Check this out -- saw these people dancing to this poem on Friday night at Sadler's Wells. It looks like a crazy idea but boyo, it was something.

The Learner -- I'm learning to drive in this gap before the US. Here's what it's like.

I’m motoring along with a strangely empty London road ahead.

“We use our mirrors to check that we are in keeping with the general traffic flow,’ says Hal, the driving instructor.

Jammed up in my mirror are the large and restless shapes of vans and buses. An exodus of traffic is stuck behind my crawling red Ford, which is emblazoned in learning logos and topped off with a cone. Someone honks.

I don’t really see why I should learn to drive, so I feel virtuous that I am doing it anyway. Each time I climb into the special car I advertise my deficiencies to the world and display a certain eagerness to remedy them. I think this is noble.

But people don’t nod at me as I jerk past or roll down the window and say, ‘Nice one, mate, adult learning, good on you.’ All I get by way of support is a very patronizing grin from some mum in her family monster-wagon and even her stare is more voyeuristic than kindly.

Even though everyone (nearly) has learned to drive at some point and gone through the same awkward fumblings and embarrassments, everyone seems to want to distance themselves as quickly as possible from the experience and demonstrate their membership among the proficient and capable. Learners are unfairly cast as joke characters, like virgins.

And like virgins, learners make up a fractious community, each one desperately trying to leave. At the beginning of each lesson Hal takes me to ‘the patch’, a quiet network of streets where other learners play and practice reversing. Big shiny dual control cars covered in stickers inch around corners while their nervous drivers try and ignore each other.

Hal warms me up here and then we hit the main roads. It’s just one big emergency. Workmen start drilling just when I’m close, buses appear improbably in tiny streets, roads narrow suddenly and without justification and traffic lights are always on hills. In the end, I crack, stalling and swearing on a hairpin left turn when a Volkswagen comes round the corner like a banshee. ‘Back to the patch,’ says Hal. And we start again.

I like Hal. He’s better than my last instructor, a man called Reg who used to crack mints in his hands and whistle. Hal is from Blackheath and fills the car with talk, ‘I’m in commentary mode now,’ he says, as he bangs on about the bus in front. Hal’s been teaching driving for 16 years and says he doesn’t look it. He doesn’t like tv but he likes biography. He tells me about Eric Cantona’s ghost written autobiography.

‘It’s not Cantona writing, but some other bloke. But what the other bloke has done, he has got things that Cantona actually said and put them in the book. Now THAT,’ and Hal says this with all the certitude of a driving teacher celebrating a smart three point turn, ‘is a good way to write biography!’

The lesson finishes and later I’m walking down the street wondering why only driving learners have to suffer such stigma for their frailties. Why don’t people who are too slow at bank machines wear stickers on their faces? Or people who never buy interesting presents or don’t know their way on the underground?

I am happily imagining a regime of l-plate shame when a learner comes wobbling around the corner and clips the roundabout. I try not to laugh at him but I do.

I'm going to New York, as you all know. I'm making this blog to keep you in the know and to tell you about what comes to pass, the adventures which happen and some of the ones which don't.

But I'm not there yet. I'm in London hankering, slightly, for the day to come around, filling the days with curiosities and little projects that I've had on my mind: people like Charlie Wade. Or not. The rest is taken up in the horrible slew of paperwork and phonecalls, the web of details and ticks and crosses that go with moving to the States for a year. Nothing interesting, only zip codes and dates of birth, dependents and social security numbers. No one's looked me in the eye, gone all spangled and asked me to swear a vow so help me God. Maybe that will come in the embassy when I go for a briefing on US tax.

Right now it's just a sweaty, ongoing bout with the bureaucrats and their fiddly emails, their unlikely surnames and their 'Regards', their abhorrence of small talk at the beginning and close of my polite replies and well meaning questions.

When I get on my Virgin plane to Manhattan, unglamorously and cramped, I'll be joining a wild crowd of migrants to NY, an arrivals line that stretches into some history. I’m longing for a Godfather-like arrival in the queues of Ellis Island then a movie slide into reminiscences of a life I left behind. I need a cap, an old brown bag and nothing to live on but my wits.

In homage to immigrants more exotic and graceful than me, I'm going to tell you about some who made stories of their lives.

LUDWIG BEMELMANS -- You can't touch him for wide eyed fear and excitement. If you were riding the boat in with Ludwig, you would have looked up a few times to protect your belongings and the Sicilian family or whoever it was you were with at the time. Ludwig came over to the US of A with nothing but a few Austrian swear words, a couple of letters on introduction to restaurants and pair of pistols in his baggy pockets. Ludwig was afraid of Indians. He was 16 when he stepped off that boat and it was Christmas Eve, 1914.

Ludwig Bemelmans was born in the Tyrol in Austria -- the bottom slice that flops over the Alps and turns into Italy -- in 1898. Ludwig was too fresh for school and got farmed out to Uncle Hans, a man who made a life in the hotel business. After making hell in a few hotels and trouble in a restaurant, Ludwig not only got fired from all his jobs, he also shot a head waiter with a gun.

Time to Emigrate.

In New York Ludwig stayed straight and busy in hotels and restaurants. Seeing the guns go off he took a noisy trip to Ole Europe as part of the American army and did some shooting in WW1 before continuing to move around dishes and hatboxes before a friend saw some of his drawings and suggested he turn children's novelist. Ludwig did and set off on a writing, drawing and radness career that saw him dabble in the New Yorker, get married, write travel books like How to Travel Incognito, get drunk, eat, design sets for Broadway and write for Hollywood and then die in 1962.

Ludwig Bemelmans (1898-1962). Mad as chips.

JOSE MARTI -- The renaissance man at the heart of Cuban independence in the 19th century. He was everything, poet, journalist, exile, martyr, liberator. Havana airport is named after him. He was removed from Cuba when he was 16, no doubt for his wildness and strength. To Spain and to the US where he lived in New York and my word did he contribute to every Latin American paper there was, sending snippets of American life, their prize fights and racism, their graduation ceremonies, their winters, Valentine Days and the making of their wonderful bridges. By hook and crook, Jose bizarrely became a consul to Uruguay at the Pan-American and International Monetary conferences from October 1899 to April 1890, during which time he wrote poems. Good ones. People call his Versos Sencillos some of the most important early pieces of Latin American modernism. Jose also wrote the words to Guantanamera.

But is was Cuba that counted, and from New York to Florida Jose ran up and down, collecting money and paying for guns to fight for Cuba against the Spanish. It was all looking so good until a big boat full of juicy bombs and pistols sank near Florida Keys. Full of premonitions of his own death, Jose set out for Cuba in February 1895 and kept an astonishing, difficult to follow, hallucinatory, wallowing, heavily scented and bushy diary for the last three months of his good good life. Maddened by it all, Jose rushed into the first battle he could find and died in a swamp on May 19th, riding into the storm. He is buried at the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in Santiago de Cuba.

Jose Marti (1853 to 1895). Any greater?

....first wiry letters of this adventure, watch them creeping out on to the worldwideweb. This feels ok.