I was in LAX last month, Los Angeles International Airport, the worst airport on earth, even counting Rome and Sana'a. I was supposed to meet up with someone I'd never met before, and I wasn't exactly sure where they'd said they'd be so I lurked near the sliding glass doors at the entrance to the arrivals hall.There was a large-boned gentleman in a blue outfit and a fancy peaked hat leaning against the wall nearby."You want a limo?" he growled.I thanked him for his thoughtfulness but I was waiting for someone."You maybe shouldn't block the door," he growled. "If you block the door the security will move you away."This was good advice so I went and leaned against the wall beside him. He smelt like the inside of an empty wooden wardrobe and when he shook my hand, his was the size of my head. He said his name was Glen Mazarro and he drove limos but not only for celebrities. I asked if his limo had one of those floors that were really illuminated fish tanks. I'd seen one of them on TV once. He said he'd heard of those, and we speculated about how you'd feed the fish and how you'd extract a dead one and whether certain kinds of fish don't mind being sloshed around and bumped against the sides when you go round corners or brake abruptly.He asked me where I was from, and I told him South Africa. He nodded thoughtfully, and said: "Right, like Piet Koornhof."This was not a reference I expected from Glen the limo guy. It turns out he used to be a state trooper in Houston, Texas, and would drive security for Piet Koornhof and Pik Botha whenever they came to town, which was apparently quite frequently, for reasons that aren't entirely clear."Pik Botha, that guy liked a drink," said Glen Mazarro, chuckling with the air of a man who also liked a drink once, and probably still does but is trying his best each day not to, and whose resolve usually lasts until about three in the afternoon.The person I was meeting couldn't seem to find me and we had a conversation about it on the telephone, with Glen giving me helpful directions. "Tell them you're under the big Seiko watch," he said. "Tell them you're across from the doughnut place. Tell them you're next to the big guy."It was a bit mysterious how they couldn't find me, Glen and I agreed as I hung up, because the arrivals hall isn't much larger than the back of his limo.I had spent much of my previous trip to the States shadowing traces of Donald Trump around New York, so I hadn't been expecting to indulge in any Trumpology this time, but it struck me that Glen the limo guy might be exactly the sort of fellow to give me the inside scoop.It's quite difficult to scrounge up the nerve to ask someone if they're a Trumpist, even when that someone is a large-knuckled former state trooper around whom hovers the ineffable atmosphere of a man with a dead body in the boot of his limo, wrapped and loosely knotted in a sack of lime for disposal in the desert later tonight.But Glen surprised me. He was a Reagan man and a Bush guy and he might have voted Rubio but he disliked Cruz and Trump's definitely not his guy. He wasn't planning to vote, but he had lots of family who like Trump, family who hadn't voted for years but would be getting out behind Agent Orange. I asked him why, and he told me that they wanted things to change.I wondered if that isn't just a cycle - every eight years Americans seem to swing back the other way from wherever they are, and he said maybe, but people want things to be different, and that guy's different. "But different how?" I asked, and he shrugged, and he said: "When someone wants to leave a marriage, they have to run to someone, right? They don't make such smart decisions about who that person is. Believe me, I know."And I understood that the marriage wasn't the Democrats, it was an entire situation that they felt wasn't helping them, and I remember thinking I should think about that and that it probably doesn't only apply to America, but I'm as blinkered by my own prejudices as anyone out there so I never seriously thought Trump would win, just the opposite, quite the opposite, and I never really thought about that conversation again, but it seems to me now that there are many surprises coming, and there's nothing quite so underestimated in our chattering world as people who are tired of feeling ignored...