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Hi

Its been really lovely hearing from you, thanks. I wanted to write sooner but so much has been going on.

The flight went well, the kids were great. Have you ever seen ‘You’ve got mail’ with Tom Hanks? If you have, can you tell me what happened in the end? The flight was 25minutes early and I missed the end.

The house we’re staying in is lovely, and it has a really big garden. None of the gardens have fences round them which made me a bit nervous with wandering Conor, but he’s been fine and loves running round and round the house. Inside is really nice, painted white with wooden furniture, and stripped wooden flooring. The living room has a really big stone fireplace and we’ve had a fire there most nights (the house is warm, but it’s a novelty to Simon). We haven’t had a cigarette for a week now – the open fire helps as we can breathe in the smoke from it.

Cape Cod is absolutely beautiful, every house is pretty and most are stunning. Of course they are all wooden cladded and painted with wonderful porches and verandas with white cane furniture, shutters, and so well cared for. It must be stunning in the fall as there are trees everywhere.

Nothing is quite as I expected, the supermarkets have seemed very drab like Kwik-save (food shopping has taken me ages as I don’t know what anything is and can’t find most things I am looking for). Everything is very clean though and everyone has been really friendly and has made such a fuss that we are British. We have eaten lots of local food, doughnuts, hot dogs, etc. We went to Burger King today, and Simon ordered me a vege burger, but when we looked it had nothing in it but lettuce and dressing, when we told them that the middle was missing, they said that to them vegetarian meant no meat and so gave us nothing inside (I think they thought we were a little odd).

We bought a car today, a Chevrolet Blazer Sports Utility (jeep), we have a hired one at the moment and so does half the people on the road, if you don’t have you have a truck. We’ve been all day arranging insurance and number plates, we can’t believe how much hassle it is to buy a car.

We went to a terrific place the other day called Plymouth Plantation, a live museum showing a real life replica of one of the first villages the Pilgrims settled in. It was done with incredible accuracy and all of the houses you could go in or around the village were characters based on original people that you could talk to and ask questions. All the people knew was there own history and moment in time – it was quite surreal.

So, what have the American settlers been up to. Thought its about time I let you know!

We’ve now been in the USA for 2 weeks. We’ve been staying in our holiday house in Cape Cod. It’s a bungalow, but has a huge basement, and those metal door that lead in to the basement like to a pub cellar. The sort you see in the films. Like the Evil Dead.

Jaine doesn’t like the basement. It frightens her. She doesn’t understand why they have to put the washing machine and the tumble drier into a badly lit, undecorated cellar, with a groaning boiler and a zombie in the corner. The more I skit her about going down, the less she goes, so I have to do it all now. And the more I skit her, the more worried I’m getting about going down there at 1am!

Funniest thing so far: we went to Burger King and ordered a vegetarian burger for Jaine. It turns up as a bun with lettuce, tomato and dressing, but no vegeburger. They couldn’t grasp the concept of it : "We want a burger with no meat in". "We left the meat out". "No, we want a vegetarian burger!". "We left the meat out". Eventually we got them to just add a meat burger!

I got a suit today (late Friday), for my interview on Monday. Nice, simple off the peg job. No such thing! The come without a hem on the trousers and need to be taken up by a tailor. The tailor was of course just off home, so I’ll have to pick it up on Monday about 20 mins before the interview. I’ve also got a new shirt, tie and shoes, so its going to be a case of the suit wearing me and not the other way around! Chloe even found new undies for me – a pair of silk boxers with tool-belt and spanners printer on! (Is that a hammer in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me!)

Not that getting to the interview sounds easy. It turns out that its on a bank holiday that everyone in Boston but Fidelity takes note of. So there’s a marathon being run through the city centre whilst I’m trying to look cool in my unhemmed suit with labels on the bottom of my shoes. Ah well.

We rented a car for the first 2 weeks. Seemed like a bargain at $625 for a new Jeep, with auto everything, (The lights turn themselves on, air conditioning, cruise control, electric seats etc) Until they asked if I wanted insurance. That doubled the cost!

We’ve since toured lots of new car showrooms and got very close to getting carried away. Going in to spend $10,000 on a second hand car, we ended up looking at $30,000 Jeeps with everything. Luckily we left without signing as I understand there isn’t a 14 day change you mind option here!

Finally we got a second hand Chrysler Blazer – a Jeep look a like. With auto everything again. (We saw another car with auto cruise control – it decided whether to put cruise control on for you or not. Wouldn’t want these fat arsed yanks to have to press a button now, would we!) Only down side is that the old electric seats are so slow that I’d rather have good old manual ones.

The purchase was smooth, but the bureaucracy here is ridiculous and confusing. Most strange is that the number plates belong to the owner, not the car, so the car was sold to us with no plates. We then had to go to a motor vehicle registry to get a new number plate (got a nice one with a picture of a lighthouse on!) We spent 2 day driving around carrying bits of paper and queuing before we could be sure we had the car.

With the insurance, you can get cover if you hit someone, as here. In the Uk this is limited to the cost of repairing their car. Here you decide whether they’re going to sue you for $200,000 or $1,000,000. Then you get cover if you’re hit. You need to pay to repair your car. Then you have insurance if the motorist is uninsured, so that you can sue yourself for damages. But what if the other party is underinsured? You can sue them for the first $100,000 then for the remaining $900,000 you sue yourself. Of course, for an insurance bill of $1,300 they still expect you to pay for the first $500 of any claim! And I always wondered how they paid for all those big payouts!

It maybe worth paying for the insurance though, as I’ve driven down a busy road on the wrong side, and I only just stopped Jaine going around a major roundabout backwards.

People here are extraordinarily friendly. People chat to you in shops rather than ignore you. There’s a guard in every carriage on the train, telling you where you are and chatting to you. I think its because they see it is better to give everyone a job, even if it could be automated, and have low unemployment. There was even a driver in each carriage of the subway. Now I may be stupid, but I thought only the driver at the front would actually have any impact, so I don’t know why these other drivers are needed?

And because there are so many staff in the shops, its easy to spend time chatting to the customers. The strange thing is that they are all actually being friendly : I’d expected to get lots of insincere platitudes (Have a nice day), but it all seems genuine. Or maybe I’m just naive! Doesn’t always sit well with my grumpy Southern demeanour though – I usually like to keep quiet and ignore people and only say the minimum possible to complete a transaction with the odd ‘Thankyou’ thrown in to alleviate guilt!

Food: I wanted chilli on my pizza. They said they couldn’t put chilli on my pizza as it was too wet, thinking I meant chilli con carne. Took me a few days to discover they call chillis ‘Hot peppers’! Worse still, I can’t find curry anywhere – as you know I love my curries. No Indian restaurants. No instant takeaway meals in the supermarkets. Not even any jars of Pataks Madras curry paste. Anyone who visits is hereby ordered to bring jars of curry sauce and poppadums! The other odd thing is that you expect them to have far more choice on things; they may have 30 different brands of crisp, but they are all plain or salt and vineger: no chicken, bbq or beef for me!

We are having a great time here though, despite my few gripes. I like the big cars and cleanliness. Huge fridges are a must, as are double sized tumble driers (yawn). The houses are big and have interesting designs with lots of levels of detail (no standard terraces here!). The layout of Boston is great – it’s a small city and so the financial district butts up to the shops then the parks then the sea. Looks a good place to work.

Chloe and Conor are enjoying some extra freedoms. The house is in a quiet road, with a big garden, and although there are no fences I am happy for them to go out an run around the house by themselves.

Chloe particularly like it here because her favourite doll, Madeline, is big over here. We couldn’t get a thing in England, but now every toy shop has new outfits and accessories. The Madeline cartoon is even on TV everyday which is odd: Chloe started liking Madeline when she was three, so we videotaped some episodes for her, but have not seen it since. She’s been stuck re-watching those same 5 episodes for four years!

The fact that I’m unemployed and looking for work now is having a detrimental effect on Conor. He’s much closer to me now and we play more games, wheras I’m supposed to be a dark, shadowy figure who appears near bedtime and makes him cry!

Have a good day, y’all.

Simon, Jaine Chloe and Conor.

Dear All,

I think this place was made for Jaine. Every street has a quilt shop, a craft shop, beautiful houses and scenery for her to paint. She has also found her ideal shop - it is a warehouse size craft shop, selling discounted arty bits she can make! Fortunately we only went there 10 mins before closing, so it didn’t drive me (too) mad!

We’ve finally had a rainy day; it poured down when we went to see Plymouth Rock (the rock upon which the first American settler stepped when leaving the boat). Very historically important to the Americans. Looks like a rock to me, and it didn’t even have PLYMOUTH all the way through like Brighton rock does.

We finally found a shop that sells computers, a great big warehouse one. And then another one ½ a mile away. And then another one next to that. They’re like buses you see! Unfortunately, it is 50 miles away and meant a 100 mile round trip. I bought a scanner, took it home and it wasn’t working, so had to go back the next day. They replaced it and then managed to find a WebCam for me, which I took hoe. To find it wasn’t working. I can’t be bothered to go up there again! Apparently they don’t work with portables, so we’ll have to buy a desktop now!

More importantly, on our wet day around Plymouth, we stumbled upon an English shop. Lots of bobby hats, Beatles and Chas and Dave for homesick Brits. And food. You guessed it, they had a curry section! So I got a jar of curry sauce (£4) a jar of mango chutney (£5) and some lime pickle. Apparently, my face lit up like a child at Christmas when I spotted them! Its strange, as we’ve only been away a couple of weeks. I think it was more the thought that I could not have one at all rather than really wanting one immediately.

And I found an English style pub today. When in Rome, stay an Englishman as I always say!

The lady has been running the shop since 1982. She still has a strong British accent and was complaining about how the yanks can’t do good sausages. I’m doing that daily – but after 17 years!! It was odd the things she’s learnt that people miss: Paxo stuffing, sausages, curries, sherbet fountains, custard and of course, marmite. All staples you expect to be everywhere! I don’t know if I’ll ever get desperate enough to buy Chas ‘n’ Dave though!

House hunting if interesting. There are signs for ‘Open Houses’ by the roadside. The estate agent basically kicks the owners out for the day and anyone can stop by without an appointment for a viewing. This is giving us a better idea of what to expect. Unfortunately, the signs don’t give a price or size and so you can see the wrong sort of place. We went to one earlier: at the drive it seemed a tiny 1 bedroom house and we would have left if we hadn’t been caught. Inside it was a tardis, and had 3 floors, huge open plan rooms, every conceivable luxury and 1 acre and was basically ideal for me. It was also on a hilltop with a beautiful view over the river. The price – not cheap but about the same as the place we almost bought in Hove, but for somewhere twice as big in a stunning area. If only the commute from here wasn’t so long!

If any of you have read them, we saw ‘TheHouse of the Seven Gables’ and the place where ‘Moby Dick’ was based. No, I haven’t read them either! I know the ‘The Ghost’ is a popular story with the girls at the moment – we plan to visit Deerfield and Shelbourne Falls next week, and maybe visit the Chateau (if it exists!)

That reminds me: an odd thing about this place is the re-use of names. Place names from the UK are widely re-used (This is just funny: Manchester-by-Sea, Ipswich, Brighton and Birmingham are delightful little villages) but what’s confusing is that they use the same names for towns only 15 miles apart (i.e. Salem exists twice)

I’ve had another odd ‘interview’. When we were buying car insurance, I mentioned I was after computing work and the woman said her husband was a recruiter, so I took his number. I was expecting a tiny, two person office when I visited him and so went in my scruffiest jeans, but instead they have this enourmous new building, like southfort in Dallas! Overlooking a lake, sweeping staircase but only 1 year old etc. Anyway, instead of discussing in detail the skills I had or the roles I was after, he took me on a tour of his plush new building and took me to meet all of the other consultants, in case they had any work. I must have met 50 people, and probably most of them just thought ‘Who’s the scruffy weirdo with Sean?’ Never mind, they all sounded positive jobwise!!

Unfortunately though, I’m a bit in limbo jobwise at the moment. The IT director I knew at Fidelity has basically agreed to give me a job if he can get a proposal through the board, and the agency are pushing forwards with the visa. This means they are not looking at other companies. And because they are processing the visa, it makes it difficult for me to look for work elsewhere…. So its now all down to Fidelity getting a job for me!! The role I’m going for there, by the way is as a senior developer on fixed income (GILTS, bonds etc). This limbo also means I find it difficult ot just sit back and enjoy this as a holiday: I think I should be pushing hard to get a job, but can’t..

We found some snow the other day – four foot deep. We made snowballs and I tried driving the 4X4 on it, but as it was only 6 foot across it didn’t help. The ‘snow’ was the skimmings from the local ice-rink! So we took the kids ice skating. Chloe took to it like a duck to water, and even wrote "I’m a champ at ice-skating!" in her diary. The place was good, as the kids could skate around using milk crates for balance, which gave them confidence. Conor, of course, would charge his as fast as he could, then lift his feet and skid, trying to ram Chloe. C&C are loving it here by the way, although they are starting to miss their friends.

Well, I think that about covers it,