Today I went shopping with my wife. This is of course an extremely enjoyable activity. I love my wife and I love the city, as Petula Clarke famously sang,

When you’re alone and life is making you lonely

No, for my money, if you want a real feel for people, go to where families are. Interestingly, on our recent holiday abroad, Mrs Bain and I slipped into our swimming trunks and spent a few days in Puerto Vallata, Mexico, which amongst other claims to fame, is where the Love Boat used to visit

This is the latest in my Observations of America series of blogs. I have previously covered Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite National Park, and America’s looming (ballooning) obesity epidemic.

In this piece I launch into the unsavoury, but some would say lucrative world of tipping.

There are many great things about America. The friendly people, the National Parks, the breakfasts. However, and I’m going to say this quietly, one of America’s un-greatest things is tipping. Tipping surely ranks as one of America’s worst ideas, second only to

In a recent blog I wrote about the Grand Canyon and the power of water to shape a landscape. However, all the geographers and penguins amongst you will know that there is something even more powerful than water – ice. If you want to undertake some serious earthmoving, just call Glaciers R Us. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, is this more powerfully illustrated than Yosemite National Park in California. If you are ever in San Francisco, take a break from the gay bars and hippy watching and take a trip to Yosemite.

If you want to make a fortune, sell meat pies to America. A cursory survey of American cuisine, as experienced first hand, (I also used my mouth) is that the meat pie would fit into American culinary tastes like a succulent pea into a pod. Pull off from any road into a strip mall and you have a staggering array of choices that range from the unhealthy to ‘death is only minutes away’. Convenience and size are everything, and I can see the fully self contained delicious meat pie fitting nicely into this scene. Actually, the lack of pies in the USA is really one of life’s surprises.

I remember as a kid watching an episode of the Flintstones where Fred and Barney visit the Grand Canyon. They arrive to find a small shallow creek that they could easily step over. Fred tells Barney that one day it’ll be really something! I thought it was pretty funny back when I was 10 years old and I hadn’t even seen the Grand Canyon. This week I was again reminded of that Flintstones episode as 50 years on I finally got to see the real thing.

1.5 million people a day visit the United States. Today I was one of them. We,(the effervescent Mrs Bain and I) are headed for Las Vegas. Why, I hear you ask? Well certainly not to gamble. Being tighter than a Scotsman’s jockstrap (skintight) there was no chance Mrs Bain was going to unleash her faux calfskin wallet on the croupiers of Sin City. No, we were in Las Vegas primarily because it

Books might just be to blame. Like an undertaker at a rest-home aerobics class, I was loitering in a book store when I realised that the way books are classified is a little odd. No, I’m not talking about the Dewey Decimal system that although invented way back in 1876, was in the 1960’s (when […]