Things that may make the move a wee bit tricky - 36 days.

Moving to another country is a huge step. First there's the issue of getting permission to live there, something that for me involved first setting up a profile on E-Friends, creating a website full of drunken photos, enticing a lovely young lady into my friendship trap, travelling back and forward to the USA, leaving bedroom doors opened, negotiating Jesus people, lying, proposing, persuading my wife to be to move here, persuading my dogs to be to move here, getting married, having a son, filling out a lot of paperwork, paying out a lot of money, sending my wife and son to the USA, sending my dogs to the USA, getting a chest x-ray, getting shots, sitting in a waiting room, telling the truth, and getting manhandled by homeland security. But I did it, permission granted.

Another difficult task for me will be to get a job. Most people who emigrate do so because of work, whereas I'm jumping bollocks first from one recession to another. I got my current job through a combination of reputation, networking, and fate. My previous post, which I had for seven years, was handed to me by default because I just kept turning up after an initial month's temp assignment (and I was also willing to sort out some projects which were running fraudulently). Before that, based on the numpties I was working with, I got my previous job by purely attending an interview. So, with no ex-colleagues to take over from and no European Funding, I'm relying on looking good compared to stupid people to get a job.

However, it's whether I can adjust to the little things that will shape whether this move will be a success.

Can I live amongst people who eat these?

Food. Ok, I'm partly creating my own problems here because I'm vegetarian ("fucking evil" in Tennessee language). People seem to like bacon in the south, a lot. They put bacon in their vegetables, because if you don't taste pig death with every bite you might just die. We're just getting used to vegetarianism in the UK, but things are progressing because we have lots of students, and mad cow disease. However, it gets old when all you can order at a restaurant is a combination of side dishes.

It's the lack of certain foods that's going to be the test for me though. Firstly the convenience foods. There's no potato waffles, super noodles, or pot noodles. My system expects one of these on a sandwich every day.   Oh, and pasta is not noodles, pasta is pasta, the different shapes have different names, but none of them are noodles. Spaghetti may look like noodles, but so do worms and shoelaces, and they're not noodles.

The fast food/takeaway options all seem to be rather burger-y. There are no chip shops, Indian takeaway, or "British" Chinese restaurants (they do curry and chips). I somehow have to come to terms with the prospect of not having my dinner deep fried in batter and wrapped in newspaper, and no pakora! What? Why? It's the single best food ever invented, and I am finding it difficult to accept that I can't get this delivered to my door with some naan bread and too much curry. Oh, and morning rolls. Scottish ones.

Church.  I may have to tip-toe around this one.

Weird freaky singing Jesus lady also scares me. A lot.

Driving. I can’t.  Well, I probably can, but I don’t. After failing my test when I was 18 I didn’t have any real need to drive, and I’ll walk anywhere, so I kind of never got round to getting my licence.

It's going to take me a while to get used to there being no roundabouts.

Although most people do drive here, you can get by quite fine without driving. Public transport is OK, and the towns and cities are relatively small, so you can walk most places.  This of course isn’t the case in the US, where you have drive through (yes, the ‘o’ and ‘gh’ should be there) pharmacies and banks. This worries me because I haven’t yet frequented banks and pharmacies to the level that it has become tiresome to just walk inside.  Also, there is a distinct lack of pavement.

So I’m going to have to learn, which in theory should be pretty simple, providing I can unlearn 20 years of  the left hand side being the passenger seat, and adapt to driving on the right hand side, but when all I really have to go on is how shit I was at Mario Kart I get worried at times. There are no lava pits in Atoka that I know of, so at least there’s that.

Me sunbathing

Weather. I'm not sure if this is a little thing or not. To be fair, most of the stuff above is hardly trivial. Anyway, I don't do sun. I'm Scottish. The last time we saw the sun we worshipped it, and t didn't come back. I know I moaned about the Scottish weather the other day, but the thought of spending a proper summer in Tennessee is terrifying. I can't handle the weather there in April.  Then there's tornadoes. It gets windy here sometimes, but not to the extent that you have to run away from it and hide.

A wasp

Insects. I'm not arachnophobic, and I don't have an irrational fear of any other little creatures. It's totally rational. I hate the fuckers. We get spiders, bees, daddy-longlegs, and midges, other than that everything hides. We also get wasps, but what we call wasps, Americans call bees; and what we call bees, they call bumble bees. What they call wasps, we call birds with knives.

They also have chiggers, cockroaches, stink bugs, and mosquitoes. All on the face of the Earth just to piss me off.