Narrative gaps and funny cartoons at gapingvoid.com. Hugh hits the spot again.

Ruffles writes about the mysterious fetish women have with shoes. I giggled.

The bunion, the scar of women's battle for equality, the Blahnik and Choo, the spoils. Womenfolk place a lot of importance in their shoes. They're a celebration of sexuality, choice and independent wealth. A pair of women's shoes is an episode of Sex And The City distilled into footwear. Eclecticism, achievement, vivaciousness, cocktails and lunch.

Whilst the battle for gender equality has been a fierce one, women's shoes are also a place for the genders to meet. The passionate fixation of a woman on her shoe collection remains baffling, yet above all they openly recognise men as a component that is both required and sometimes desired. It is the terms and conditions that have changed.

Psychologists say that one of the reasons a pair of heals is deemed sexually attractive is because the shape of the shoe, and the angle of elevation offered by the heal make the toe look like a furry front bum. Shoes say, look at my fanny, but you're not actually going to get to look at my fanny unless I say so. Oh, and stop looking at my tits and keep your eyes on the floor, damn you.

The sexual subtext of the shoe is a deep and layered. You know, therefore, you're in the wrong party when one of the first things you hear is "Ooh Margaret those sandals look comfortable".

The Naples Grande resort (formerly the Registry) has undergone a recent face-lift. The huge lobby has been beautifully re-modelled in marble, glass and steel with an enormous circular fountain at the centre, peaceful boothes with cream leather chairs, modern art. It looks like a scene from a futuristic movie set in 2010. The bar is surrounded by cream leather stools in a fashionable square style, the bar top is a chunky 4 inch thick slab of greenish rippled glass. They serve expensive and tasty cocktails in tall glasses over crushed ice, stirred with raw sugar cane sticks.

What amuses me, every time, is stepping out of the lift on the 11th floor where my room is, right onto a disgusting yellow patterned carpet, taking me right back to 1970 when this hotel was built.

Nascar (stock car racing) is the US's most favourite sport.

I was chatting to one of my colleagues about US politics and asking him why it was that the president of the US wasn't a democratic, moderate, diplomatic, charismatic leader with strong environmental and foreign policies...

"What hope do we have," he says forlornly, "when the majority of the electorate get excited watching cars racing around a circular track?"

This explains a lot that is wrong with America.

It's 6.30am. I'm outside the hotel with colleague Justin, limbering up for our run. I am already sweating in the steamy Florida morning heat, there are crickets buzzing in the grass.

I'm a little apprehensive. J is a former marathon runner, slim and athletic, whereas jogging typically pushes my heart rate above my body's aerobic threshold. I tell him to go gentle on me. We settle for him talking most of the way, which is a good handicap. I listen. And wheeze... Actually I surprise myself, once we're underway and even despite the heat - which feels wrong for so early in the morning - I feel quite fit and comfortable running for the four miles we end up doing.

It's funny running through the "theme park" that is Naples. Real Estate values have shot through the roof here in the last few years - the combination of wealthy retirees and tourism helping make Florida's coastline one of the fastest growth areas in the US recently.

It's fakeness appalls me in some ways, but you can't fault the people here for wanting a high standard of living and a convenience above even American standards. The lawns are pristine, deep, crisp grass, largely ornamental, watered daily by extensive water-guzzling automatic sprinkler systems. The hotels are huge, glass and concrete monstrosities towering in acres of palm-tree littered grounds, selfishly shielding their private beachfronts from the public with locked gates and fences. The boardwalks are ideal for the wheelchairs and zimmer frames of the elderly residents of this, the place they come to die in. Most of them you see have that kind of clementine-coloured, deeply furrowed skin which comes from 25 years of over-exposure to the hot Floridian sunshine.

Did I mention the houses? Along the shoreline and just back from it, these are monster air-conditioned palaces and palazios, villas and castles. Each designed to demonstrate it's owner's career status to their neighbours. Each with 5 times as many bathrooms as its owner needs, stocked with vacuous, echoing guest bedrooms for the large extended families who come to stay from the bigger cities once a year, each with a grounds-staff and an army of immigrant cleaning labour required to keep them polished to perfection.

These mansions are the physical evidence of their owners' 21st century wealth and destined to stand only until the next big hurricane flattens them, and the developers get to start over with insurance millions. Everything in Naples has been constructed since 1970 when the place was last raised to the ground by storms.

We drop through one of the hotel grounds and onto the top of the beach. The sea is busy eroding the beach - you can watch it happening - and so of course this beach is man made. Every year, the top of the beach is pushed down into the sea by bulldozers and millions of tonnes of sand and water are pumped from sandbanks out in the bay back onto shore to fill the gap and keep the water, for another year, from lapping around the apartment blocks. So even the beach is fake.

There are lots of dead fish washed up on the water line. Justin says it's due to the red algae which blooms around about now. I can't help but imagine that man has something to do with it somewhere.

I love Florida's 1970s grandeur. I love it's cleanliness, order and the fake pretence it gives that the world is controlled - despite it's fragile coastal position. I love the energy and enthusiasm with which residents embrace what they can achieve with their land, the ease with which they manipulate their surroundings - the fertlisers on the lawns, the sprinklers, the pool chlorination - in a State built on a shifting reclaimed swamp. But I also hate the way it's demonstrably unsustainable. I hate the unselfconscious excess, the selfishness and the "gated community" economic gap. The carbon footprint, energy use and water wastage this place represents makes me sick.

But finishing the run, stripping off and laying on our backs in the cool, salty surf, is the most pleasurable feeling for tired, hot muscles. And you can't do that in Acton where I normally go to work - so I surrender to Florida and all their theme-park craziness and magic and give them the benefit of the doubt - what they've created is a wonderful escape from the real world.

Tomorrow we head to Naples, Florida. A new State for me and a two day due dilligence exercise.

Naples is on the Southwest tip of Florida (on the gulf of Mexico).

It's the 4th July Independence Day and the US is a very fine place to be on this date. People set off fireworks everywhere.

Big fireworks actually. I watched them from the roof of the car park in my hotel and they were improved by the electrical storm which was raging behind us and only slightly marred by the accompanying rain.

Earlier I went to a party with A and L at the house of their friends further up Lake Austin. They have an amazing (huge, spacious, stylish) house right on the lake set around a "horizon-less" pool and overlooking the expanse of greeny-blue water. It's what you get from being a partner at one of the big law firms in Austin.

"A" came by boat from his place and so, halfway through the afternoon after a couple of beers and a tequila, he offers me a chance to water ski behind his boat. Never one to leave a challenge unfulfilled and never having water skied before, I get changed and we get the boat out onto the lake. With 5 minutes instruction, feeling awkward and clumsy with these big skis on, I have my first go. You sit in the water with the skis in front of you, knees to your chest and arms locked on the bar. Then the boat drags you upwards and you're supposed to stand up. First go is a disaster, I do stand up but I let go immediately and get water up my nose.

Second go is *electric*. I stand up and "balance" and suddenly find stability - I can't stop screaming because it's so much fun. And so we go zooming up and down the lake a couple of times (naturally right past the party which is going on on the lawn) with me water skiing successfully behind the boat. I even managed to move sideways over the wake of the boat - which is wierd because it seems properly "solid" - a textured shape to slide over - as opposed to liquid.

Thoroughly fun experience, I am now hooked on water skiing. And will have sore shoulders and forearms tomorrow...

I went out for dinner with my boss A. Well, one of my bosses. I seem to have three.

He was going to take me out on his boat on Lake Travis, but sadly the boat's battery had run flat - hasn't been out this season. It was a fine boat but I only sat in it in the dock while we unpacked it, prepared it for it's non-existent voyage and then put it away again. Still it was good to see the rows and rows of dry-docks holding the boats of Austin's well-to-do.

So we retired to the local Tex-Mex joint with A's wife, L. Intrigued by my experience of online dating which I relate to them and with A having a professional interest in subscription websites like Match.com, we spend the evening joking about how A and L would use Match.com to find their ideal match (if they weren't already happily married...!)

Having decided that A has a lot of negative attributes which might make his search for the perfect woman tricky - such as being a "grumpy old man" and "viewing the human race as basically a cancer of the planet", we mentally drafted an appropriate Match.com profile for him in fits of giggles. He claimed that being athletic and generally quite affluent would be able to make up for the negative features, L and I weren't convinced. A says he wishes he'd had online dating around when he was hunting for a bride...

I look forward to reading his completed profile in due course.

When I woke up this morning, the rain was settling in - Austin was dank and steamy. I had plans to go kayakking on the lake outside the hotel - and I decided to go anyway. Fortunately the weather picked up - and it got quite hot.

Town Lake is overlooked from on high by clifftop houses of the wealthy - so it was educational to paddle upstream and take a look at what several million dollars buys you in Austin.

The picture looks a lot more dreary than it actually was, I have sunburn...

I love this building. It puts me in mind of Gotham City. It's my favourite building in Austin's downtown. The clouds looked moody over it today. This was minutes after stepping outside "Fado's Irish Pub" after a thoroughly enjoyable but ultimately disappointing morning watching England's football dreams trickle away into the raging torrent that is Portugal.

Penalties. Why is it always penalties? We hate them and love them, but we always lose them. Is it too much to ask our players to practice? Or does our confidence just go to nothing when we're faced with the historical fact: we never win on penalties?

It was fun to enjoy the atmosphere of an "all-American" boozer whilst watching an obviously non-American sport. Actually they were getting fully into it - and the smattering of Brits throughout the crowd helped swell the support. There were a lot of England shirts in there and the pub was packed at 9.30am when I got there. Friends from work had been there since it opened at 8am to secure a table. Kind of wierd to start the morning with a pint of Smithwicks but not wholly unpleasant.

The despondancy when England lost on penalties after extra-time was just as strong here as in every pub across the nation back home. It really was like letting the wind out of the sails. The only thing that cheered people up a bit was France sending Brazil out of the World Cup in the game that followed (although I was expecting support for Brazil to be stronger over here - especially with France's record of collaboration with the US).

I spent my afternoon like a true American: I went to the Mall. (A word I still don't know how to say). Is it Maul or Marl or Maaarl or Mahll? I don't know.

I shopped like a good 'un, had a Large Jamba Aloha Pineapple Juice and finished it all off at the movies with popcorn and coke. I went to see the new Superman film - which, given that I loved Superman when I was a kid, just had to be done. It was quite entertaining - a little bit "too" far fetched as always but entertaining nonetheless.

Sunset over Zilker Park, where we played 7-aside football on Thursday night after work.