AMISH COUNTRY

MOST INGENIOUS INVENTION SEEN TODAY: the quillow. Is it a quilt? Is it a pillow? The beauty is, you don't have to decide. It's a pillow that can fold out into a quilt! I'm still grumpy with Max for not letting me buy one. We need a quillow in our life.

I woke up this morning to find a very dejected - and awake - Max. He'd been up for ages, having checked whether his McCain townhall piece had been published on the website yet and finding it significantly changed. He was sad.

He eventually pinned his editor down to explaining why and it seems to me that it's purely stylistic and that particular editor is the kind who has to change everything that comes their way, to justify their existence. But Max's confidence wasn't improved by the stinking unions still not coming through with anything for us to do today.

I watched the curiously awful 'Georgia Rule' (the film that Lindsay Lohan behaved so badly during the shooting of that the producer sent her an angry letter that was 'leaked' to the press) in our hotel room while Maxy made and waited for calls and eventually we decided to sack it and have a day out in Pennsylvania instead.

So we headed to Lancaster County, the heart of Amish country. We had lunch at a place that had llamas and a donkey and some billy goats in the garden and saw some real Amish people having their lunch. There were men with braces on their trousers and a little old lady with a white sort of cap on. The restaurant was this big wooden place that felt very homely and had a nice view (left). The food was very wholesome and our placemats had suggestions of graces we could say before eating, with different options for different faiths.

Afterwards, we headed up to the gift shop upstairs and got some locally-made trinkets before doing down the road to a village called Bird-In-Hand for a buggy ride around the local area. While we were waiting, we saw the weirdest most hairiest hen ever:

The ticket booth for the buggy rides was run by a little boy and his sister. They were both proper Amish. Eventually we got to go on our tour. It was just the two of us in a horse-drawn buggy with a guide who grew up Amish (his father was a pastor), but left the faith after his rumspringe - he got too used to driving a car and didn't want to give it up.

Our tour lasted about an hour and a half, as we clip clopped along little windy country roads just like in Dorset. It was a really nice and restful way to see the countryside, which was mostly big crops of corn that had grown unusually high this year, dotted with smallholdings with big bullet-shaped seed store towers.

It was a real privilege to get such a long one-on-one time with someone so familiar with the Amish and we ended up basically interviewing him for the whole time. We asked him about what it's like to be an Amish child, how they date, how they vote, what he reckons the future of the Amish is and lots and lots of other things. He knows the school teacher from the place where the massacre was a few years ago, so that was really interesting, if upsetting. Apparently the school house has been burned down now.

Part of the tour was visiting an Amish home, where we met an Amish fellow who has an extraordinarily industrial setup in his garage, for one who's not allowed to use electricity. He turns plastic tubes into railings using massive hydraulic machines. I would like to've taken a photo of him, as he had a beard and no moustache and braces on his trousers, but I was painfully aware that that would effectively reduce him to animal-in-zoo and apparently the Amish aren't too keen on photos anyways.

He had a huge house and lots of land and we went down into his basement, where they hold church services every Sunday. His wife was upstairs, sewing stuff and they had two little kids running around. Increasingly as our tour went on, the uncomplicated life of keeping things simple made real sense in such serene surroundings. But then we saw a man ploughing a field with some horses and I thought that things could probably be easier for him. We also saw a one room schoolhouse which was tiny.

It was all fascinating and I was really pleased that Max's work fell through (though I think he's a bit worried about it, as he was hoping to make up for the heavily-edited piece he wrote yesterday).

The satnav scaled new heights of awfulness on the way home, but we did manage to get to Ikea, where we bought massive frames for the Jacob Lawrence print Max bought me and a huge poster I got made of one of my photos of a beach in Montauk. Our flat looks well fancy now!