Here be dragons - or snakes, to be quite accurate.

Icelandic natural phenomena be damned; we made it to Virginia a week ago. Most of the time, I forget that I have stepped into a metal tube and in this tube, roared my way across half the world; however, occasionally it's brought forcibly home to me just how far from home I am. We are living in a modern American townhouse, which means that we have gone from a cramped little brick Victorian terrace to a vast, featureless white box. You could probably fit our entire English house into the basement of this one.

It is a very good thing that we have all this space, as it's apparent that we won't be spending as much time outside. In England, we could walk to the doctor's, and to the dentist's. The post office was a scant few hundred metres away, as was the little supermarket, and when you walked through the woods behind the supermarket, you reached the tennis courts, the football pitch, and the park. In the other direction, the library wasn't far beyond the post office, and the school and the train station were a grand leg-stretching ten minutes' walk away. If you'd designed a small world for a two year old boy, you could scarcely have done better. When Jasper started climbing up the walls of the house, I could take him to watch trains, or to visit the sheep, or to the waterlands to throw stones into the Avon; we could walk around the paddocks by the Manor to visit the ancient horses grazing nearby, or we could hike up to the canal towpath and watch the boats go by. For the best part of the year, we did all this walking with rain dripping off the ends of our noses, but - sensibly for a child born in England - Jasper never seemed to mind the rain much.

This part of the world is clearly designed for cars, and not for walkers. The developers of this area have thoughtfully put in a little playpark under the giant power pylons, where they clearly could not slap any more houses; the wires crackle and hum overhead, and Jasper does not like it much. We have a short, unfenced little backyard, with a small tree demarcating the line between our yard and the neighbour's - however, the neighbour's gangly adolescent son has taken to shooting his little BB gun in the direction of our house. If I let my toddler outside, he runs the risk of getting potted, and I rather like his eyes where they are. Since our backyard appears to be a shooting range, we're reduced to trekking down a long concrete path by the side of the busy road for fifteen minutes in order to reach Goose Creek (which is, oddly enough, about six times the size of the River Avon).

Yesterday we went for a walk by the Creek with Jasper running happily on ahead of us. And then I am stopped dead in my tracks: 'What the HELL is that?'

'That..? Oh. Erm. I think it's a black moccasin. But don't worry. I don't think they bite.'

It was the biggest bloody snake I have ever seen in my life - black coil after black coil draped over a branch near the path, overlooking the river.

'They bloody well do! Also, it's fucking huge. Get away from it! HENRY!'

Then my sainted husband gets out his Iphone in order to google the wretched thing while Jasper sensibly tries to climb my leg to safety. (I miss the days when marital rows didn't involve looking up the correct answer on Wikipedia.) Thanks to Virginia's Herpetological Society, we managed to ascertain that a) the range of the black moccasin (deadly, incidentally) does not extend this far north, and b) that Voldemort's little pet was probably a black ratsnake (capable of growing past six foot in length, apparently).

Today, we did not go out in the yard (where the neighbour's kid was shooting again) and nor did we go near the river. Instead, we went to the local outlets, and walked mindlessly around and around, staring at all the 'Sale' signs.