New Orleans

It may have been Tennessee Williams who quipped “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” I surmise that diversity was at least one of his criteria. Anyway, by this measure, and having just returned from New Orleans, I have only one more American city to sample – apart from Cleveland.

Regardless of my misgivings about tacitly condoning Trump’s regime by visiting his manor, we had arranged, some time ago, to meet up in “Nawlins” with our American friends, who were as traumatised by the outcome of the presidential election as we were by the result of the Brexit referendum. The start of the trip was inauspicious: we stood in line at Atlanta airport for two hours, while three officials processed the passports of hundreds of travellers. I speculated that the dearth of staff was due to pressures further south, where millions of Mexican rapists are besieging the border.

New Orleans, notwithstanding its devastation by hurricane Katrina in 2005, remains a tourist town and it is not surprising, therefore, that the most popular attractions are often overwhelmed by visitors. This applies especially to restaurants so, having had enough of queuing, we sought out-of-the-way places – by which strategy we managed not to experience most of the famous joints. Nevertheless, there is a lot to be said for leaving the beaten track and mixing it with the locals. You have to navigate their ways and customs by means of direct engagement. Our accommodation, for example, was the converted basement apartment of a traditional Creole-style, wooden ‘shotgun’ house in a suburb a five-mile ride from Frenchtown on the historic St. Charles streetcar. When the must-see attractions of the city have been ticked off, the more subtle delights of the neighbourhood yield quieter enjoyment – shops, coffee bars and drinking holes, where the service for tourists is the same as that for locals.

We stayed in an area called Freret, where the population appears to be all white and there is an air of faded gentility spiced by the up-coming, youthful, hip generation of residents who breakfast with laptops at laid-back cafes serving fancy coffee, yoghurt-based confections and sourdough toast. One day, we travelled a few blocks to experience the Fête Francaise, a street junket staged annually to raise funds for the bi-lingual (French/Southern Drawl) school. By this time, I had got used to the friendly, open ways of the people, so was not surprised when a large, middle-aged man sidled up and commented that the fête got bigger each year. “Are you of French origin?” I asked. “No. German,” he said, with just a hint of resentment. But before he could elaborate, a friend of his appeared to drag him off to the bar.

Soon afterwards, a man commented on the cap I had borrowed as a sun-shade. It bore the logo of an American mountaineering outfit. However, we soon established my disinterest in mountaineering and he became curious about my nationality. The mention of Britain prompted him to express his political views. “I know I look like a liberal,” he said – and he did, with his long, untidy hair, scruffy but colourful clothes and floppy hat – “but I’m a conservative. This is just a disguise to fool them if they try anything tricky.” He went on to explain that he had to protect his Californian real-estate investments from tax-grabbing socialists. This was not a “How are you liking our country?” type of conversation – and it got worse. His next topic was “effing Muslims” and the way that they had made most of Europe a no-go zone.

I pulled my cap down and excused myself from the ‘debate’. In fact, I may wait until Trump is history before I bag my final American city – which is San Francisco, by the way.