United America

Shortly before I went to the states, my dear friend Joble organised a 24-hour writing experiment type thing for reasons apparent only to himself. He'd suggested that anyone in our writing group could join in but in the end only Amy and I stayed and wrote with him.

We turned up for the nightshift armed with books, scissors and glue. Lots of things were produced that night, but the one project to which I devoted the most time was cutting full-page pictures out of a copy of Alistair Cooke's America and sticking nonsensical captions onto them using a small selection of text from said book, which gradually dwindled (I chose not to restock once I'd started selecting images), making it harder and harder to even achieve grammatical accuracy in the captions.

By morning I had about 17 of the buggers and no idea what to do with them.

Then, a couple of months ago it struck me: why not try my hand at writing a book about America myself? After all, I'd recently visited the country and thus knew it like the back of my elbow, and Cooke's account was a good fifteen years out of date, at least.

Thus, I present to you:

United America: Country of Liberties

Have at it!

PS - A little DVD extra for you. One of the pictures I scanned but couldn't squeeze into the final version of the book: