England was in the grips of a heatwave. Manchester was hitting 34°C. Never have I ever been so happy to step off a plane and be met with grey skies and a merciful eighteen degrees.
After taking the train from Manchester to London for work, I flew to Inverness to meet my good friend Lesley-Ann and her family, over from North Carolina. LA and I met on Instagram over a shared obsession with a ship that sank in 1912. That might sound like a ridiculous foundation for a friendship, and yet, as RMS Titanic endures, so too has our friendship. Daily voice notes piled up (we’re still arguing over who started), and I have somehow found myself part of the family; her kids now call me “Uncle Pabs”, and I’m included in all the holiday planning. Last year was Bergen, Norway. This year we decided to try Scotland.
They are, in the way a lot of Americans are right now, desperate to flee their own country. LA and her family fell in love with Britain a few years ago. Today, they talk about visas the way the rest of us talk about the weather.
LA’s schedule - inspired by my tightly run efforts in Norway - gave us a day to ‘acclimatise ’ after we’d all arrived in Inverness, which mostly meant walking, local parks, the river, markets, and the bookshops, where the Titanic section was located within a minute and then twenty more vanished without anyone noticing.
Walking around the town also gave me the honour of explaining the cultural significance of a ‘big Tesco’ and the EastEnders ‘duff duff’ (complete with the customary “you ain’t my muvva”, obviously)