Our last posession has left Ukraine. We’ve been in the US six months and finally the Discovery left Ukraine and is now sitting in a bonded warehouse in the UK.

I have a buyer for it and all I have to do now is (remotely) wrangle it through customs. Seems like we won’t get away without paying any tax at all but we can value it very …uhhh… competitively so that HMG’s cut is small. Certainly smaller than the VAT on the new price.

We already have a buyer but if you need a lowmilage, lhd 4×4 with great gas-milage* and a solid history of being in exciting countries, please reply at the address below.

* not really.

We have a new member of the family.

Burt is a 1998 Subaru Forester L. We adopted him from Scott who I work with for the grand price of $4500 - that’s about four blackjacks in the old money if you still count Imperialwise.

Cars in America don’t age like cars in the UK. When you buy a second had car in the UK you have to worry about rot around the doorsils and if it’s been kept in a garage to stop the sophits getting damp. In California there is no weather so cars just carry on until they suddenly fall apart on the freeway from terminal old-age.

Burt has driven 150,000 and still looks new. 150,000 miles is a visitfrom Jane’s parents to my mum’s house every month for 50 years. I think Burt looks quite goo on it.

Of course, the question everyone asks is “Why Burt?”

We got new passports. I say passports, HMG has taken to issuing bird spotters i-Spy books instead of passports. Each page has a picture of a bird on it. I’m not sure if there’s any requirement to match up with the national bird of the country you’re visiting. Very pretty though - much better than the old ones… except for one thing.

The pretty birdy pictures are obviously a come on to tempt people into having a biometric big brother friendly passport. They added another thing to quell the riots in Rhyll and protests in Peterhead. The new i-Spy bird spotter passports are tri-lingual: English, Welsh and some other dialect of Welsh than looks just as dangerous to speak.

I preferred it when we didn’t like the welsh and they burnt our holiday cottages down. Now it seems we all have to speak their language as if words like Cymmrodorion were sensible or even utterable.

I’m trying to pull my own Equifax record - the US credit agency can’t because of the ridiculous UK data protection laws. Just getting a login to the site is very difficult. You need several addresses, personal details and financial history. If you mistype your address once they lock your account and require you to call them.

When you have an account and you try to pay, if your credit card address differs in any way from the address you gave them you need to fax them proof of validity (specifically a copy of the credit card and a corresponding statement).

If you log in incorrectly once, they lock your account. When you phone them up to reset the account they send you your passowrd - in the clear, in eMail. It would be slightly more secure to write it on the side of Kylie Minogue just before she plays at Wembly and send you a front row ticket.

Before we move to the US, we need to find a place to live. Ravening hounds are not welcome in rented houses. If you want to buy a house you have to see it first. If you want to see a house you have to go to the US. If you want to go to the US, you shouldn’t put your passport thought the hot wash.