It's a strangely wonderful thing, but one of my best memories was takeoff in the rain. Spatters of raindrops on the window next to me. Then the plane picks up speed down the runway, and the droplets turn into a hundred horizontal streams across the window. And then the front wheel lifts off the ground, and all the streams simultaneously hang a left towards the top of the window.

On the weirdness side, the US and grid-system roads. Everywhere else, roads go from one somewhere to another somewhere. In the US, roads are a visible net of latitude and longitude, like they thought the land might escape and it needed to be held down. My first thought when I first looked out of the window over the States was that I'd arrived in Legoland, because Lego streets all come in those diddy squares, and that's the only place in Europe you'll see roads laid out like that, is on a Lego layout. Very strange.

Graham.