On big, yellow inflatable things

The backsides of American cities usually leave me cold. I have spent too many hours among the crumbling concrete acres of parking lots gazing at the linear roof of a box store to ever appreciate beauty again.

Or maybe when I do I'll go a little bit crazy and come over all American. I'll start screaming about how beautiful Buckingham Palace is when, we all know, it's an ugly oversized pile.

It only took me three pages of Christopher Hitchen's memoir to realize the guy is, in fact, a god, albeit a conceited and pompous one.

He describes how he looked over a woman's shapely shoulder to the "horrible wedding cake architecture of Sacre Coueur" and it made me think of my last visit to Paris when I kept telling myself this church was meant to be beautiful but it struck me as forced beauty.

Likewise Gaudi's unfinished Sagrada Família in Barcelona is magnificent and iconic but ultimately left me unsatisfied, probably because it is unfinished.

Although I was obviously not as unsatisfied as an American woman who started shouting "look, look" and pointing in the direction of the soaring ediface.

"It's a Polish bus," she screamed at her rather nonplussed husband.

In contrast to the Sacre Couer the greatest buildings of the world seem less self concious as if they have grown up effortlessly from the ground. The architects who built Florence's magnificent cathedral surely had the wings of angels and designed the heart of this city with little conscious effort.

I won't say America has no architectual legacies. The Chrysler Building in New York is one of my favorite structures.

But away from the big cities, art seems to have taken a hike and lost its tent en route.

So I drove through the endless suburbs taking little in, until suddenly something completely unexpected and audacious caught my eye, like this giant yellow inflatable gorilla by the side of the road advertising a gold shop.

I was so impressed by the size of it, I decided to take my kids to see it for a day out, although I fear it could give them nightmares.

Even so the free days out citcuit is starting to become a bit predictable, the lobsters at FarmFresh and the fish tank at the Pro Bass Shop. And sometimes a turtle makes an appearance in the retention pond near our development.

Time to book my tickets to England before the excitement round these parts gives me a heart attack.