Stuart Ford I speak my mind involuntarily. It's both a blessing and a curse.

Actually a holiday

Having a great time in the US of A. Currently in the middle of our stay in Provincetown, Massachusettes (the discerning gay couple's choice of holiday destination), known locally, and also for the purposes of this report, "Ptown". We're staying at the Crowne Point, which is very nice indeed, very private and very quiet, although the air conditioner in our suite keeps me awake at night.

Provincetown, as it was when we last visited, is a beautiful place. Right on the end of Cape Cod, it seems relatively untouched by globalisation and it's very "anything goes", everyone leaves their cars and houses unlocked and there isn't a megacorp logo in sight, save perhaps for the odd Budweiser neon sign in the windows of various bars. We're literally doing nothing, sitting around the pool all day, taking walks through the town, perhaps a drive along the cape. It's great, our holidays are normally much more hectic than this.

This isn't our first port of call of course. By contrast our first stop was Manhatten, where we spent four night at the W on 49th & Lexington, where we stay every time we come to New York, and will will return there for three further nights next week before returning home. New York is a big, busy and exciting place, yet despite that we find it relaxing there, it's a place where you just "be" rather than "do". Since moving to Manchester my tolerance of big cities has increased somewhat, and I would love to live there at some point, if only for a few years or so (my life has, at least for the past 10 years or so, followed a rough pattern of living for 3 years somewhere and then moving on).

Provincetown is a 1 hour 30 minute ferry ride away from Boston, the state capital of Massachusettes. We've been there before of course, two years ago, but we might visit again as it's a really nice place - slower and more spacious than New York. But probably not, it's not as if we're short of the city element on this holiday.

Hired the normal Ford Explorer for the drive from Manhatten to Provincetown. Yesterday we found some corners for it to go round, which it didn't like very much, making this clear by squealing its tyres. For all of the X5's lumbering appearance, it goes round corners better than most cars, and certainly better than any American car.

Anyway, I'm just rambling now. Back to doing nothing. We've been blighted with a number of minor emergencies from the office since we came on holiday but nothing that couldn't be solved (or at least, deferred) relatively quickly.