Time to get the Marmite out. World's second greatest comfort food - Cacao theobroma being the first. Not that I need comfort right now. Just I'm feeling hungry and lazy, and what better nutrition can there be at a time like this than Marmite on Toast

They all look alike. People in Japan. Same hair, similar clothes, same awkward stance in public places. Uniformly sized, nearly identical features. Amazing.

The Japanese? No. Us.

You never realise just how conformist Westerners are in shape, style, and manner, until you see them (Us. Me) abroad, and never more marked for me anyway, as I experienced in Japan. We all look the same: overweight, pallid, every man is bald, or at best tonsured like me. Virtually without exception, we're ungainly and unsightly in standardised leisure wear. Male and female. Sorry.

On the other hand, the Japanese are formidably well-dressed, instinctive flair too; it all flows. Even those who dress eccentrically do it with a panache and style that's inaccessible to us.

My money would be on them if there was anything like an international dress off event. They leave the French and Italians panting for breath in the accoutrement stakes.

I always have a little bit of uncertainty whenever I buy anything that has a slogan in a foreign language - does it really mean what the people in the shop are insisting it does ?

Were they were on the level when they said that the swirl of Japanese characters across the front and back of the two t-shirts I bought is a delicately balanced, elegantly constructed, sensitive haiku that Basho would have been envious of ? Am I wearing something that says that - and by extension references me as nuanced, discerning - or did I shell out nearly £40 just to walk around with a tee-shirt that says oldest virgin in town?

I think I'm ok...after all I did buy these particular t-shirts in the grounds of a Japanese temple, and that has to be a positive sign. But what about all these people who have weird oriental symbols tattooed along their arms and across their shirts, what are they saying here: funky, edgy, with a meaningful piece of prose, or is it a line from a takeaway menu, they've had inked in to the skins.

I don't like tattoos full stop, but imagine you've undergone the agony of having one of the damn things done, and all that exquisite oriental calligraphy really says is "Chicken with bean sprouts". Tattoos are for life as well.

At some point it's going to happen: I'll come up with an original metaphor, an image that's pulled fresh from the earth with the soil still stuck to it's sides. It'll happen, I know it will, that baseball field will be built; but between now and whenever, it's going have to be an old image, dents in the panels beaten out, tyres retrod, to carry the essence of what I want to convey.

I don't know how, or indeed why, icons appear, just that they do, and that occasionally some transcend cultures, and in fact, become so embedded in daily global life, you can say they're part of the cultural DNA. No can, in some cases, the working verb is are. Take the Beatles as the uber-example.

There's no country I've been to ( and that's coming up to nearly sixty), where I've not heard a Beatles number in one form or another: someone lazily strumming Fab Four tunes on a levee in pre-Katrina New Orleans; an elderly trio crooning Beatle hits in a hotel lobby in Chennai; sat next to a very young man on a Tokyo subway train who was flipping between an English language biography on John Lennon and it's Japanese language equivalent. They're part of the fabric.

Of course they're not on their own here, I think they're the most powerful global icon, but there are others in the iconosphere - Elvis for instance, can't forget him, pretty powerful presence, and there are sports icons, especially football (Soccer if you're American and reading this), and this inevitably means one particular powerhouse brand - Manchester United. Just knowing a few of their players is akin to having the ability to speak a global lingua franca.

They're everywhere. I've seen people wearing MUFC shirts mooching through Hollywood; plenty of places in Europe, with the most unlikely sighting being in the DMZ. The most heavily defended border in the World, nearly half a million men on each side of the wire facing off, the last thing I expect to see in an exhibition room on a series of North Korean infiltration tunnels in a small complex, bang up to the DMZ and surrounded by a minefield, is a signed MUFC shirt taking pride of place. Not long before Manchester United become part of the global cultural genome if this kind of thing keeps up.

Three countries, fourteen plus hours, two planes. Back home. And why do those two words always cause my heart to sink - back home. I'm never homesick, never have been, in all likelihood will never be, it's the fact of having to come home that makes me sick

I`m in Tokyo right now. I`ve moved forward literally in space, time, and daring. It makes New York look old and weary, Paris like Toytown, and London like Stonehenge.

Japan is the most uniformly affluent society I`ve been to as it is the most formidably well-dressed; Prada and Louis Vuitton are like chain stores here. I`ve not been to a city yet that does n`t have one.

It's come round to the time of year when I take a couple of weeks off to go traveling, so there will not be any more postings until the end of November. Normal service resumes then.

Progressive, Liberal minded Americans, you can come out of hiding. Stop pretending you're Canadians...the clouds have lifted. America is cool again.

I'm a man with a shopping gene..and it's been firing on all cylinders since last Thursday.

I've been to the Westfield shopping mega-mall on four consecutive days - simply entranced, bewildered, stunned by it. Massive. A spectacle. Eye-popping, jaw dropping, and it's just so close. Five to ten minutes by foot depending on traffic conditions from where I live

But today, I can say confidently " ...spell broken...". I've not been there during the last twenty four hours. Self-discipline or poverty, either, or both. Who cares.

I know something else: Westfield deserves a chronicler. Like an official artist who follows armies, Westfield needs a Chaucer, someone to record the first unexpected birth, the first credit card induced heart attack: I'd say the first shoplifter caught, but that's already happened. Three hours open and some someone tries to lift a scarf. Of all the places to choose....a place teeming with police and store security....how bright...

Thank you America....I can unclench my sphincter muscle now. Obama is Prez ! Hooray. The nearer it got to Election day, the more I started to fret that the Republicans might just sneak it. Dust settled. Smoke cleared. Clear skies. It's the right man - the only man - who'll be stepping up for January's inauguration. Thank goodness.

Of course, it's the transition from expectation to the realities of actually governing, we'll be transfixed by now.

That sphincter image ? Not mine, wish it was. Something I purloined from a facebook comment left by an American friend.

Weird and exhilarating.

Weird that it'll soon be possible to buy Prada or Versace in Shepherd's Bush.

Not that it ever has n't been. It always has in a sense. Virtually that is. You could lay your hands on something close, nearly there, but not quite; still it resembles one of those mighty premium brands. Logos might not be in the right place and the colour not exact, a shade or two off, but leave exactitude to the connoisseurs. What mattered was that it was almost identical. Close...and a cigar as well.

From this month, it'll be the real thing. No copies. Pure. Pukka. Courtesy of Westfield, the shopping supertanker that's moored itself permanently by Shepherd's Bush Green.

I still find it bewildering that somewhere I've known as a near neighbour has all sorts of high end, luxury shops and others just as alluring and exotic.

Exhilarating that in around forty-eight hours, there'll be a new US President, and it'll not, if there's any karmic justice or plain common sense, be a Republican.