Jacko and Elvis hold gay marriage.

I had just decided that the simple pleasure of strangling the screaming child at the front of cattle class was worth the prison sentence, when the cabin lights turned on, ruining my day. We were four hours into our already delayed overnight flight and, what with the prehistoric entertainment system and the bawling of the milk-fed, things were not looking good. I had managed a superb twenty minutes and thirty seconds of sleep before the miserable little shit woke me, and it was three in the morning, so I greeted the Captain's announcement that we were turning around due to engine trouble with all the enthusiasm of a concussed heifer. However it was a British Airways flight and after gathering my wits I agreed with the rest of the passengers that it was damnably decent of the Captain not to try and fly us across the Atlantic for four hours on only one engine.

After our unscheduled landing we were confined to our seats for two hours, presumably so that first class didn't have to rush their use of the complimentary on board hot tub and lap dancing club.

We were finally let out at 6am after being lightly seared by the heating system, given a telephone number and told to go to a hotel. This turned out to be a Hilton, which was nice, but in my stupor I succeeded in making it a little less nice by feeding so much paper into the toilet that it became blocked and flooded the bathroom.

Further amusement was in store: my travelling companion and I managed to get booked onto another flight that then turned out to be overbooked. Some pitiful begging and imploring later, we found ourselves with genuwine tickets for a new plane (that also was overbooked but we were already checked in this time). The plane left only two hours late, and the seven hours of obligatory knees in the kidneys and crap films simply flew by as I discovered that American Airlines don't serve alcohol on their flights (at least not to plebs) or provide toilet paper that hasn't had a good soaking. Comforted by the fatalistic knowledge that things couldn't get any worse I settled down to listen to country music until my brain imposed a self-preserving coma.

So far it has been great to be back in a country that has yet to develop air conditioning, and where people still think leggings are a good fashion decision. A place where you can hear two girls on the train talking about how easy it is to cheat in GCSE's and still only get a C. A place where grating forced accents are a source of pride and tennis nationalism has replaced patriotism.

As a final note, here are two interesting shop signs from my journey across Freedom to the plane launching installation: Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits, and Latino Multiservice.