No Marmite, Bisto, or Bird's custard powder. But plenty of Spam.

I am writing this from the room of a Holiday Inn Express near Pittsburgh. Business brought us here on Monday, a six hour drive across Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is on the eastern-most extreme of the state, on the Ohio river which gives Pennsylvania's neighbour its name.

Pennsylvania is an intensely forested state, in its interior; mile upon mile of wooded hillsides stretch in every direction as you follow the highway. Amongst the trees, neat farms coax a living from the land. The earliest settlers must have literally hacked their way through the woods until, finding an agreeable spot, probably near to water, they decided to set up their homesteads - or, perhaps, just couldn't face any more hacking. The pastures and meadows we see today are all surrounded by trees and must have been cleared, stump-by-stump, without the benefit of mechanised aid. It would have taken a very special breed of people to have had the dogged determination, resilience and foresight to have done it. Intensely self-reliant, too - there are sometimes many miles between the farms, they must be lonely places to be in heavy snow, and it does, as you can see, get very heavy here. Amazing, when you think about what happens when even a little bit falls in the UK. Do you notice, in the first picture, that the traffic is still flowing?

Now, as then, the people of rural Pennsylvania must be of a very particular sort. The road which goes through the state has few access points. There are hardly any towns of any size apart from Harrisburgh, the state Capital, equitably placed in the centre of the state, miles and miles from the industrial, commercial, residential, cultural and social hubs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Apart from that, there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. They must be content to live in quiet, peaceful self-sufficiency. The Pennsylvania Amish and Mennonite communities have distanced themselves from the modern world, eschewing the combustion engine, the computer, television and even electricity. But I rather suspect that the hoards of tourists who come to gawp bring many millions of dollars, so presumably they don't eschew those.

I perhaps ought to make it plain that I am a Bristish woman who finds herself, about three times a year, spending extended amounts of time in the US. I look at America through very British eyes.

The mechanics of living are very different, here. Cars, here, are king, and although there is public transport, and even a few bicycle paths, there is virtually no provision made for the pedestrian. I have walked many a mile along the 'hard shoulder' (basically, the gutter) of the roads because there is simply no pavement. At junctions, you have to take your life in your hands as there is frequently no pedestrian crossing signal - they just do not expect people to walk. On one occasion, in Michigan, I walked six miles to a book shop but it was across the road and, try as I might, I could not cross. When I asked (not a passer-by, of course, I had to go into a car repair place which was nearby) how I might get to the book shop, I was told, with the kind of patient tone we use to talk to children or people who are a bit weak in the head; 'well, lady, you see, you have to get in your car and drive there.'

There are pedestrian crossings in towns, but towns here are another case in point. Doylestown, where I usually hang out when in the US, is different to most.  It is the county seat and the courthouse is its biggest building, recently, indeed, extended. The town has a plethora of lawyers' offices, including this one, which caught my eye and made me smile.

The perfect practice to handle your divorce case!

It is a pleasant, leafy, rather affluent place, with boutiques and eateries suitable for the kind of shopping you do when you don't really want anything practical; designer clothing, books, antiques, jewellery. You can park your car and saunter along the streets (and across the streets, there are crossing signals). It's an ideal place if you have time and money in your pocket, but not, as I say, typical. Most town centres are rather forlorn, forsaken places, down-at-heel, the businesses eeking a living, providing essential but, shall we say, not very glamorous services ('Father and Son Exterminators' is one of my favourites, although I despair of the so-called professional sign-writer who omitted the essential piece of punctuation.)

The reason that most American town centres have this ghost-town feel about them is that the real shops have all departed for the Malls. Even Doylestown centre has no butcher, baker nor candlestick maker. No post office or hardware shop. No supermarket, no green-grocer, no Boots the Chemist. They've gone, lock stock and barrel, out to the Malls, unreachable, except by car.

In general all food is bought from the supermarket. Acme is our nearest and the one we prefer. It makes buying 'local' a problem as the provencance of the goods isn't displayed. As with most things in America, there is endless choice but no real variety. The shelves are lined with literally dozens of brands of the same kind of food; 28 makes of salad dressing, innumerable shelves of apples - as many as twelve or fifteen different sorts. Ten different kinds of dill pickle. Isn't a dill pickle just a dill pickle? There are things that we are used to that you just can't get - good plain yoghurt is a problem, unless its Greek and you're prepared to pay a fortune for it. Flavoursome cheese - even 'extra sharp' cheddar is disappointingly soapy, a mediocre medium to our palate. Good chocolate - their's is sugar-rich and cocoa-poor, although now they have appropriated Cadburys (they pronounce it Cadberry's) this crisis has been somewhat alleviated. Marmite. Bisto. Bird's custard powder. Corned Beef. But there is Spam - oh gosh yes, shelves and shelves of Spam.

But then we discovered, in a gloomy side-aisle, the 'International Shelf' where, in the 'British and Irish' section, we found, to our pathetically gleeful delight, some heart-rendingly familiar packaging. I do not propose to tell you what there was, I want you to see if you can guess ten typically British grocery items that might have been gathered as representative of the British Storecupboard Staple. Answers in the comments box, by email or on a post-card please..... I will only mention that Tim and I clutched a packet of Hobnobs to our bosoms with little short of ecstacy!

The malls are found every few miles along the four or six lane highways. They all look the same, from the outside, and often from the inside as well. Walk into any CVS pharmacy and you could instantly be anywhere in the country; the layout of the shelves is identical. Pizza Huts, Burger Kings, TacoBells and MacDonalds restaurants are all, down to the tiniest detail,  the same: manufactured somewhere (probably by robots), they are transported by road, unloaded, plugged in and are fit to fry once the straws which fell out of their dispenser en route have been collected off the floor and the servers have got over their travel sickness. They are clones, there is nothing at all individual about any of them, inside or out. It makes orientating yourself very difficult.

'Turn right past Starbucks.'

'Which one?'

'The one with the green roof.'

'They ALL have green roofs!'

By the wonders of modern technology I am now in another hotel room, in Warren, in the far northwest of Pennsylvania, almost on the shore of Lake Erie. But nothing, in the room, betrays the fact that I have moved 130 miles. The furniture, the decor, the facilities, even the mournful sound of the maid's vacuum cleaner outside in the corridor, is exactly the same. It is exactly as though we left the room, drove for two hours and re-entered the same room, which has been tidied up a bit in our absence.

We have come here on account of a hydro-electric power station. It is relatively small, as these things go, operating on a smallish dam, generating only 600 megawatts. But, my poor beleaguered friends in West Cumbria will be interested to know, this small, very unobtrusive, environmentally friendly power generation system would need 6000 wind turbines to replace it.

Food for thought, eh?