Sunny Day In Glasgow. Female vocals float over shimmering walls of guitar, chiming and bell-like. Sustained arpeggios fight their way through feedback and ring through the spring air.

Listen: On Broadway - Neil Young

At Frank Lloyd Wright’s curved Guggenheim museum, I see New York through the eyes of immigrant artists of the 1940s - Mark Rothko, Rothenberg and Pollock. It’s easy to miss the significance and beauty of their paintings close up, but step away and the blurred outlines take shape. They’re like the city, which seems overwhelming and enveloping at first, but starts to make sense once you’ve moved outside it. Once you’re detached, you have time to reflect.

The streets are also steeped in history. Stonewall, home of the historic gay rights riots of the 1960s, is now memorialised in Greenwich Village. In Harlem I stop at a graffiti gallery and tattoo parlour. I also have a change from a junk food diet of pizza and pretzels, bagels and cream cheese and jelly donuts, cookies and cheeseburgers. I eat a hearty meal of curry goat floating amongst rice, peas, sweet corn and bone marrow on Lennox Avenue, in sight of Malcolm X’s mosque.

Central Park is like an oasis of calm, a refuge from the noise and crowds of 5th, 6th, and 7th avenues - home to the Empire State building, Grand Central Station and the Rockefeller Centre, among others - that approach it. The nearby theatre district may be advertising stereotypically American concepts such as Legally Blonde, the stage version, and somebody mentions Woody Allen’s name in awed tones as I wonder past tree lined, brownstone streets closed off for film sets (the redbrick, cobblestones and zig zag fire escapes of Greenwich Village are already familiar from countless films) but the real entertainers are those all around you.

Listen: The East River - Jeffrey Lewis

Dogs are often driven around, or carried in owners’ pockets, but I sit on a bench next to a more inventive middle aged lady who’s turned her two miniature dogs into a travelling road show in a trolley lined with blankets. Passing children’s parents are asked for permission for their offspring to be the benefit of ‘dog kisses’, that is dogs licking the faces of delighted children. Some lucky children are offered the chance to feed the dog a biscuit, and then are told ‘well done’ and ‘you did brilliantly’.

Even without their casts of freaks, American cities go out of their way to entertain us in the summer months. I arrive at Central Park’s annual Summer Stage to see the local band Vampire Weekend for free, and join in the snaking queue that I’m told formed at 9am. Its members are passing the hot afternoon by trying to outdo each other in how sweaty they feel. T

he festival starts promisingly, as Time Out makes me a button badge, a radio station hands me a free chap stick and I find a seat on some metal bleachers. Then the rain starts. At first it’s refreshing, but as Born Ruffians soldier on it becomes apparent it’s going to rain for hours. And it does.

Andrew WK, best known for the one off novelty tune Party Hard, and its blood stained video, comperes, as over the top as ever. He observes that ‘if you haven’t washed your hair for a couple of weeks, your face will taste strange - that’ll be the hair oil!’.

We’re told to get off the bleachers when the storm starts. My fingers wrinkle like I’ve stayed in the bath too long, and my hands go so white you can see the blue veins through them. I’m soaked through, but then again so is everyone else, and we’re splashing around barefoot on the flooded ground. Those who had the foresight to bring umbrellas are trying to guard their possessions from the rain. Thunder shakes the floor, but every flash of lightning is followed by a huge cheer. The sun tries to break through, and there’s a cheer for that too. Then the cycle begins all over again; as soon as we’ve dried out, it’s time to get wet again.

The female rapper Kid Sister, though, remains upbeat, and Vampire Weekend keep us on our feet with their string led, pop take on world music. I get the Metro home, happy and dripping, after a hotdog vendor asks ‘what happened to you?!’, concerned. He asks where I’m from and I try to explain to him a world in which people stand in Central Park for hours in a thunderstorm and get soaked through to see a concert.

As I step off the Metro I see people are reluctant to go outside and see why: the entrance stairs have turned into a waterfall.

Listen: A - Punk - Vampire Weekend

I also arrive at Bryant Park early to claim my seat for an outdoor film showing of Dr. No. . I’m there more to share in another communal outdoor experience and see how New Yorkers react to the adverse weather that seems likely again, than for the choice of film.

The film is not starting until sunset, but I watch couples with wine and picnics, interrupted by frequent optimistic updates from a loudspeaker voice. I also listen to one of New York’s many cellular phone conversations, most of which are dedicated to friendships in crisis or analysis of relationships. A man sitting next to me updates somebody he is trying to persuade to come on the other end of the phone: ‘the weather just went from bad to apocalyptic’.

Looking at the clouds speeding towards us, like angrily swirling smoke, this doesn’t seem like an overstatement. They’re forming grey patches over clear white sky and gleaming, futuristic glass buildings, one of which is shaped like an inverted ice-cream cone. The bottoms of sun umbrellas over tables start rippling like water, propelled by the wind that’s conspiring with the rain against us seeing the film. As the thunder starts, half an hour before the film is due to begin, I decide to make a run for it, thankful that the excess of scaffolding in the nearby area makes a good waterproof.

Listen: On the Waterfront - Leonard Bernstein

Some of the interesting parts of New York, however, Soho and Tribeca included, are fast becoming gentrified. South Street Seaport is now trapped, as if in a stifling bell jar, under a glass shopping mall. Its charm has been staled by piped music and chain stores, bland restaurants and bars.

Past the Staten Island Ferry, from where it’s possible to catch a free close up view of the Statue of Liberty rising from the spring rain, and a grey-haired man volunteers a brief history lesson on the history of the bridges we pass through his newspapers and headphones, though, is a hidden gem.

Listen: NYC’S Like A Graveyard - Moldy Peaches

An ostentatious lime building with mustard trimming houses an installation by the former Talking Heads singer David Byrne, called ‘Playing the Building’. A vintage wooden church organ is spotlighted against the stained, paint peeling stone floor of a huge, cathedralesque, maritime hall. Through a prism opening in the plaster ceiling loom the clouds, rain, sky and skyscrapers of Wall Street powerhouses. The sun briefly comes out, and it casts a wonky shaft of light through windows in various states of repair over the organ. Eerie flutes and panpipes whistle, far away, through the workings of the building, screeching like the phantoms of its past history cast in a period opera by the avant-garde composer John Cage. I feel something rattle through the ornate pillar I’m sitting against, one of many with gargoyles at the top which must once have been gilded with gold.

When I sit down at the piano stool for my turn, clang, jangle, ting are countered by drag, rub, rumble at the other end of the scale, deep chords splodging and dragging like a large vehicle revving up. I feel as if I’m in a decrepit haunted house decorated with wooden panelling in nuanced shades of brown and grey, black and grime. Far off, mutated strings whine, grind and grate in surround sound. Then I stand up, and silence, like a beast of heavy machinery whose parts are slowly coming to rest.

Listen: Sonata for Prepared Piano I - John Cage

I reluctantly say goodbye to New York by walking past the notorious Chelsea Hotel, round the corner from my rather less characterful hostel, one last time.

Gothic looking, it rises above the launderettes and dry-cleaners, florists and minmarts, palm readers and psychics’ shops that comprise Chelsea. It’s like a rock ‘n’roll wedding cake, stacks of balconies layered on the outside that look as if they could have been built from the layers of popular history that have been made there. Today, all that remains of its colourful past is some rather garish art in the air conditioned foyer.

Listen: The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song - Jeffrey Lewis

A megabus $2 return takes me to Boston, sound tracked by a young man waxing lyrical about the elegance of suspension bridges as we tour New York to get to the highway.

We drive through the green and pleasant states of New York and Connecticut, all lakes and rivers and small settlements of wooden houses among the New England forests, to Boston.

Boston seems altogether more modest than the Big Apple, a mixture of old, historical buildings and modern glass architecture. I arrive on Bunker Hill day, but now the most subversive thing I come across is an innocuous tree hung with printouts on coloured paper that suggest ‘hug the trees’ and ‘an apple a day’ superimposed onto a scanned image of an apple.

The leaves sway in the breeze, and I can only imagine how Boston must look in the fall when its trees carpet the ground to match the warm redbrick of the buildings around it.

Listen: Roadrunner - Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

Eccentrics aren’t just on display in New York, though. Accordion players and saxophonists parade the statues and goldfish ponds of Boston Common, which is home to a tented ‘Old School Revival’, where ladies in their best floral dress are seated like ghosts of the old South.

The redbrick, outwardly austere old South Street Church, too offers jazz worship. A voice coming from a sandwich board pacing the ornate fountains and statues rises to a crescendo of ‘REPENT OR PERSISH’, and the flipside ‘JESUS GOOD SHEPHERD’, until even the homeless complain ‘you’re crazy, go away!’.

I start following the historic Freedom Trail uphill through Boston, but it’s full of tourists, locals break dancing for the crowds, and green t-shirted, shamrocked Celtics fans congregating noisily in Irish pubs for the Lakers-Celtics NBA final.

After stopping for gelato in a claustaphobically quaint district, I decide to conserve my energy for the next day’s pilgrimage to Concord, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond.

Listen: Dirty Water - The Standells

Forty minutes through Massachusetts on the bi-hourly commuter train, and home to Sleepy Hollow cemetery, Concord paints the idyllic picture of small town America that so many people over the world have from watching films and TV series. Painted houses with corresponding shutters and columns sit in the sunshine, rocking chairs idling on porches in shade cast by trees.

Walden Pond is a thirty five minute walk along a county track, carpeted by pine needles and bordered by bales of hay bleaching in the sun, but I’m spurred on by the memory of a case of Thoreau memorabilia in New York Public Library that featured John Cage’s setting to music of Thoreau’s famous dictum ‘that government is best which governs not at all…and when we are prepared for it that will be the kind of government that they will have’ and an audio book of Thoreau‘s most celebrated book, Walden, his account of renouncing nineteenth century society to live in the woods.

I asked for directions in an old-fashioned style ice-cream parlour, but stop some teenagers on my way to confirm that the long, winding road is taking me in the right direction. Although I’m on Thoreau Street, they seem barely aware of Walden Pond, saying ‘I haven’t been there since I was, like, five’ and suggest I ask in a nearby high school. After confirming with a trucker resting by the side of the road, I have to cross the highway to Walden Pond State Reservation.

It’s more popular than my brief conversation would suggest. There’s even a beach with a lifeguard hut, a far cry from the solitude Henry Thoreau sought in the 1840s. My first glimpse of Walden Pond comes, unexpectedly turquoise blue, through the thick trees that have grown on the site of Thoreau’s Bean Patch.

When I follow the trail down, it’s a lot larger than I expected. A couple from Cambridge who’ve been going there nearly every day for twenty years, to swim in the summer and skate in the winter when it freezes over, show me the steps down to the best bathing spot, and greet their fellow regular Errol. I’m told the pond has reached 74 degrees Fahrenheit after last week’s heat wave, which made it up to Boston too.

Remarking on the water’s cleanness, I’m informed the pond is filled by rainwater, and ‘the only pollution is the swimmers’. Someone adds that ‘sometimes you can taste the cosmetics in the water, like lacquer hairspray and sunscreen’.

At lunchtime, a shy chipmunk decides it’s safe enough to come and steal my crumbs, as I watch goldfish through the warm, clear water and swimmers in bathing caps lap the lake.

An enthusiast in the Thoreau shop, upon learning that I wrote my dissertation on Thoreau and Kerouac, recommends I find time to visit the old industrial town of Lowell, Kerouac’s birthplace. I begin to wonder whether I should have bought a $28 dollar, suede baseball embroidered with Kerouac’s signature from New York Public Library as a souvenir.

I’m heading back to New York early the next morning, however, to commence my first real journey by American standards: the 19 hour Amtrak service that links New York to Chicago.

As we wind our way along the Hudson River, the city quickly gives way to small towns with a seaside feel. Boats and fishermen gently ripple the calm water. We pass through Yonkers, the late afternoon sun breaking through the reflection of clouds in golden shafts over the wide river. We pass peaks and power stations, electricity pylons and water-cooling towers. What looks like the ruins of a castle, its own island in the river, is illuminated from behind by the orange sun. Sometimes the train is surrounded by water, as it splits into marsh on the other side of the track.

Listen: Syracuse - Saint Eskimo of the West

Old fashioned conductors Jim, and rotund, small talking Bob, barrel down the aisles as if they’re fresh young recruits ready for a cross country adventure. Jim proclaims we’re at ‘Syracus-ee. Syracuse-ee’ as if he’s seeing it for the first time. Seasoned passengers start trading Amtrak horror stories - taking a train in America is unthinkable to most Americans I’ve met, as they’re notoriously unreliable - but Jim tells us Amtrak is proud of its trains being another great American product, and urges us to tell Amtrak about any suggestions for improvements we may have, so he can keep his job for another twenty years.

We’re allowed out occasionally, for example at Albany, where there’s a vending machine offering seeds and flowers for sale. For a few seconds we’re joined by a deer lolloping alongside the tracks, a brownish orange against the green and blue darkness that is starting to descend.

As night falls we recline our seats, take out our blankets and try to find a comfortable position on the small pillows that have been handed out for us. We glide through town after town, distinguishable only by the gleaming of orange streetlamps in the rain through the silhouettes of trees.

At some point during the night, we travel past some lakes, and I wake up disorientated to a distended, swollen, almost full moon over which hovers a lone star, suspended lopsided above Lake Erie.

Early morning, we hit the flat Midwest, passing through Ohio until we reach the red and orange containers of industrial Chicago. As the train winds down past the famous Sears tower, I get the impression that Chicago is a city of symmetry and flashing lights, tall round buildings and lofty diamond shaped buildings, enveloped by rolling mist one minute and clear the next. The sky is an arena for advertising, planes flying over with banners fluttering in the wind.

Listen: Chicago - Sufjan Stevens

The weather in Chicago is extremely changeable. I think to myself that Chicago should be known as the rainy city rather than the windy city, but a tour of the Loop area (so called because it is encircled by the tracks of Chicago’s elevated trains) informs me that Chicago is famous for being windy because of the hot air of its residents and their pride at rebuilding Chicago after the great Chicago fire, rather than for meteorological reasons.

Whilst the sea at Coney Island provided a pleasant relief from the heat, intensely blue Lake Michigan is the coldest body of water I can ever remember immersing myself in. Usually swimming warms my body up in the cold water, but as I chatter amongst noisy seagulls, geese and fishermen, I remain conscious that my skin feels as if it’s been doused in ice and I want to get out before I get ill. Instead, I sit in pavilions by the lake that come with their own built in stone chess boards.

The view from piers, too, such as Navy Pier with its stained glass museum and Ferris wheel, is immense.

Listen: To Be Alone With You - Sufjan Stevens

The most concentratedely arty city I’ve visited yet, Chicago is full of Alexander Calder sculptures. Unusual interpretations of women by Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso face each other defiantly amongst Mies van de Rö he buildings. A photography exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Centre captures the bemused expressions of viewers of the giant Picasso sculpture when it was first erected against the cityscape in 1967.

The contemporary artist Jaime Piensa has created modern day gargoyles in the lakeside Millennium Park: two fountains against which videos of Chicago citizens are projected, pursing their lips gradually until they spurt water, to the delight and squeals of children in bathing suits.

Anish Kapoor’s shiny, affectionately named ‘bean sculpture’ reflects Frank Gehry’s serpentine bridge, and his playful Pritzker Pavilion, which resembles a crunched up paper chain cast in steel.

Listen: Theme De Yo Yo - Art Ensemble of Chicago

I spend evenings here laying on a lawn to free music. The first night, the Grant Park orchestra plays well known classical pieces: Barber’s Adagio for Strings, music from the Magic Flute, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, a selection by Debussy and a piece from Rossini’s William Tell. A fellow guest in my hostel, a recent high school graduate who’s travelled from Seattle is astounded: he tells me Chicago is the ‘most advanced’ city he’s visited.

My companions, too, are getting the train cross country and share my view that it’s preferable to being stuck on a plane where you can’t see anything. We feel obliged to go to a blues bar, being in Chicago, so watch a harmonica and organ led combo groove to Southern soul food at the House of Blues.

In the daytime, Pitchfork magazine offers lunchtime concerts in an ‘Audible Architecture’ series. Grizzled blues man Gary Higgins harmonises with an another guitarist in the classic, warm American style of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

I saunter to the nearby Freedom Museum before returning for an ‘Audio Picnic’ - a history lesson of Chicago popular music broadcast on the pavilion’s concert standard sound system. Small children whirl to ragtime, jazz and doo wop. Encompassing much of the twentieth century, obscure acts are balanced by famous names such as Sun Ra.

Listen: French Fries w/ Pepper - Morphine

I wander over to a free smooth jazz festival down the road, past a saxophonist busker bobbing up and down as if in accompaniment to the waves of the Chicago river. I blend into a crowd that’s snapping its fingers and clapping in time, singing falsetto and swaying along to a tenor and soprano sax. Over an almost hip-hop beat, a soulful female vocalist invites us to ‘come together’, spreading the vibes of summer and happiness.

A visit to Chicago wouldn’t be complete without trying its deep dish pizza. I accompany a hyperactive girl guide group from Michigan to dinner, and then we spend the evening watching the Buckingham Fountain light show, and trade information on customs such as fireworks night and the upcoming July 4th celebrations (in the event, I spend it in Mervyn’s parking lots in Redwood City, California, surrounded by families with blankets).

I leave with several phone numbers and email addresses and a cordial invitation to stay if I’m ever in the Midwest again.

Once I’ve stocked up on food for the trip - in a supermarket that’s not particularly big, but still manages to overwhelm me by containing a WHOLE AISLE full of the most choices of sliced bread I’ve ever seen - I continue my journey West in the great American tradition.

Floods in Iowa mean that America’s most scenic train, the California Zephyr of which Jack Kerouac wrote enthusiastically, has been cancelled for a week, but I’m allowed a last minute change onto the somewhat less romantically named ‘Southwest Chief’ double-decker train from Chicago to Los Angeles, which is to be the first train allowed through the rain soaked tracks.

Whilst I’m queuing to board, further insult is added to injury by a retro art nouveau style poster proclaiming the view from the California Zephyr to be ‘the best scenery you’ll ever sleep through’.

Listen: California - Low

Orange, red and yellow Union Pacific trains pass in the other direction, huge car carrying trains that seem as endless as the landscape they blend in against - flat golden fields of corn in Kansas, empty apart from the odd farm and manmade metal storage containers that house the crops.

Large, bulbous white towers occur at infrequent intervals, the name painted in bold letters at the top telling us which town we’ve reached the only thing that changes. A red parrot stands out through the window as we move towards the Mississippi, and begin to see the floods: trees up to their necks in water, the top of a slide where there would usually be a children’s playground. Inside our carriages, we can smell the water - an earthy, muddy, natural scent.

Listen: Ramblin' Man - Hank Williams

We slowly and gingerly cross the great river at Fort Madison, next to a boat casino and freighters sailing down the river, and a yard of submerged phantom trains, only their roofs left on display. We briefly make a stop to breathe in the sunset air. Rather than mere air and an abstract sensation, it seems to be something tangible and living, hot, moist and salty, almost touchable. We’re cautioned, though, not to move too far away from the train unless we want to become hitchhikers or wait in the desert for the next train along, in twenty four hours time and risk becoming bait for bears.

As I’m told off by the conductor for moving a few metres away, and previously had to run and scramble back on the train, I resist the temptation to walk over and photograph a petrol station named Love with a heart logo on its sign. The man I’m sitting next to informs me it’s a Southern chain he always makes a point to stop at when possible, and he’d like a t-shirt if they sold them.

We follow the Santa Fe trail and the female conductor tells us to look out for a ghost town in amongst the scrubbed hills. At the highest point of the trail we have to turn the air conditioning off to help us get up the mountain.

Settlements have given way to the occasional ranch braving a rocky terrain of terracotta earth where the only thing hardy enough to grow is flowered cacti. I’m touched by humbles graves in the middle of nowhere, mounds marked only with loose earth and heaped flowers.

There are more horses than humans, and the few people we pass wave to the train. Towns out this way have forbidding and unusual names like Truth or Consequences.

Listen: Whipping the Horse’s Eyes - Calexico

I spend most of the epic trip in a dedicated sightseeing carriage with outward facing seats and large windows. The train is like a hotel on wheels, complete with a café and dining car that takes reservations for tables three times a day. It’s a community on the move, united in heat as we have to make an unplanned stop in the New Mexico desert to allow the engines to cool down, which have given up on us after climbing too many hills en route. We start trading books and magazines.

It’s a family train, as we’re reminded by constant announcements asking us to watch our language and ensure any laptops only show films and games with child friendly content. There’s a high concentration of elderly and middle aged couples with the time to spare, and by the end, fathers are promising their tired, cranky children that they’ll take the train next time they go and visit grandma and grandpa.

The conductor, though, remains upbeat, and chirps ‘it’s been an adventure’ over the tannoy.

Listen: Way Out West - Big Star

I come to know my fellow passengers by sight. I recognise religious families, their teenage boys stiff in tucked in shirts, dress trousers and old fashioned haircuts when the rest of us are crumpling in the heat and shedding clothes. Ladies sport lace and bonnets and demurely put up hair, and arrange cards decorated with Bible verses in front of them. Women coo over my straw hat and tell me to watch out in case they steal it when I go to sleep. A young girl sits down next to me and tries to make friends, asking me if I know any ‘Japanese - Spanish’ and trying to teach me some words in her hybrid language.

As people get on, they bring with them newspapers, like The Pueblo Chieftain, and The New Mexican, which talks of rodeos and tobacco chewing - traditions that have been handed down from generation to generation.

It doesn’t seem to matter that we’re currently running seven hours behind schedule. As the light fades, someone takes out a harmonica and starts to wail to the eerie landscape.

We break through the night like a ghost train as lightning flashes past us, and thunder rumbles above. The train is already moving to its own music - the horn is almost always pushed down in a fat chord filling out the bang-clacking drum beat of the train’s metal workings.

The rhythm, and passing through all the different time zones is making me feel lethargic - Central Time, Mountain Time, Mountain Central Time, and then finally Pacific Time.

I pull back the curtains at first light to Arizona. I could have awoken on the moon. Dried out trails where water’s eroded the sand eat into pyramid shaped dunes. A blue-green river is incongruous in the arid surroundings, and there’s a surprising amount of traffic - trucks and cars cutting though the desert.

Listen: Scenic World - Beirut

I’m sitting next to a pin up photographer and writer from Baltimore who’d sold everything to go on a road trip for a couple of months, but no one seems to have told him the predicted journey time is fifty five hours and doesn’t seem to believe the prospect of spending so long in motion at first.

Chase, as he invites me to call him, asked if he could sit next to me rather than risk ending up next to a weird person. He’s wearing aviator shades and is covered in tattoos, from his neck to his ribs to his grafittied feet. One of the first things we talk about is his love for Manchester music, and he proudly shows me a tattoo on his wrist proclaiming ‘Morrissey waz ere’, tracing the lines of a tag the great man himself wrote there after a concert. I smile to myself at a foot tattoo that boasts ‘I love ASS’. He’s been tattooed lived on TV, and wins the admiration of nearby passenger by explaining that he recently won a sum of money on a television programme in New York that sounds like Who Wants to Be A Millionaire played in a cab.

We discuss mods, teddy boys and culture. I tell him my ambition is to visit the South, and Chase says that the scenery flying past us reminds him of the south. I note he’s reading Tortilla Flat, and tell I’m excited to be heading into John Steinbeck’s state.

Discreetly drinking from his battered Pierre Cardin luggage throughout the journey, Chase is less than delighted when his own supply’s gone and the onboard shop runs out of liquor. My new neighbour raves about Dexy’s Midnight Runners and invites me to listen to his ipod while he’s asleep. When I’m attempting to sleep, he does his best to distract me with hilarious impersonations of stereotypically ‘British’ accents; the Cockney, the Mancunian lad.

Having made it through the first night, he gives me a ‘hi-five, roommate’.

Southern California is bland and flat in comparison. We rattle through vines and orchards, succulent with plums and peaches. We drive past Route 66, and road signs inviting us to ‘Adopt A Highway’. We pass scrap yards and the occasional trailer park.

I end up having to transfer in Bakersfield, as my train is running too late to make the connection to Northern California. My new friend films me as he accompanies me to the end of the platform and gives me a hug goodbye. We exchange contact details.

A coach ride and further train later, the bay area approaches, presided over by a pink sun reflected in a tranquil sea. Whereas the stations, like Albuquerque, we stopped at in the night and morning were warm, Northern California is COLD. I’m told it’s because forest fires have blocked the sun and turned it its strange colour. Unfortunately, the fires rule out a long hoped for visit to the spectacular coastal scenery of Big Sur and Monterey, setting of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

I don’t feel as if I can possibly sit down any longer, but on reaching Berkely I’m whisked off to see a bay area punk film from the 1980s, ‘The Decline of Western Civilization’, at the Pacific Film Archives where my hostess works.

Seated amongst old punks, surrounded by the smell of creaky leather jackets and boozy breath mingled with cigarettes, it’s a fight not to fall asleep. While I’m there, it’s also screening a Buster Keaton silent movie, Steamboat Bill, Jr. , set on the Mississippi, to a live pianist, and the original Howard Hawks Scarface.

Berkeley Art Museum is showing photographs by the filmmaker Bruce Connor, who died shortly after I arrived home, documenting the area’s 1970s and ‘80s punks.

Berkeley is also home to a Shakespeare and Company bookstore, sister shop to the famous old Beat bookshop in Paris, just one among many used book stores and vintage shops.

The town is overhung with a pine and eucalyptus smell, and dominated by the grassy campus of Cal university. Vestiges of the political activism it’s famous for remain: tree sitters have lights shone on them all night by police constantly on guard.

The town is a lot larger than I expected, and full of streets occupied with frats and sororities, their mansions distinguished by giant, alien Greek letters pinned on to the facades. We lunch in Café Mediterraneum, a sixties literary hangout.

San Francisco, too, is cold, windy and misty. Weirdos on the Bart (Bay Area Rapid Transit), who I take to be amongst Berkeley’s drugs casualties, entertain us with talk of audio books. An assertive liberal tries to defend a passenger’s right to have a seat given up for her. A hairy man wearing two hats with feathers sticking out, combat trousers and an ‘I’m a HERO I gave blood’ badge carries a container in a pocket with what looks like an unappetising mixture of mud and milk. A fellow traveller asks what’s in it, and the man replies that it contains all his nutrients. A metal tree house peers at us from a scrap yard, and an otherwise nondescript man enters carrying a silver spacesuit under one arm. He holds a tub of glitter and silver paint on his arm, and a trail of glitz remains once he’s left the train.

On arriving at touristy Fisherman’s Wharf, we’re greeted by the fishy smell of sea lions, and watch them bask and flop over each other. Amongst stalls selling clam chowder from bowl shaped bread, we hire Blazin’ Saddles to bike the haunted city of decorative old Victorian villas, despite the wind (and hills!).

We take refreshments in the Japanese Tea Garden in the massive and green Golden Gate Park, with its coi carp, tiny trees and water features, and pose in the sculpture garden of the De Young Gallery by a giant Claes Oldenburg safety pin and oversize apples.

The famous, three story City Lights bookstore in North Beach is still populated by bearding men discussing literature. I’m taken with colourful posters on the wall proclaiming ‘Viva Zapata!’, and ‘Printers’ Ink is the Greater Explosive’, as well as a section entitled ‘Muckraking’. There is a large fanzines section, where a zine entitled ‘Slept in Beds’ features photographs of slept in beds, the stories behind them and samples of fabric from said beds. Upstairs in the poetry room, I leaf through Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the founder’s, best known book, Coney Island of the Mind.

We pant our bikes up Lombard Street, the world’s crookedest street, and find it’s almost as difficult to get them down some streets, as it feels like they’re going to run away down the slope with us.

Listen: Shake Some Action - Flamin’ Groovies

Nearby, is Kerouac Adler, an alley named after the most famous Beat. A ticket to the Beat Museum announces ‘the mission of the Beat Museum is to spread the values of the Beat Generation - Tolerance, inclusiveness, and having the courage to live your own individual truth’. Two loud, oddly dressed hippies in the video room grill me on my favourite beats. Luckily, my preference for the poetry of Denise Lebertov as well as the more obvious choice of the writing of Allen Ginsburg, John Clellon Holmes and Kerouac, seems to meet with their approval.

They add their own commentary and laughter to the film, criticising ‘Which war? Good one. Who says the war ever even finished’ when the film makes an unsuspecting mention of the post-war climate in which the Beats were writing.

Listen: 7 and 7 Is - Love

We go for dinner in a restaurant dedicated to all things garlic, named appropriately The Stinking Rose. It’s hung with corks everywhere of all the bottles of wine ever popped there.

Night has fallen, and the street lamps seem to follow the tramlines down crooked streets, becoming light condensed into wire form.

Haight-Ashbury is touristy these days, and apart from vintage stores it’s full of shops selling sixties hippy memorabilia like tie dye baby grows. I enjoy a blues harmonica busker under a sign post, however, and pose for the obligatory photo where the streets Haight and Ashbury cross.

Listen: White Rabbit - Jefferson Airplane

My visit also coincides with gay pride weekend. Naked hula hoopers on the top of buildings and men proudly showcasing their bottoms from upstairs windows point the way to the Castro district, where we dance in the street to techno at a huge party amongst pink angels and faeries in fluffy dressing gowns and heels.

By the end of the night, feathers, boas and tinsel of all colours are trampled underfoot in amongst party food like corndogs, funnel cake and sourdough bread.

Homeless people with shopping trolleys dart through the sea of legs to claim rubbish - cans and bottles - to sell for recycling. On the drive back, however, an aggressive tramp throws a rock at our car.

California boasts spectacular, bleached scenery, golden and pimpled with trees but it’s also very urban. Houses have colourful front gardens of wild flowers, and even the freeways have flower beds down the middle.

We soar over the Golden Gate bridge on a day when there’s enough fog over the red-orange metalwork to give it atmosphere, but not enough to obscure the bay and the small islands beneath.

We go on scenic drives on windy, hilly roads past remote farms selling strawberries, signs for drag races and miles and miles of cliff top fields broken by strange yards selling large animals made out of rusty metal. Reaching an angry ocean, we stop on a remote beach of grey sand.

Another destination is the Mystery Spot, an attraction where one can sample the rules of gravity in reverse. It’s just outside Santa Cruz, a university town with a seaside amusement park, and we stop in a giant redwood forest and step inside hollowed out trees, where the bark inside takes the texture of wooden leopard skin.

We pass through the cottages of La Honda, hidden amongst sun and pines. It was once home to Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and setting of his notorious novel The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

At sunset, we reach a lookout spot and park in a row of cars admiring the view out over Berkeley, before returning home to make popcorn slathered in condensed milk and sugar. I feel like I’m a typical young American, watching South Park and an animated TV comedy American children grew up on: Ren and Stimpy.

Another outing takes us to wine country, cheese tasting and a historic Mission opposite an art deco cinema with worn paint in the small town of Sonoma. Nearby, a park is dedicated to the author, socialist and tramp Jack London.

The woods around us hum with wildlife, as we trample past signs warning us to beware of rattlesnakes and poison oak, to London’s houses and cottage. Lizards dart about to both sides of us, and we stop to watch one with a long, electric blue tail. I’m fascinated by banana slugs, large, slimy mustard coloured creatures.

Later, we explore Jack London square next to Oakland marina, visit a Chinese bakery in Chinatown and eat a dinner of tibs and honey wine in an Ethiopian restaurant with our hands.

Listen: Crazy In Love - Beyonce

By night, houses in Oakland are taken over for hip-hop parties. Another house hosts an impromptu punk gig in the front yard. Most houses in this area have threatening looking fences with metal spikes, but three punk bands play within a picket fence, with a wheelchair attached to it by a coat hanger, before the police turn up. A woozy Latino family arrive in their dressing gowns and stand in the street gazing in curiously at the odd view of a chess set, two sailing boats atop a barbecue, a child and Rottweiler dogs and puppies running around and an angular punk band whose drum kit sports the motif ‘A Friendly Neighbour Is My Shotgun’.

Over in San Francisco, pale faced, long haired metal fans dressed in black get a much needed dose of sun at a free outdoor concert in the Jerry Garcia Auditorium. A small dog has been dressed up in the customary regalia too, in a denim jacket decorated with band patches.

Listen: I Just Can’t Seem to Make You Mine - Nuggets Boxset

I’m told I have to sample American fast food chains, so we drive through Taco Bell, Americanised Mexican food, and In and Out, a Christian, California only burger chain where the fries and drinks come with a discreet Bible quotation on the packaging. Unlike the UK, these really are cheap - a dollar something for a cheese burger.

During my last week, I’m taken to an old style diner playing sentimental sixties pop music. My companions’ omelettes, and my pancakes, come with a sole strawberry as a cute finishing touch, and the ketchup dispenser puts a freak heart shaped blob of ketchup onto the top of the serving in my friend’s cup.

I think that American style pancakes with the unlikely combination of melted butter and syrup is the most delicious food I have ever tasted, but still feel obliged to try a slice of real American. pie. I deliberate at length, considering pecan, but finally settle on classic, wholesome apple pie and steal a bite of my friend’s pumpkin pie.

I’m also taken to a Peruvian baby shower my friend’s baby is holding, in one of the distinctive Latin areas in Californian towns and sample Peruvian food - chicken with spicy sauce and rice.

I decide to leave the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Frida Kahlo exhibition until my last day, but it’s closed so I wander the independent galleries nearby, from those offering collectors Picasso and Miro sketches to small galleries championing new artists.

I’m transfixed by the colourful, luminous skin tones of Californian painter Serena Rosenfeld. The gallery assistant, confident she can make a sale, sits me down in a private room to view the painting in a different light, and amongst other works by the artist. She quizzes me on the size of my bedroom at home and asks if I can envisage a place for it in my home. I have a hard time convincing her I can’t part with $6400 dollars, even if they will ship it for me. As a consequence, I don’t linger too long on the children’s book paintings of Peruvian artist Rosemary Vavende.

Having walked around galleries for hours, I rest in Union Square to a Bolivian guitarist named Oscar Reynolds.

Listen: You’re Gonna Miss Me - 13th Floor Elevators

I’m worried that if I stay in California any longer, I might start to talk in the strange language of Northern Californians, and begin to pepper my sentences with the word ‘hella’ that seems to precede every adjective.

I have a thirteen hour plane journey to look forward to, however, twice the time it took me to reach New York. My last journey in America, though, is a good one, past the magnificent dinosaur shaped cranes of the port of Oakland that tower over the bay and can be seen through the windows of the SFS airport bound train.