More time has passed, people like you have been kind enough to look at the blog, and some have asked how I got into quite so many conversations and then managed to transcribe them.

Well, there are two things...

The first is that clearly I have the sort of sympathetic, somewhat vacant face that makes people think I need comforting. My wife chuckles and her sister is astonished that I can walk into a garage to pay my bill and come out knowing the life story and all the immediate worries of the woman operating the till. I don't know why it happens, it just does.

The second, far more important, is that Americans are friendly people who love to talk. You can get a European to talk but he has to be prised open. Some people say it's because Europe is more densely populated and that people value their own and respect other people's privacy. On the other hand that doesn't explain why Swedes have all that space and not enough words to fill it and a group of Finns can stay quiet for 20 minutes without feeling embarrassed.

Whatever the explanation for Europeans, Quentin Crisp got it about right for Americans. He loved America so much that he went and lived there. In one of his three autobiographies, he wrote: 'Everyone is eager. This is to me by far the most important attribute of Americans. They want to speak, they want to listen and they will endure quite a lot of inconvenience to prevent the colour being drained out of the experience. They like people to be unusual in any way they know how. Even being foreign will do. Visiting Englishmen they adopt as pets and coo at them as though they were budgies than can nearly speak American.'

Well, I like talking as well so Americans and I make a good pairing. As soon as I could, I'd write the main bones of the conversation, and all the best phrases, into a notebook. Every evening I'd spend an hour recording the encounters in full. As simple as that.

Now and then I'd stop at a library, use the internet and transcribe what I'd written into a separate account on the net for friends and family. It's an enlarged version of that that you've been kind enough to wade through here.

I don't think there's anything clever or special in it. I like talking and I look like someone who needs to be talked to. Somehow I must nod at the right time and then ask such elementary questions (like 'Why?') that people feel sorry for me and seek to explain at length.

In the end, I think people just like talking about themselves, don't you?