8 February 2023

So much is so familiar here – I’ve heard the accents a thousand times before, seen the Starbucks and Krispy Kremes on their imperial advance into British culture, we have motorways and car culture back home too. And yet at the same time so much is alien – endless ads on the freeway: ‘WRECK?’ ‘Life is short. Get a divorce.’ ‘There IS evidence for God.’ Who’d have thoughts to call a supermarket ‘Harris Teeter or ‘Food Lion’.

7 February 2023

Apparently the superbowl is coming up next week. ‘Oh I don’t really pay attention to it – I follow college football’ says Shawn, ‘if you don’t mind which team wins it’s just like watching a ball go back and forth in front of a camera.’ This has always been my experience with trying to watch American Football.

Bryan Adams and Meatloaf suddenly make more sense when you’re actually working in a big warehouse with real american guys and power tools. It doesn’t seem so cliched or inauthentic when you’re surrounded by the same accents and the same big-ness that come across in these epic anthems about desire and manly, chivalrous love.

‘Everything’s bigger in America’ - this saying is true – big cars, big meals, big pianos, big skies, big roads… and big problems.

3 February 2023

I sit at the table – laptop out, an empy packet of crunchy granola ‘raisin bran’ awaits its transport to the recycling pile, reminding me that I don’t yet actually know when the binmen come. I’ve added another cardboard box to the overflowing pile of dry rubbish – and that will be full once the raisin bran goes in.

On the wall of the air BnB bungalow I’m staying in is a clear kitsch instruction - ‘EAT’ - the command is shouted at me in capital letters on a circular backing, made to look like it’s constructed from wooden slats, but also to look like a plate?

31 January 2023

Today 9 volunteers turned up to get stuck in to taking apart pianos - it was an amazing experience to share what we know so well from back home, and to find such enthusiastic and like-minded people so far away.

27 January 2023

The sun shines on the accumulation of tower-blocks that is Uptown Charlotte as I drive up the freeway – the Interstate 77. Charlotte is a banking boom-town – steadily growing through aggressive gentrification over the last 20 to 30 to 70 years. Almost everyone I meet has arrived as an incomer from somewhere else in the States.