The trouble with travel is that it’s addictive: as soon as you come back from anywhere in the world, life at home seems so dull that you start planning your next trip. The wider world seems so exciting and exotic that you start wondering where to go next. I say goodbye to John for a couple of months today, but we have already started to throw around ideas for our next adventure. I still want to explore Paris a bit more, but one city John mentioned was New York.

On the face of it, New York would be a great idea: it is one of the world’s greatest, most cinematic cities. Yet these days, the thought of going near the USA is tinged with trepidation. On social media especially, I’ve been hearing all kinds of frightening things about the military being deployed on the streets of Washington and other big cities and the rights of minorities being removed. The puzzling thing is, you hear distinctly less about such things on mainstream news platforms; so the question becomes what is the actual situation? Watch organisations like the Beeb and everything seems relatively fine; watch Youtubers like this one and America is now a despotic neofascist hellhole far too dangerous to go near. It’s becoming harder and harder to discern the actual situation there, as in these days of information overload it becomes harder and harder to know who to trust.

What, then, is the actual situation in America? Is it still a safe place to visit?