Our first day's journey was unambitious - we're now in a small bed and breakfast room near Oxford, on a floor where the rooms are numbered 2, 4, 3 and 8 (and they gave us a significantly better deal on Internet access than the Heathrow airport hotel did). This afternoon, we went into the city and walked around the university buildings that Whitney had known for a year and that I'd known for a very short while when I visited her, just reliving the experience of a shockingly distant nine years ago (including taking a bus into the city centre like the students and peasants). After so long away I'm noticing things that were normal here as huge differences - the bus shelter advert pictured serves as quite a wonderful reminder of how foreign to America this country really is.

Prior to arriving in England, nobody had informed me that half the country is underwater at the moment - the rain was heavy when we left London and even though things had brightened up by the time we arrived, the public allotments next to Whitney's old flat were easily mistaken for the river, and traffic was at a crawl because of the huge tides of water across the roads. We have a choice of routes tomorrow, and from what I've heard on the (calm, quiet, much less flash-grenade-like than I'm used to) news, the one to the northwest of the country is the one less likely to end with driving into the temporarily extended North Sea.

When the light came up this morning we discovered that the car we had rented is a blue Hyundai i10, which I keep forgetting to photograph during the couple of hours of daylight. Undertaking a serious drive in it wasn't the terrifying experience that you might have thought, though I did quickly discover that when you put this make of car in reverse without the clutch down it leaps about five feet into the air. When I drove it out of the rental car park and directly on to the main road I got up to about ten thousand RPM before remembering that I had to change gear manually, but as soon as I'd done it the first time I got used to the idea again - the lack of paddles behind the steering wheel is mildly disconcerting now, but otherwise it feels very natural to return to the left hand side of the road, the right hand side of the car, and the correct use of the gear lever.

In fact, the only thing I haven't worked out is how on earth to get the petrol flap open, so if we don't find the button for that soon we might have to stop a bit short of the Scottish border after all.