In order to avoid the terror of going to a new barber here in the US - where I dreaded emerging with either some bizarre San Francisco hipster hair cut or something that a jarhead would be proud of - I’ve been cutting my own hair.

Easy enough.

Then suddenly, one fine Saturday morning (yesterday) I was doing it while not entirely compos mentis and managed to put the wrong attachment on and shaved a streak on one side of my head. Whoops. The only remedy: a No2 all over, the shortest I’ve had it for years.

The result?

A look Anna referred to as “the bully in a special school”.

Oh well.

Blimey, I thought: that’s bloody brilliant.

So I sent them an email.

Hello my name is Bobbie Johnson. I love sausages of all descriptions: big ones, small ones, brats, links, smoked, you name it, I’ll eat it.

And since my name is Johnson too, I feel an affinity with your company that I would like to display publicly through the medium of a T-shirt.

My dream scenario is that you have a stockpile of tees with your logo and slogan on: “JOHNSONVILLE: SAUSAGE IS ALL WE DO.”

Can you fulfil my dream? You would win a fan for life, and have your fine products advertised wherever I go.

I thought little of it until we returned from a few days away, and I noticed a mysterious envelope in our pile of post (note the Johnsonville logo in the top left).

How exciting!

I opened the envelope, and discovered a card - embossed, no less, with the Johnsonville seal.

I was on tenterhooks.

The anticipation.

The sweet
anticipation
and then…

I opened it up to find a canned message and two $1 off coupons for Johnsonville sausages.

How disappointing. My dreams of a sausage-related T-shirt dashed in seconds.

I may never recover.

So… is this working?

Anna’s mum is visiting us at the moment, and we’ve been taking little trips in the temporary windows afforded by the apocalyptic storm.

Yesterday we took a trip to Half Moon Bay, a little scoop taken out of the coast that’s about 25 miles south of San Francisco. As a place it’s all a bit twee for my liking, and there’s a harbour at Pillar Point that takes some of the fun out of the coastline. But the real reason I wanted to go was to see Maverick’s, the wave that is legendary among surfers.

I’ve never climbed on a surfboard, and given my lack of coordination I think it’s better that I don’t try. But watching the water rise and crash in immense slaps against the rocks was simply awe-inspiring.

As somebody who grew up with dogs, I was never really a cat person. In fact, I worried about cat people. And most of all I worried about becoming a cat person.

I’m not sure if I am now a fully-qualified cat person, but I’m glad we brought them with us.

The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of Josh Hersh, “It really annoys them.” Sara remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was “the late” reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker, in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed.

For example, in conversation with a stranger you might feel the need to point out that you aren’t American.

“Well, I’m British,” you say. They volley back with a roll of the eyes and a mildly disdainful “Well, obviously”. How stupid of you. Of course you’re British. Everybody can hear it, even if you can’t.

Sometimes it’s different, though.

The plumber came to try and fix our broken dishwasher the other day.

“All this economic stuff, it’s terrible,” he said, handing me a piece of piping glistening with rancid water.

“Yes, it is,” I replied, wiping my hands clean. “Lots of people have lost their jobs, it’s awful.”

“Yeah, a couple of my good friends have no jobs now,” he responded, poking his head out from under the sink.

“Oh.”

“But I suppose it’s OK for you,” he said. “After all, if things get really bad in America, you can always move back home to France.”

“I’m British.”

The idea confused him. Not only had my accent clearly not got through - in fact, he hadn’t even realised that English might just be my mother tongue.

“Oh yeah? Britain?”

“Don’t they have a train over there that goes straight to France?”

On a separate note, here’s a little bit of startling San Francisco history for you, courtesy of Wikipedia.

“At the end of 1849 [in SF], out of a population of between 20,000 and 25,000, only about 300 were women and an estimated almost two-thirds of those were prostitutes.”

Anna’s response? “Wow, the rest of them must have just given it away for free.”