But otherwise Mr Woosnam proved a congenial companion, with an endless supply of stories. '…You can't tell the Greeks anything. I showed this foreman – Popopopolis, or something, you know what those names are like – I showed him the schedule, and told him the eighth floor should be all complete by now. And he got angry. It was complete, he shouted. He shook his fist and waved his arms and went rushing along the girders, jumped through a doorway and fell all the way into the basement. Eight storeys! Killed of course. We had terrible trouble getting a new foreman at that time of year. Another month and it wouldn't have mattered so much.' He took a drink.

'Ha ha ha. Some people just won't listen. Perhaps you find that in your business too,' said Woosnam, but before I could agree he was off again. 'I was with one of our site surveyors in Bombay and he was laughing and making jokes about the way the Indians build their lashed-up wooden scaffolding. I told him that he'd be laughing on the other side of his face when he put up steel scaffolding and the heat of the sun twisted it into a corkscrew and his project collapsed. Bloody architects! They come straight from college, and they know it all. That's the trouble nowadays. I'll give you another example…' And so it went on. He was good entertainment but his affability precluded all chance of slumber.

'Travel much?' he said as I began to doze.

'No,' I said.

'I travel all the time. Flying across the Atlantic is exciting for you of course, but it's just a bore for me.' He looked at me to see my reaction.

'Yes,' I said and tried to look excited.

'And what line are you in? No, don't tell me. I'm good at guessing what people do for a living. Insurance?'

'Chemicals.' I usually say that because it's so vague and also because I have a prepared line of chat about pharmaceuticals should my bluff be called.

'All right,' he said, reluctant to admit to error. 'Not a salesman though. You haven't got the pushy temperament you need for the Sales side.'

'No, not Sales,' I agreed.

'Keep an eye on my briefcase while I go to the toilet will you? Once they start the meal service everyone will jump up and want to go. It's always like that.'

The toy meal came and went. The captain's carefully modulated voice recited the names of places that were hidden far beneath the clouds. The great aluminium tube droned on, its weary cargo of unwashed, red-eyed travellers numbed with alcohol and crippled with indigestion. Duty-free baubles were interminably hustled by stewardesses who went, eyes averted, past bawling babies and harassed mothers. Over the public-address system came more names of equally invisible towns. The shutters were closed against the daylight and the cabin darkened. Blurred ghosts of tiny unrecognizable actors postured on the pale screens while their strident voices assaulted the inner ear from plastic tubes. We raced after the sun and chased a never-ending day. Tortured by the poker-red glare of the sun, dazzled by the white clouds, one by one the heads of the passengers lolled and bent as they succumbed to their misery, and sought escape in fitful sleep.

'This is your captain speaking…'

We'd arrived in Los Angeles: now came the worst part, the line-up at US Customs and Immigration. It took well over an hour standing in line, disconsolately kicking my baggage forward a few inches at a time. But finally I was grudgingly admitted to America.

'Hi there! Mr Samson? Did you have a nice flight?' He was chewing gum, a suntanned man about thirty years old with patient eyes, stretch pants, a half-eaten hamburger and a half-read paperback edition of War and Peace: everything necessary for meeting someone at LAX. We walked through the crowded concourse and into the melee of cabs and cars and buses that served this vast and trainless town.

'Buddy Breukink,' the man introduced himself. He flicked a finger at the dented, unpainted metal case that I'd wrenched from the carousel. 'Is this all your baggage?' If everyone kept saying that to me I was going to start feeling socially disadvantaged.

'That's right,' I said. He took my bag and the corrugated case. I didn't know whether I should politely wrest it from him. There was no way to discover if he was just a driver, sent to collect me, or a senior executive who was going to pick up the bills and give me my orders. The US of A is like that. He marched off and I followed him. He hadn't been through the formalities but I didn't press it. He didn't look the type who would regularly read and update the Notes and Amendments.

'Hungry? We have more than a hour's ride.' He had a sly gap-toothed smile, as if he knew something that the rest of the world didn't know. It wasn't something to be taken personally.

'I'll survive,' I promised. My blood-sugar wasn't so low that I wanted an airport hamburger.

'The buggy's across the street.' He was a coffee-shop cowboy: a tall, slim fellow with a superfluity of good large teeth, tan-coloured tight-fitting trousers, short-sleeve white shirt and a big brown stetson with a bright band of feathers round it. In keeping with the outfit, Buddy Breukink climbed into a jeep, a brand-new Wrangler soft-top complete with phone, personalized plates – BB GUN – and roll bar.

He threw my baggage and Tolstoy into the back before carefully placing his beautiful stetson in a box there. He got in and pushed a lot of buttons, a coded signal to activate his car phone. 'Have to make sure none of these parking-lot jockeys make a long long call to their folks in Bogota,' he said, as if a short freebie hello to Mexico City might be okay with him. He smiled to himself and cleared half a dozen audio cassettes from the passenger seat and dumped them into a box. When he turned the ignition key the tape recorder started playing 'Pavarotti's Greatest Hits' or more specifically 'Funiculi, funicula' delivered in ear-splitting fortissimos. 'It's kind of classical,' he explained with a hint of apology.

He gunned the engine impatiently. 'Let's go!' he yelled even louder than Pavarotti; and even before I was strapped in, the wheels were burning rubber and we were out of the car park and off down the highway.

I had arrived in the New World and was as bemused as Columbus. In this part of the world it was already spring, the air was warm and the sky was that pale shade of blue that portends a steep rise in temperature. The noisy downtown streets were crowded with black roaring Porsches and white Rolls-Royce convertibles, shouting kids rattled round on roller skates and pretty girls preened in sun-tops and shorts.

Up the ramp. On the Freeway that stretches across the city, the anarchy of the busy streets ended. Apart from some kids racing past in a dented pickup, restrained drivers observed lane discipline and moved at a steady pace. The wind roared through the jeep's open sides and threatened to blow me from my seat. I huddled down to shelter behind the windscreen. Buddy turned the music louder and looked at me and grinned.

'Funiculi,' sung Buddy between chewing. 'Funicula.'

Once clear of the 'international airport', its manana-minded airline staff and its hard-eyed bureaucrats, Southern California reaches out to its visitors. The warmth of the sun, the sight of the San Gabriel mountains, dry winds from the desert, the bitter herbal smells of the brushwood flowers, the orange poppies in the bright green landscape that has not yet suffered the cruel heat of summer; at this time of year all these things urge me to stay for ever.

Racing along the road that is slung roof-high above the city, there was a view of the whole of Los Angeles from the ocean to the mountains. Clusters of tall buildings at Century City, and more at Broadway, dominated a town of modest little suburban houses squeezed between pools and palms. Soon Buddy took an off-ramp and cut across town to pick up the Pacific Coast Highway and go north following the signs that point the way to Santa Barbara and eventually San Francisco. At Malibu the traffic thinned, and we sped past an ever more varied selection of elaborate and eccentric beach houses: until houses, and even seafood restaurants, ended and the road followed the very edge of the continent. Here the Pacific Ocean relentlessly assaulted the seashore. Huge green breakers exploded into lacy foam and a mist of water vapour, and roared so loudly that the noise of them could be heard above the sound of the jeep's engine, and that of the music.