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He met me on time with STORR written on his phone, just outside the place where human arrivals spill out into America. In his sixties, he introduced himself as “Tim, I will be your driver today.” Tim had on a loose charcoal suit and friendship bracelets and was jolly and camp. Relieved to have got through the long, hot immigration queue, I chatted brightly with him as we walked through the grey corridors of San Francisco International to where his car was parked. “Was that your plane?” he asked, as the travelator moved us past a large window through which I could see a Virgin jet. “Yes, that was it.”
“I kept seeing Virgin Airlines and then Alaska Airlines and I didn’t know which was which,” he said.
“Ah, ok.”
Then he started telling me about the weather at this time of year, here on the Pacific coast, and then about the weather at all the other times of year. The weather is different in one place than it is in another place, was the gist. There was a lot of detail. My flight had been eleven hours and the immigration queue was long and hot and the immigration officer had been bad tempered and my jet lag was kicking in and it was a lot of detail about the weather.
“Don’t get old!” Tim chuckled as he struggled with his key fob to open the car, so I could put my case in the back. “The boot! We don’t have boots in America. We have trunks. And did you know that we don’t have lorries?”
“You have trucks,” I said.
“That’s right!”
I slid into the back seat. Tim started the engine.
“Hey, do you say ’priv-acy’ or ‘prive-acy’?”
“I mean, I don’t know,” I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “I think we say both.”
“I haven’t been to the UK since the 1990s. Or maybe the 1980s. No, 1981! 1981.”
“Great.”
“I’ve got Hampstead Heath on my mind! Where is it they do the rowing?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“The rowing museum. Where is that? There’s this wonderful rowing museum.”
“Somewhere on the Thames?”
“It will come to me. The journey is going to be about two hours.”