Turkey day

Thanksgiving is by far my favourite holiday. Free from the religious or patriotic claptrap that engulf most American holidays,, it is just about eating, drinking and making merry. Like any fun holiday, it is almost pagan, despite being only made a national holiday in the 1930s by FDR to help folks forget about the Great Depression (it has always been a holiday in Massachusetts).

There are some folk who are not so wild about it. A day that commemorates the Pilgrim's first sucessful harvest - and by implication clearing the way for more white settlers - is not celebrated so much in the Native American community. I'm fact, Native American protesters usually go down to Plymouth Rock each Thanksgiving to throw blood on it. I don't know whose blood it is, actually. A slaughtered whitey, one hopes.

Yet where am I spending the day? In the bosom of family and friends stuffing my face with pumpkin pie until immobile? No I am on a train to Edinburgh called the Highland Chieftan eating a Marks & Spencer Mexican three bean wrap and some Kettle Chips. It is the first Thanksgiving I've not celebrated since I've been abroad. Usually I whip up my famous nut roast (secret ingredient: grated green apple. And semen. Not my semen, mind). My vegetarianism has waxed and waned over the years, but one thing that turned me was cooking my first (and only) turkey and having to remove the euphemistically named gibblets. Gibblets sound like a children's board game. What I discovered was that they are the poor beast's internal organs. Incidentally, Benjamin Franklin propsed the wild turkey as the US national bird. Would American history have been different if we adopted the comical, ungainly and skittish turkey as our national symbol rather than the war-like bald eagle? Discuss.

Media whore

I have become, it seems, some sort of voice of authority, declaiming from my observation deck atop Endeavour House. Here is me giving my thoughts on BBC Radio Scotland on the impact of Amazon.co.uk (available for 6 more days, I think). And here I am quoted in the Hootsman on misery memoirs.

On Monday, I hit the Holy Grail, BBC TV. I'm ready for my closeup Mr DeMille.

Twickers

So I went to my first rugby match on Saturday at Twickenham, which is, according to billboard's plastered all over the place and the adverts that run on the big screen incessantly during intervals, "the home of rugby". Here's a shot from my seat, to get the blood stirring for those interested in the pageantry of an international sporting match, the astonishing athletic prowess, the rampant homo-eroticism.

It was interesting going to a rugby match; I have only been to football matches here. In football, fans are corralled, like the animals they are, into separate sections, where they bray for each other's blood, hooting like baboons, perhaps hurling piles of excrement at each other. In rugby the crowd mixes together pleasantly, people applaud for the other team and don't call even them cunts! Alcohol is served (real ales, for goodness sake) and you can even buy it in bottles. I have seen pies at Easter Road, the Hibernian ground, turned into deadly weapons (they do have the density of granite), I can only imagine what Neds with glass bottles could do.

And yet, I couldn't really warm to the rugby. The game itself was boring, a rather pointless to-ing and fro-ing of territorial acquisition, much like a Balkan war. And there is something somehow false and oh so terribly middle class English about the whole thing. These people are watching what it is essentially a blood sport; why are they sitting down as if at a terribly straightened Sunday roast at their granny's in Maidenhead?

A long national nightmare is over

I've been up since 5.00 watching the results, scarcely believing it, my glee rising with each passing moment, each state falling to Obama, each gain in the House or Senate. I cried as I watched Obama's acceptance speech, maybe more from relief than anything else. Maybe this for Britons is analogous to Tony Blair sweeping into power. And let's bask in it before the cynicism seeps in, which it undoubtedly will. There is so much to be done - a horrific economy, two ongoing unwinnable wars.

By the way, Bush apparently called Obama to tell him he had an 'awesome night.' I'll miss W's stirring, Jeffersonian rhetoric.

There will be a lot of talk about America finally living up to its all men created equal credo. To an extent that is true, that so many rednecks and crackers apparently managed to vote for the black guy. But I think it is just another tiny step on a long road to America ever having any kind of racial equality. Obama may be in the White House, but most blacks still live in poverty, the divides are still deep.

And something that nobody seemed to have mentioned at all during the campaign is that America has already had a popular black president: David Palmer in 24. I'm joking but not entirely. I honestly believe that seeing a black president battling terrorists with Jack Bauer for five years perhaps subliminally helped Obama's profile with the dumb-asses who make up the majority of the US electorate.

But the big news, of course, is the people of Massachusetts voted overwhelmingly to decriminalise marijauna. Hey, I might move back!

Obama

I come home tonight oddly unsettled. Not because I have just seen Daniel Craig's second go as the moody, brutal, muscular kick-ass Bond - which is not terrible, but is a second or third rate Bourne film. And not because I walked back through Peckham.

No, I sit here a few hours from the polls closing on the East Coast, hoping but wary. I know all indications are for Obama in a cake-walk, but there is this horrible nagging feeling that something (such as, I don't know, racism) is going to go wrong. In the past few days, I have become a surrogate pundit for friends here, as the real American, asked to give my take on which way it's going to go, and also to explain the intricacies of the electoral college, why the Cuban vote matters in Miami, etc. I've found that I can lie outrageously and most people will believe me: "In the event of an electoral college tie, it will be settled by a game of horseshoes between the candidates. That's how James K Polk beat Henry Clay in 1844."

The headlines repeated on almost every outlet about this being "an historic election" are starting to grate. Well, aren't the all, for Christ sakes? I'd prefer a the more honest: "Hey, A Black Guy Might be President!"

It'll be a long night. Fingers crossed.

This is so funny, so painful

I do despair that people on Tuesday will actually be voting for this woman. Listen as "Caribou Barbie" is pranked by a couple of Montreal DJs.