Britical

 

 

 

 

‘Ever since my childhood I’ve been scared I’ve been afraid

Of being trapped by circumstance or staying in one place

But I always keep a small bag full of clothes carefully stored

Somewhere secret somewhere safe and somewhere close to the door.’ 

- Frank Turner, The Road.

 

 

It should have been simple: Tuesday night, fifth date, two and a half weeks in. I wanted to get a cupcake and watch the boats on the East River, and he agreed and suggested we get something proper to eat first.

On Third Avenue, we sat at an outdoor cafe table. It was here that something started to make me feel antsy - and not in the good way. Our chat, which usually raced along in all directions, was stilted and awkward. We ran into silences and funny little conversational cul de sacs, and  then there was the nasty sick feeling growing in the pit of my stomach. Again, this was something I couldn’t have consciously articulated at the time, even in my head - which might help explain the disaster that followed.

As the food arrived, I was dimly aware of him scrutinizing me in some steady, thoughtful way that he’d been doing since we got there. Steady and thoughtful? Or appraising and calculating? I might have wondered. Whatever.

We left the restaurant and headed down to the cupcake place. For some reason I didn’t want one anymore but I didn’t say anything. We got a chocolate cupcake plus a cup of milk and walked - a little too briskly like a forced march - to the river. 

Here I should remark that to anyone who knows me even slightly, the idea of my being sat down for a stern Talk is likely to produce giggles. But there it was. And there was still a minute or two to go. We sat on an empty bench and I scanned the river, up and down, the reflected moon waning, but still fat and self-satisfied from the night before. My date fed me cake, and I felt a little better - at which point, he abruptly put down the fork and said:

      ‘So what are we doing?’

Surprised, I glanced at my watch. True, it was past nine and we both had early mornings but we’d just got here and hadn’t even seen any boats yet.

And then:

       ‘What are your plans?’

        ‘Oh. Plans. Right. Well…I guess get some more work, keep writing…and….I’d quite like a dog. Wait, do you mean am I still planning to leave the country?’

 

As you have already spotted - and as I failed to - I was saying all the wrong things.

 

       ‘I mean you and me’, he said patiently. ‘You’re not into commitment, are you?’

 

"’Into commitment’"? - His phrasing made me sound like a slut, or worse - a hippy! Regardless, the penny had finally dropped, and the strange, bad and trapped feeling started to seep back with a vengeance.

 

I had heard tell of such Talks, of course, but I had had no idea they were scheduled this early on in the proceedings. I was fairly sure that it wasn’t normally the case. But even saying this would, I supposed, have been damning, and there was no one around to ask. Some lone joggers staggered past our bench. Useless. (The next day, a friend suggested me I might have created some distraction: ‘Look! There’s a baby wolf!’  - and run off. That way it would all have gone away in the morning and we could have a sixth date like nothing happened. I don’t think it would have worked though.)

He looked at me and waited, which calm non-reactiveness I appreciate in anyone and especially in men. But unfortunately for everyone this required me to say something useful and informative. Instead, I thought with dismay of all the glib, flip, stupid shit that comes out of my mouth on a daily basis in order to get a laugh and how it might possibly make me look a bit flighty and indifferent. And how, confronted now with someone wearing their Serious face, I had the immense task of backpedalling furiously - without appearing to do so.

…Because that would look like protesting too much. And so, I protested too much, not enough, mangled words, syntax, hit verbal dead ends, peered over his shoulder at nothing, and avoided eye contact. Was I supposed to persuade or convince? What should I say that wouldn’t make me sound like a used car salesman? I was entirely unconvincing. Later, it would occur to me that if I had been trying to lie, verbal dexterity would not have deserted me so tragically. I would have aced this shit in no time. But ironically, attempting to be truthful, to figure out something that I have never had to figure out, and on the fly at that, my ‘assurances’ sounded like someone cornered. I reeked of lying.

 

I could see no other option except to continue panicking. I pushed on, down into my kamikaze death spiral, hoping I could pull up before I ran out of airspace. And when I ran out of words, he looked then as I felt, wretched and grim, but most of all, unconvinced. And who could blame him? I have always been lousy at selling.

 

‘There’s nothing I can say’, I said, defeated by it all, inwardly cursing the now hateful cupcake, and handing him back the cup. And there really wasn’t anything to say. I’d said enough.

 

Copyright Britical, 2010. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright Britical, 2010. All Rights Reserved. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New York

 

Two of my favourite postcards say, "New York is a Friendly Town", and "Lack of Charisma Can Be Fatal". I like them because they’re true. Or should be in this economy.

 

Monday night, I was wandering the streets of the West Village with R. who was complaining about his three current girlfriends and explaining in detail how each one was "really fucking annoying" in her own way while I took up the slack and whined about everything else, including my favourite subject of late: Where to Go When You Might Want to Leave New York but There’s Nowhere Better than New York to Go. (Facebook group coming soon!!!)

 

Although he usually strives mightily to do the precise opposite, R. seemed touchingly keen to cheer me up. We were passing ‘The Waverly Inn’ and I’d mentioned that I’d never been inside, fearing another poky, authentic, local joint had been ruined by the same sorts of people who’d set about destroying half the rest of New York. Although, typically, I never hung out at the original Waverly either. And not that I’m a fan of ‘dive bars’ or trustafarian-type crumminess for the sake of it. That’s one reason I hate Williamsburg. But walk through The Meatpacking District on a Friday night and you’ll see what I mean. Hell on crack. ‘Come on’, said R., ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

 

The Waverly Inn 2.1, looks charming in exactly the way that ‘Freeman’s’ and ‘The Spotted Pig’ attempt to be. That is, only in theory, or if you’re a deaf person - but more on that later. It is, undeniably, beautifully "done" and earnestly gussied up with pretensions of "coziness" - that is, they gutted bits of the old place and performed all sorts of tortuous decorator twists and stunts to make it look just like the old place again. Sort of. Sitting at the bar, you notice an emptiness or quality of "wrongness" -  like the dead pets brought back in Stephen King’s ‘Pet Sematary’. Fakery is fine by me if it’s done well, if it’s faked with charisma, because this can be impressive per se. But if it’s not done well it becomes phoney (a detail, I know), the shabbiness, ironically, a bit haughty. So unless you want your customer to sit in a flimsy, set-decorated space waiting for their close-up, it’s up to the staff to provide the substance. And that means, yes, being friendly to your customer. Or at least polite. Simple, really. Even if there isn’t a single bottle of wine under $100. Especially when there isn’t a single bottle of wine under $100.

 

 

Which brings us to the bartender. Now, I have a lot of time for bartenders and - with the exception of Postal workers, Duane Reade employees, and airport "security" guards - anyone who has to put up with the general public. People suck. However, the fate of a restaurant can pivot on the charm and professionalism of the maitre d’ or bartender, the latter often developing a "following". A good bartender, like a skilled whore or fund manager, knows that faking it and making people feel welcome and not totally ripped off, even if they are not welcome and being totally ripped off, is more their job description than knowing how to mix a Side Car. So it went with the bartender at the Waverly, who mixed an excellent Side Car, but neglected to perform the first bit. The only following I could see him having were the angry mob approaching his castle with pitchforks.

 

     ‘I wish this place wasn’t in New York….’, I said to R. We’d been there about ten minutes.

 

    ‘Because it’s trendy?’

 

    ‘Yeah. No. Something like that. Like…if it looked like it does but was somewhere….more friendly.’

 

I felt like a tourist.

 

    ‘Right.’ He said, giving the bartender a look. ‘Like the old place.’

 

 

But we were still in New York and a tornado wasn’t happening anytime soon to drop The Waverly Inn onto, say, Kansas. We had both noticed that our bartender, older than Christopher Walken but channeling him in some unspeakably disagreeable way, had been taking care to display an intense personal dislike of each and every one of his customers, as if for some evil we had done him and which we had compounded by immediately forgetting. I feared it might be me and my rotten mood at fault, but it wasn’t. "Do you want a drink?" he barked, stony-faced and challenging, as the man next to me greeted his date. The man’s head snapped round in alarm, his date’s coat, halfway off, poised in mid-air. She looked like she was going to cry. A few minutes later, the bartender struck again, slamming down their cheque, rolled up in a shot glass, with the sort of gusto that suggested he’d just knocked back a much needed shot of Tequila himself. I found myself wishing that he would. Was he was an elderly relative of the owner, ‘Vanity Fair’s’ Graydon Carter, forced to work off some debt or other? I thought of something quite useful I was taught years ago: that rude customers are people who are insecure about their status and should be treated like unfortunate children, or failing that, ignored.

 

 

So we left. And despite the excellent Side Car, I did not feel cheered up. I felt newly depressed and hollow, wondering about living in a New York where such a shallow, celebrity-encrusted pretender as The Waverly Inn could incite praise that would be more likely put up with in L.A. New Yorkers, for all the glitz perceived by those who don’t actually live here, can generally tell when The Emperor has no clothes. Being at The Waverly was like finally meeting some popular wit and beauty everyone has talked about and admired, they open their lovely mouth and let out a huge burp. The gorgeous space, the contrived "old time" look to the scuffed wood and old photos, the roaring fireplace - we left it. We left without a backward glance at the room, which was now less warm, clubby sanctuary and more like an Abercrombie & Fitch. And like that store, the look was tired. We left the bar where the bartender made sure not to look up as we said thankyou, past the maitre d’ who did not bother to say goodbye, and though we hadn’t eaten, I left with a nasty taste in my mouth.

 

Copyright Britical, 2010. All Rights Reserved.

 

November 19^{th, 2009}

UK Customs & Immigration

 

I worry they’ll say, "Business or pleasure?", but they never do:

    ‘Hello!!

    ‘Hello. How are you?’, I reply

 Knowing, too late, that this ‘How-are-you’ sounds so American when I am still not.

    ‘Oh, not bad. Nothing that a barstool wouldn’t cure!!’

 

A Santa-ish and avuncular immigration officer, an encouraging start to a trip nobody wants. The Tube is stuffy, and coming up above ground, London is its usual drab self, at night a city of flat orange and grey, the streets splattered with enormous yellow leaves, slimy underfoot. Arriving at my friend’s flat, her hallway smells slightly of damp, the smell of so many English houses, which makes me think of all the ones I have lived in - and so of her house. Wish you were here.

 

November 20^th

Chalk Farm Tube Station & Islington

 

The awful package is handed to me in an obscenely mauvish-pink nylon shopping bag. So it’s true, then. It’s surprisingly heavy, which is not surprising at all given that everyone probably thinks this same thing. The commuters swarm round us and I sense I should take my leave. I step onto the escalator for the steep ride down into the Northern Line, the deepest in London, conscious of and appalled by what I am carrying, but very calm of course, and careful not to put it on the floor of the train.

 

At the newsagent’s I buy wine, crackers, cheese, in that order. The man asks if I need a bag, glancing at the obviously half-empty one I am holding - and don’t need, either. I might have told him.

 

       ‘No…I mean yes, yes please. Sorry, I’ve got something a bit fragile in this one.’

 

Not anymore.

 

A few minutes later, suddenly enraged by the tangle of bags, money, cellphone, keys, I put the little bag he’s given me into the awful mauve one anyway. She wouldn’t have minded.

 

The next morning I will carry this and the box hiding inside, out to Epping Forest, where she worked with horses all those years ago and where she was happiest. She even knew at the time, she told me, how happy she was and how rare it was to really know it when you are.

I am sleeping on an air mattress on the floor and I’ll keep the thing at my head, one handle wrapped round my wrist. Waking up a few times during the night I pat at it gently and very uselessly.

 

Saturday 21^st

Epping Forest

The box is navy blue cardboard like something holding posh stationery. Her name is scribbled in biro on several sides and again, printed on an envelope fastened to the top with an elastic band. It’s a ‘Certificate of Cremation’. Who knew there were such things? I unwrap the brown paper, feeling a bit shifty and dishonest in a two weeks before Christmas sort of way. There’s a little white card inside, her name yet again. Yes. Thankyou. It’s like bloody Pass the Parcel in here. Another horrible white card later, and I understand they want to make sure someone gets the message and while I’d like to say they’re preaching to the choir, they’re not. That’s the problem, you see.

 

I lift up the lid - not slowly, quickly, fearfully, or even like Pandora. I just open it. I know what’s in there. When I was seventeen, having read too much Edgar Allen Poe, I asked the local crematorium for a behind-the-scenes tour and they obliged. They were probably delighted. I had asked the man:

    ‘Is it true they sit up when they’re burning?’

    ‘What? Nah! The dead can’t hurt you, love.’ (Think again.)

    ‘No, I know that. I mean, because when the heat reaches the muscles, it shrinks them and they contract and so…’

    ‘No, luv. Look, the dead can’t hurt you.’

 

And so on. It was hopeless. But I told her about it afterwards - I got my ghoulish streak from her - and we had a good laugh about that, she and I. 

 

So I know all about it: the  inconveniently lumpy remnants of skull, of pelvis, pulverized in the aptly named Pulverizer, into something less unpretty. I dig out 3 - 4 scoops with a teaspoon and seal it in a little plastic screwtop tub. Save some for later. I feel like a character in ‘C.S.I.’, all professional delicacy and steady hands.

 

My London host comes with me. We take the train out past Walthamstow where I remember living as a child. I tell her about the husband and wife owners of the fish stall and how they gave us two little china polar bears. Yes, she says, the market is still here. Imagine!

 

At Chingford we walk up the hill, turn left, and go down the other side into the forest. It’s damp, blustery and muddy, full of walkers, dogs and runners ruining their knees. I must find the right place. Somewhere, but where? She had always insisted, ‘Oh, I don’t care - I’ll be dead!’ until eventually, worn down by my interrogations, ‘Oh allright, just spread me on a horse field somewhere.’ I peer at the ground looking for hoof prints.

 

I find not only evidence of horses, but a tree, symmetrical and alone. It’s late Autumn-looking, bits of gold still smouldering at its edges. ‘What a pretty little tree!’, says her algorithm in my head. The tree it is, then. A Nevermore raven is pecking about underneath, or maybe it’s a crow. whichever one it is that walks instead of hops. I take the box out of the inappropriately mauve bag, pull off the lid, and tip the whole lot into the wind. And is that all there is? It is. Memories are only chemicals stuck between your temporal lobe and your occipital fissure. In my hands were eight pounds of grey, black, and white flecks in navy blue cardboard - carbon, charcoal and bone. I stamp on the now empty box and quickly lick the ends of my fingers. They taste vaguely of iron, blood and, unsurprisingly, ash - but mainly they taste of nothing at all. Then my friend takes some photos. Later, one of them will show someone standing under a tree surrounded by white stuff and looking dismayed, perhaps by a coke deal gone terribly wrong.

 

As we walk away one magpie perches on a branch. Really. ‘One for sorrow’! I say. How perfect. Three horses trudge by and I’m thrilled. I stare hard at the riders, her simulation running in my head, commenting on their seat, their hands, heels and toes, the placement of the saddle. But it’s not really her.

 

 

Tuesday 24^th

South East Coast of England

 

"It was a dark and stormy night…." - and it is. Her garden isn’t hers anymore, I’m told, but legally it never was so, so what? It belonged to the state. They’ve put another tenant in there. But I have thought a lot about the little patch of wild strawberries and how she looked forward to its appearance every June and how no one will care about it anymore or even know it’s there (hidden under some bushes). Who can worry about criminal trespass at these times? It will be an Adventure. ‘Oh, your Mum, she would have loved that idea!!’ said her friend, who is now driving the getaway car for her reckless remark, my aider & abeter.

 

I don’t look at the town as we drive in. We stop short of the front gate and get out. It’s raining hard. Aside from a lone houseplant in the sitting room window, the place looks ignored and very bare. They’ve painted everything white inside and all the downstairs lights are blazing. Someone is in. Someone who doesn’t care about wasting electricity. Fuck it. I walk through the gate with the screwtop jar, perform a surreptitious little scatter in the front garden just in case. Excellently Plausible Story at the ready, I run up the steps, along the side of the house, perform a proper skulk under the kitchen window, and duck and weave through the sodden back garden, sprinkling here and there like a demented Tinkerbell. Insert, extract. Simple and clean, even if back in the car, I sense a bit of unsaid disappointment at not getting caught.

 

We are halfway along the coast road when I remember the doorkeys in my pocket. They’re hers and I had meant to bury them in the forest. God knows why. We stop the car and I clamber over the wall and onto the beach. It’s pebbly with a steep drop down to a flatter part close to the water’s edge. Scramble, scramble. Scrambling and falling. I remember doing exactly this right here when I was six or seven. It’s raining now at stinging angles, the wind a King Lear gale, the sea an animal bellow , etc., etc. The sky moves fast overhead, wasting no time, rushing through its clichés of battleship grey and charcoal smears, scudding bruises, peeping moon shimmer and all the rest. Pathetic fallacy. Under the melodrama the sky is merely itself, hard and cold.

I’m not sure what I’m doing here but I know it’s exactly the right thing to do, standing on the beach in the storm feeling tiny against the enormous sea, staggered backwards by the wind, gauging how close to get to the eerie hiss and rattle of millions of tiny stones drawn back in, the inbreath before it returns in a massive roar of triumph. I really don’t want to get fallen on by what looks like half the English Channel. I lean back and chuck the keys as hard as I can through the salt spray, against an incoming stacked wall of galloping waves. The keys probably fly all of four feet, who knows, but there is glee and defiance and that’s what counts.

Driving on, I untangle my wet hair, feel bad about the mud on my boots messing up someone’s car, and I think too about her house and that new plant she’s put in the front window.

 

 Copyright Britical, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

New York

 

 

"When your parent is gone, there is the realization that you are next in line for death."

Nice. I honestly had not thought of that. Cheers, Grief booklet.

It had also never occurred to me that Travel wouldn’t work. In books, romantic heroes and heroines everywhere know to take solace in Travel (perhaps with the caveat they have a base, a Home from which to travel from). So last week I went to Mexico. On a whim. Yep. That’s how I roll, baby.

On the way to the airport I decided didn’t want to go after all. 

At the airport, it was the middle of the night, and even though a patient friend was talking me down through the two hour wait, I wanted to bolt. It was like being put on the school bus again. But I thought about all the hassle it would cause for Air Mexicana to find my bag and pull it off the plane when they’d been nice enough to give me an exit row aisle seat.
 
On the plane, a nice little A 319, there were no sleepy men in sombreros, no goats, and no chickens. Neither was the Taco Bell chihuahua yapping it up in the galley. (How travel expands the mind!) It was the quietest flight I have ever been on - sedate, even.

Despite these disappointments, I felt better once I arrived at Mexico City and took a plane for the mountains - the sorts of mountains, I noticed, as they appeared through the little window, where CNN shows pictures of plane debris scattered about.

At the house, during the week that followed, I knew I was there to Relax. I met quite a few people here and there at lunches and dinners, all good and interesting in their own way. Still, sitting alone and restless outside my casita, I took measure of the banana-less banana trees, the obscenely garish coloured flowers, the maddening flutter and squawk of the birds flying constantly in and out of the windows, the insects (oh, the fucking insects!) - and I looked miserably at the lake, shimmering and empty, far below, and I thought: I wish this was Italy. And that was when it struck me that no, actually, it being Italy wouldn’t help either. Not Italy, not Greenland, not Thailand, not even Christmas Island…none of these places would work. "It’s not you, it’s me", I wanted to say then to this poor place and all its natives, who, naturally, I couldn’t fucking stand either. And as for New York, well, it has now become merely the place that is the least unbearable.

Arriving back here to ignore the aforementioned Grief booklet a friend sent to me, it sits on my desk fairly unexamined, its pristine-ness feeling like a rebuke every time I walk in the room. I’ve skimmed bits, like the damning sentence I quoted above. There are also, I saw, lists. Lists of things you’re "allowed" to feel, not feel, feel a bit, feel "in waves", feel half the time, wonder why you’re not feeling, wonder when you will feel, wonder when you won’t feel, and why…..all this Feeling! It’s exhausting.

I am not myself. I am angry with those who haven’t called or haven’t called enough, irritated with those who call or call too much (whatever that means). I have nothing to say and everything to say, but either way I can’t say it or don’t want to or can’t be bothered. I am ignoring people who mean well, people I am fond of. I have cancelled my way out of so many fun things these past few weeks, but I can’t remember what they are and neither do I care. But I do care that I am Missing Fun Stuff. And that pisses me off, too. But I can’t seem to stop. I want in, I want out, I want it all to go away, I want it all now - Bring it On, take it back. I haven’t looked at the news or a newspaper in five weeks. I’m reluctant to go to one of my favourite escapes, the movies, but don’t know why. I can’t sleep, and I eat only for fuel and because if I don’t my stomach hurts, which (you guessed it) is annoying. I am good only for whining and raging with a dollop of self-pity, as you can see - and I resent myself for it. I can’t stand looking at people in the street; their bodies, their clothes, their noses, the weird and stupid sounds coming out of their mouth holes. I am ready to punch them in the face. I am ready to ask them to help me cross the street because I’m secretly blind. I am ready to ask them for all their air miles I don’t want.

Underground, the screech of the subway now makes me want to out-screech it. I pace the platform, a budding crazy person, my I-Pod playing the same song for weeks now, and unable to hear it for the clatter and noise of the place, switching it off, switching it on, upping the volume and worrying and not worrying about becoming deaf. Sometimes, walking above ground, a zombie numbness descends and I feel my face slacken, and then I might feel hungry. Or not. Otherwise my patience (such as it ever was, yes I know) is non-existent. My tolerance, gone. My concentration, shot. It jumps from here to there, but never to, you know, There. To Her. "That way", mumbled King Lear, "madness lies." But by then he was already mad. This not thinking, not "going there", as the Americans say, is not only "Denial" but also, I have begun to think, a betrayal. Of her. (Such as she was, though she isn’t, though there is no "she" - and I will stop this deconstructionist Roland Barthes-ing right here. Barf.) It’s conceivable that I need to stop with the "Soldier. Spartan. Monster trucks." mantra that sailed me through the funeral and all the rest. Is it time for something else yet? "Conscientious objector. Coward. Bicycle." I just don’t know. It’s like jumping off the high diving board. Maybe, you say, peering uncertainly down at the deep water below and backing up…..maybe….maybe tomorrow? Can’t we just come back tomorrow?

Everything is permitted, says the Grief booklet, like some demented New Age version of Aleister Crowley. It’s all perfectly normal: everything you feel, don’t feel, can’t feel…blah, blah, blah….and on into infinity, resulting in endless option paralysis. Is there really no organized way that this thing is done? No formula? Especially in the 21st century, lacking Rituals, being an atheist, lacking family. Can you not custom build me a little something? A schedule, a To-Do list, even a shitty Power Point presentation - or a teensy-weensy little clue of a map scribbled on the back of a napkin with a blunt pencil…? Can you really and truly not tell me What To Do? Well, a kindly grief counsellor would likely answer, well….there are no right and wrong ways here, you know. Uh-huh. Really? I would say again. And raising my grief-induced gun to the kindly grief counsellor’s greying head, I might ask him, just like in the movies: "How about now?"

Copyright Britical, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

New York City

 

 

"You help yourself to life", she would tell me during the last year or so, adding recently that it was something she admired - and I would tell her it’s what you taught me, and especially lately by example, so there.

As things had wound down in England and I was left with nothing to occupy my mind, I could barely wait to get out. Flying from England to New York I worried that the world’s epicenter of helping yourself (and I don’t mean in the negative sense of grabby opportunism) would not feel like home. I thought that the cause of my absence might have changed the city for me, as it had seemingly changed the country I was from. Unless that was just a symptom of the flat wrongness of the calm I feel. In the peripheral vision is the thing I can’t shake. I haven’t on purpose decided not to look at it either. But when I try, I can’t see it properly. Out of focus, it looks unfamiliar and quite absurd.

I am informed you can get a good four months out of Total Denial. If I help myself to heaps of denial, no doubt the "life" bit will follow, won’t it? Friends who have "been through it" have offered the correct yet ultimately useless advice that "there are no right or wrong ways" to doing so. (Although I sure can think of a few…oh yessie….and perfectly do-able too if there’s a jury trial.) But a map would be nice. A (non-New-Age-claptrap) guide to whatever this is, or isn’t. And I don’t mean Jesus.

People had left messages, cards, and emails offering coffee, walks, dinner, chats, drinking, seventy-five Valium or anything, anything they could do. I don’t know what to tell them. I suspect my Mother might encourage them to help her daughter uphold the noble quality of Helping Yourself to Life. But that’s the awful point (she can’t. She isn’t. She will never, ever again.). I certainly qualify for some sort of messy binge-type rampage - drugs, alcohol, gambling, adding a few inches to the bungee cord and so on. But I doubt that was what she meant. And, annoyingly, it holds no appeal. Opium might be O.K. for a night, but it’s impossible to find here. Travelling could be a cure, but I hold no funds. Which leaves us, I think, at distractions in the form of people.

My lovely friends and I….I sense we all feel a bit useless and tactless. Sitting there. What to say. What not to say. Can we make a mundane joke? Or is this inappropriate? We all tip-toe together through the minefield. It’s all so…..peculiar. And so, it occurred to me, if one feels a bit unreal right now, perhaps spending time with someone equally unreal is the solution; someone met randomly and briefly in a bar just before you left for Paris. Just before it happened. Someone a bit like that, say. Because in Paris, the morning she died, you may have hung up with the hospital, and logged, shamefully, straight onto Facebook. Your excuse was one you didn’t need, but anyway you were thinking the little chat box might have someone in it you felt like talking to, but it didn’t, and any sensible sorts of friends on the Eastern Seaboard would be asleep at 6am on a Sunday. Then you thought about calling your Mother, remembering with sudden pleasure that the time difference was only an hour from here and she should be home eating lunch about now. Ooops.

So let’s think about this: what if…what if….as you’re watching the stupid Facebook box, the stranger from the bar pop up, a green dot next to his name. He is Online. What ever is he doing up at 6am in New York on a Sunday morning? Burning his boss’s eggs as he types with one hand to you, he replies (you, some random stranger he met briefly in a bar who is thousands of miles away). You wonder then why someone would be frying eggs for their boss on a Sunday morning, but you have more important things on your mind and go ahead and drop the bomb. You tell him, a would-be stranger on a train, what happened. He sounds shocked & concerned - genuinely. Even though the night you met he was sarcastic & dry and had even declared with deliberate cheesiness, "We’ve talked a lot tonight. If you give me your number we can talk less next time." Har har, you laughed, because it’s the bestest terrible line you’ve heard since the guy who said, "Do you have any Portuguese in you? Do you want some?" You might have replied, knowing he meant it, "I don’t think so, but I guess it’s a good line if you read Neil Strauss". Later, you realise you said this despite being amused and vaguely intrigued, and later still, curious….so you relented. And now, in Paris, he keeps you on the line, for all you know typing and burning away his whole career.
 
He will call you the weekend you get back to see how you are and offer to drive immediately two and a half hours back to the city, right now, to take you for a drink. Not in a creepy and desperate way, mind you. You can tell by his words that he isn’t a serial killer or a stalker and also that he’s fearful of coming across as taking-advantage-of-the-bereaved.

And what else might he be, generally speaking? We will make him have an accent, but not an American one, since like you, he should be from somewhere else. Maybe Australia. He is to be good-looking: green eyes, 6′1", whatever - maybe an ex-model (because in this recipe, I’m sure we can agree, it’s important to gaze at universally acknowledged beauty when you’re sad, isn’t it?). And, bearing in mind that the moment the plane took off from Heathrow and there was nothing left to do except think, and that thinking chased away your appetite, we could add in that he is a professional chef who is skilled in cooking exactly the food you love. And how much does he love nothing better than giving massages? Yep. That, too.

You have dinner with him two weeks and one day after she died and three days after you get back to New York, which may or may not be a home anymore - you can’t tell. That’s the thing. You suggest meeting on the Northwest corner of Gramercy Park because you always liked it there, because he might like to look up and see how that house has a top floor with French windows and a roof garden. Plus there are squirrels. He is a few minutes late (you knew he’d get very lost) and you spy him hurrying towards you accompanied by some man from whom he’d asked directions to said specific yet obscure corner. He is grinning from ear to ear, but trying not to. The man has a book about William Hamilton, and he shakes your hand, looks approvingly at you, and tells you both to have fun. You walk to the restaurant, which is small and quiet, with a menu that is deliberately all things pure and clean and good - and, being New York, accordingly priced. You tell him to order for you, which is only right because first, he’s a chef, and second, you became sick, in the last two weeks, of making all those endless, heartbreaking fucking decisions. He orders with less fuss than a regular diner. The waiter has no clue he’s a chef, and this - you think to yourself as he makes you eat dessert - is very cool of him. In return, you manage to be pretty much your wry, sarcastic self and you certainly don’t do any crying. And this is very cool of you.

Afterwards, standing by the fountain in Madison Park at 11pm, you tell him proudly how you got through the funeral. An old friend in New York who knows you well had emailed you the day before and said: "Remember, you’re a soldier. A Spartan. Monster trucks." This is the mantra that you said in your head, as you sat deliberately alone in the chapel to avoid the influence of snifflers, as you walked up to the front to say your speech with your shoulders back, surveying the audience with plenty of eye contact. And afterwards, at the food and drink thing afterwards, the "after funeral party", chanelling Bill Clinton, you were all smiles but also solemn diplomacy. He looks at you carefully, despite these cheery assurances, and then he sits on a bench a few feet away where you hear him quietly call his friends and cancel his allegedly tentative plans as he watches you gazing blankly and stupidly at some tree. Then you sit on the swings in the deserted playground nearby and he pushes you. But it’s one of those weird tyre swings which you don’t get, and this makes you irritated and restless. You stand up and linger there together by the gate. You feel him looking hard at you through the dark as if he wants to do something but is not sure if he should. But he does anyway, and you think: brave boy. Then you take Park Avenue up to Grand Central Station where he shows you exactly how the Whispering Arch works, which, though you have tried for years and years, you have never been able to work out and impress any tourist friends with. Then you stare together at the emptiness of the station, its vast ceilings in sea green and gold, and its nighttime train timetables. It feels hushed like a cathedral. Neither of you says anything dumb or stupid and if someone did then that person would laugh about it first. But nothing dumb or stupid is said. Not here. Everything is to be perfect. Because the alternative is screaming, spitting hysteria - or something vaguely along those lines.

Because you’re in a station, you want to get on a train and go somewhere. You decide Poughkeepsie is not an option, even if the name suggests to you, in a way only you could fathom, that it’s full of hamsters and other sorts of  small, furry animals that you like. You wander instead up Fifth Avenue, past the giant shops, their huge displays lit and more still seeming than ever you remember. And look, there is Central Park, which must be gone into, surely, in this story. So in you dive, at 1am. He says, as you both creep through the dark and the trees: I saw this animal in here once, some huge cat thing and it had a raccoon with it. Right, you say, certain this is not true. Meanwhile, you think, you’re stumbling through Central Park with a stranger in the middle of the night. This seems pretty allright to you. Until suddenly, how very embarrassing for a New Yorker like you, you find yourself at completely the wrong corner of the park you told him you were making for. But here, look, there’s something in a tree. It moves like a sloth but isn’t. It’s a racoon. Well, that’s some compensation, at least. It’s the racoon!!! you say, a bit too loudly, as if you’d just sighted a new continent or invented the wheel. No, he says, it’s not the same one; the one I saw was bigger. So you both stare at the creature and it sits there staring back, unmoving, unmoved. It’s a New York City raccoon, you inform him: it’s not bothered.

You’re both sorry to leave the park. It’s dark and unknowable and quiet and strange - which might all be things you feel, you’re not sure - and maybe he feels like this, too. Who knows. Of course, you’re allowed to do and say whatever you want in this story, and so is he. After all, if it’s not at times like these, then when? It could be worse, you think; you could be doing crystal meth, jumping off a bridge, getting Religion. But you can’t care about that when you have started to notice that his lips curve in a particular way that might just kill you, and that wouldn’t be a bad way to go - even if you had to take him down with you. It’s almost 2am, and you decide to hail a cab. Then you sit in your room with the windows wide open talking about everything and a few more things besides, until you hear the sounds of traffic and regular people getting ready for work in the city you now know you can still call home - and in this way you might manage, for now, to help yourself to life once more. Hypothetically, of course.

Copyright Britical, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

She was sharpening a pencil when it happened. Or so it appeared when they found her, breathing but unconscious on her kitchen floor.

We knew it could happen. The brain aneurysm she had had last year, which she was not expected to even survive, had been seen off by this determined woman so she could once again walk, talk, laugh, drink scalding hot coffee and sharpen pencils. http://britical.blogsome.com/2008/03/05/mother/

But she lived in some terror these past fourteen months, knowing the thing would creep back one day and try again - this afternoon, tomorrow, or twenty years from now - no one could know. Carpe diem, indeed. She walked, talked, laughed, and tried not to sneeze too hard, knowing there was a time bomb in her brain. And so, two Saturdays ago, the clock hit 00.00

I wonder if she felt the first gush of blood, the first burst from the artery and then, as it bloomed like Little Boy in the dark sky, a flaming, billowing red firework, a volcano spewing bloody lava running madly, joyously even, high on "freedom hysteria", through the narrow channels, destroying everything in its path. But I doubt that she did. Its force would have sent her reeling and down onto the lino in her kitchen, the whole process taking mere seconds since it was, they said, "a catastrophic bleed". She had a red button hanging round her neck for if she felt bad or ill. It was not pressed. In fact, to be killed instantly is what she had hoped for, since the fear of the thing was certainly death, but more than that: she dreaded being left disabled, paralyzed and drooling, left in some "home" that is not your Home, to lay for hours in your own piss, the air smelling of old cabbage and closed windows, your children pretending not to be repulsed by your smell. As we all do. All this she had imagined, I know, and all this she escaped, just as she had before, but with different consequences this time.

As she sharpened her pencil, I am almost sure it would have been to make a food shopping list for the next day, which was Sunday, the day before I was to arrive to see her. At that moment I was in Paris. It was very warm that day and I was probably eating an afternoon snack - cheese, bread, olives, whatever - walking through Les Tuileries, looking at the barges on the river, rifling through a bookstore. Oblivious. Later, back at the apartment, I could not reach her at her usual times and I texted my sibling, who also tried and to no avail. But, he said, this had happened the other night, too, so he wasn’t too worried.

So off I went to a dinner party, and afterwards, driving at some speed up the Champs Elysees on the way to a party, it occurred to me to check my phone messages. There were two. The first voice told me that my friend E. in New York had just died that day. But there was no time to think on this as the second came through, from my sibling: Please call. Mum’s collapsed and has been taken to hospital.

His girlfriend answered his cell and told me they were now driving the long drive down from London to the hospital on the South Coast of England near where she lived. It was past 11pm and they would arrive in about half an hour and phone me back. Having returned to the apartment, I paced, as you do, helpless. Someone sweet but a bit clueless offered me strawberries and Pierre Herme macaroons, and asked what I needed and I stopped myself from saying stupidly, ‘My Mum’. I figured, correctly, that I would not let myself get that far gone until I got back to New York.

The phone rang, eventually. My sibling had arrived. Mum was alive, just, and unconscious. She has, he said, barely a few hours to go. I thought for the 100th time: can I get there in time, how can I get there, I want to be there…..Metro, Eurostar, London…and then…? How, how, how?? She was, awfully, so near - just across the sea really. But I knew she would be gone before I even I got to London. I could never, ever make it in time. But, I thought, at least her son would be there, her only other family, extended or otherwise, who could sit with her and hold her hand. She would not die alone.

 

He said then that since he’d arrived her pulse had sunk from 95 to 50 in just a few minutes. He said her brain was destroyed (Isn’t that what they said last time, I thought?). He said, it was a catastrophic bleed and they say she won’t survive the night. He said, I’m driving back up to London now.

And he did. The hospital rang him five minutes later and said, "She’s gone."

Gone forever, Sunday 3rd May at 12:35am, almost two months shy of her 75th Birthday, and a day before she and I had planned to be wandering the thrift shops in her seaside town, drinking coffee, eating cake, and later, watching telly as she dozed and I ate too many crisps.

I took the train to London Monday morning. I just did it. I don’t know how. It was blissfully, no, mercifully fast, that Eurostar. I recommend it highly. At St. Pancras I found my brother’s car and my brother greeted me with a "Hello" and perhaps a nod. We picked up his girlfriend, and drove South to the coast, to the hospital. Being my Mother, the tradition since last year was to have any further medical complications occur around a bank holiday, when doing anything about them was made bureaucratically impossible. We would always joke about it. Today was the Spring Bank Holiday. But I had spoken to the head matron the day before and she had kindly agreed to find someone to come in and take us to see my Mother. Or her body, as it should more accurately be described.

At the hospital a man I shall call "Peter" greeted us. It said on his name badge, ‘Peter Mort’, which I thought was a weirdly untactful thing which rather sabotaged his quiet, careful, funeral director-type manner (which, yes, I was more than ready to find soothing and comforting). In response to this manner my sibling later remarked, "They’re trained to be non-reactive." I thought, but did not say, so are we - but especially you. He also informed me ‘mort’ was simply short for ‘mortician’ {or ‘mortuary, more like}. Still, I thought.

But Peter Death - who I find it comforting to think of as Death himself, who took pains to greet us personally, and show us his handiwork because we were Special in some way - he was clever or experienced enough to take measure of us: the woman in the inappropriate bright red coat attempting to make a cynical joke and then ask him about his job and if he liked it, and the tall, greying, poker-faced brother with a very young woman trotting along beside or perhaps just behind him. Yes, he took measure enough of us, of me at least, to preface his remark as we descended the echoing stairs (downstairs, inevitably) with, "I know it’s a cliché but…..". That is: "I know it’s a cliché, but she looks very peaceful." I didn’t believe a word of it, of course. My Mother and I were both very morbid in the sense that we liked to gleefully discuss death, dead bodies and the awful sorts of things that happened to them and what they looked like afterwards (at least we did before last year). So I was afraid of finding a hanging jaw, her eyes suddenly popping open, the shudder of a hand - or a smell I would never forget. This was just a hospital after all, not a funeral parlour with its cotton wool stuffing and plumping, its embalming and rouge, the eyelids glued down and the lips stitched imperceptibly (and forever) together. I was terrified. And horrified by standing at a bank of metal drawers, the sheet being suddenly pulled back with a nasty flourish by a testy man in white galoshes like on C.S.I. or some other TV crime show. I wanted to ask Peter Death if perhaps this bit could be done before I got in the room, so I might prepare and judge my approach slowly as one would a hurdle or, on a horse, a five bar gate. I knew I couldn’t not look.

But this was unnecessary. Peter Death showed us into a quiet ante-room, all "tastefully" decorated, which led to another tiny area with a large glass window through which was a small room (non-denominational, of course, no crucifixes or other supernatural gee-gaws). It had dark walls, I think, and long curtains on at least one of them. In the middle was a single bier, and on that lay, I had to suppose, my Mother.

We all stood at the window and stared in, as you would outside a shop. And lo and behold she did indeed look peaceful. "I tried to make her hair look nice…how…how she would have liked it", said Peter Death. I loved him for that. (Her hair did indeed look fantastic, although my sibling later said in the car, "Mum would have hated it. Anyway, she went to the hairdressers’ on Friday.") 

I had asked my sibling if he minded if I went in first and also alone. (I usually like to do daunting things alone.) I walked in and made my approach. It was just a few feet. She was at waist height, a blanket covering her body. It had some tiny pattern on it, little flowers, I think, like a baby blanket. Above that, a white, cotton ruffle surrounded her neck, and above that was her face, which face looked to me utterly un-frightening because it looked asleep. (Sleeping!) She did not look covered in any make-up, "shrunken" or "smaller" or any of those things people say. I stared, to try to imprint this all on my memory. But wait! She was breathing, the chest rising ever so slightly. Same with her left eyebrow which surely fluttered, her mouth, too, about to speak…the life still be pulsing somewhere within. This was, as you may have guessed - but I cannot quite believe - either wishful thinking or the mortician skill of Peter Death.

Being informed by poetry, books and films of what to do, I gently touched her forehead, expecting it to be cold. It was cold. Ditto, I kissed her forehead and said, feeling sad and also very, very foolish and like a bad actor in a mawkish scene, ‘Goodbye, Mum’. But I wanted to see her hands before I went. They were always so beautiful and I wanted to look at them one last time. I looked around furtively and seeing no one in sight, and although fearing still that I might see something…unplanned, I pulled back the blanket slightly. But her arms were covered, bound and wrapped tight across her ribcage, again, like a baby - but in some winding cloth or length of cotton. Fine, I thought, and replaced the blanket, and, looking round at the big window again for anyone who might see me, took my camera out of my pocket. I positioned myself right over her face and, in a 21st Century attempt at the Victorian death mask, snapped a picture.

After that, we drove to my Mother’s house to start the long process of sorting, emptying, throwing away, donating and so on, the almost 75 years of her life. The house was not hers and the council (government) wanted it emptied and the keys returned as soon as possible. I saw the pencil sharpener on the kitchen countertop where the police must have left it. I saw her glasses on her armchair, and her make-up tray which, closing my eyes, and in rehearsal for the next ten days to some, I tipped quickly into the first black rubbish bag. There was her green handbag with its bits of tissue and lipstick, pension card and discount cards to here and there. There were photos, little ornaments, clothes, underwear, plates and pots, old school reports, and heartbreaking little notes and scribbled grocery lists. Every cupboard, every drawer, contained a booby trap. We found a letter to my sibling, and one to me. I read mine once and have not looked at it since.

 

My sibling had announced, only upon my enquiring about bedding and where we would all be sleeping there, that he would be driving back up to London every day. Oh, I said. He did not ask what I would do - if I would stay alone in the house (which approached the very limits of stupid and unnecessary bravery even for me, I think) or where I would go. But I called some friends in Brighton and they seemed very keen to take me in.

That night, I lay in their guest bedroom and I thought about England, how in an instant every leaf, every blackbird, every noise, sight or sound typical to it, and that I associate with my Mother or my childhood, had become suddenly unbearable. I had wanted to walk down to the sea, which is where I grew up and spent so much time after we left London, the same sea that has saved me more times than I can count. If it was a movie I would have. But even that, especially that, I could not do.
 

I thought about how much this time was so like the year before: the wretched journey to England in February of 2008, to the hospital, to be told the bleed would leave her dead, the trip to a friend’s house as my sibling left the hospital immediately for London. Then weeks later, as we waited, they confirmed the CT showed "low density throughout the brain". They started to switch off the machinery keeping her, or what was left of her, alive. And then she woke up. And, except for the sniper in the brain, biding his time, she was fine.

Back in New York, two nights ago, my first day back, I saw a helicopter hovering over Fifth Avenue. I stared at it for a while. I could not be absolutely sure it wasn’t there to lower a basket, a stretcher, inside of which would be my Mother, wrapped tight and safe, alive after all. She pulled off that amazing trick last year, didn’t she? Like an impossible rabbit from a hat, the lady sawn in two, made whole - and I, idiotly, cannot make myself understand why then she can’t just do the trick again.

Copyright Britical 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

What to do when faced with a life or death situation, when something needs desperately to be done, and yet you simply don’t have what you need to fix it? Well, then you do what you can, or, as British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh might Britishly and matter of factly say, you "…just get on with it".

This he has done, quietly and without fuss, for the past 15 years, travelling several times a year to the Ukraine. There, he runs a free clinic in surroundings that are Victorian at best - Middle Ages horrorshow at worst. Geoffrey Smith’s documentary, ‘The English Surgeon’, shows Marsh doing those things we’re all used to seeing doctors do onscreen: scrubbing up, looking at CT scans and so on. But minus the histrionics and the self-referential heroism. Just poor and desperately ill people with undiagnosed or ill-diagnosed brain tumours, crowding the corridors with their frightened families. They all want, as they say in the movies, a piece of him. And who can blame them? And the director could have left it there, couldn’t he? We’d all get to wander out of the cinema with that lukewarm, feelgood woolliness that wears off after about ten minutes - and that would be that.  

But that isn’t that. Not at all. Smith steps closer and pulls back the wizard’s curtain, to show us the actual man behind it. Here is, not a glamourous TV doctor, but merely Henry Marsh. Here he is, happily tinkering about with bits of wood in his English back garden, making his own packing cases for the medical equipment he’s shipping. And there, appalled by the waste inherent in the British Health system, but excited to see the frozen lakes on the drive from the airport, and thrilled for his Ukrainian colleague, Igor Krilets, to see the perfectly good drill bits he’s brought from Britain, where they’re used only once before being thrown away. Igor stares at them in wonder, turning them carefully over and over in his hands.

And then there’s the doubt. Because there are times when some of us need certainty, aren’t there? Especially from doctors. And what if that certainty is death? We may then want hope where there is none to be had. Then what on earth do you say? Do you tell it like it is? Or are you economical with the truth? Either way, Marsh must speak to his patients through Igor, who interprets. Is it necessary, they discuss in English, to tell this cheerful 23 year old woman - who is all smiles  - that she will soon be utterly blind and, in shockingly short order, dead? And if so, how, and when? Then there is a small child whose mother asks, what she should do for her? (I suppose we want to feel useful at these times, to establish some activity in the vain belief it might help fend off the inevitable.) Marsh explains, to Igor, that the only thing to be done is "nothing" and that she must simply wait for her daughter to die. Igor tells her exactly this. As he does so, Marsh directs his gaze at Igor, his desk, the floor, clearly wretched. The woman stands, thanking Marsh, and worse, apologizing profusely for bothering him. And so it goes here all day.

This might be the raw stuff of drama (usually with a sugar-coated ending), but nothing we ever get a glimpse of in reality. A real doctor visibly struggling with what to say, and how; with what to do, and whether he has the means to do it; and with what he has done and whether he should have done it. He is haunted by past decisions, and perhaps most of all, the knowledge that his clamouring patients, many of them children, could be saved if diagnosed earlier, or still could be…if they were elsewhere, or if, right here, he had the resources.

At home in London, Marsh reflects upon the fact that as a neurosurgeon he has the ability, in an instant, to make someone’s thoughts, feelings, memories disappear…in essence, to destroy the chemicals that make us who we are, and even to know that we are. It’s a daunting prospect and he is always, always conscious of it. But as a surgeon, a bit grumpy, a bit stressed as he scrubs up, he must put these emotions aside, make a decision, and act. And when all is said and done, it is often necessary, as he puts it, "to stick the knife in".

After the film, Marsh gets up on stage for a brief Q & A. I want to ask him why, of all people, we see him in the film riding his bike without a helmet - but I decide this is a bit cheeky. Later, I chat with him in the bar, and, discovering that he trained the surgeon who treated my Mother, forget to enquire. I head home on the subway and remember something: he had admitted, unprompted, that surgeons are by necessity risk-takers, and, he laughed, "narcissists". Maybe that’s the clue to the helmet thing. More importantly, though, his honest acknowledgement indicates a duality possessed by very few: the professional All Powerful God-in-a-white-coat half we know all too well. But in Henry Marsh we witness also that which is rare: a thing comprised equal parts humility, empathy, responsibility. He clearly feels it is his duty as both a doctor and a human being to look an absolutely horrifying situation right in the face and not turn away. And after that, to just "get on with it", to do whatever you can, however small, and however imperfectly, to make it better.

 

Copyright Britical, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

(This film had its NY premier as part of the weekly documentary series, ‘Stranger than Fiction’, held at the IFC centre. http://stfdocs.com/blog/comments/english_surgeon_comes_to_stf/ )

 

 

 

"The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long…". If last night’s lights were anything to go by, we’re now well into overtime.

After all, we have burned "so very, very brightly…", haven’t we? And so, I switched off the lights last night at 8:30 sharp, and waited expectantly to see all the windows outside go dark. And continued to wait….8:31…..32…..33…as they continued to blaze merrily, obliviously, light flooding onto the pavements from the mostly empty rooms on the opposite side of the street. In other words, "Lights on, nobody’s home". How apt that this catchphrase - connoting stupidity - comes from a country which last night, for just one hour, was asked to join the rest of the world in a symbolic gesture, for ‘Earth Hour’ - and couldn’t be bothered.

I felt a bit foolish after that, there in the gloom, a pointless Earth Day martyr with my candle and my book. Perhaps I should have donned my hair shirt? And then I thought, because I couldn’t help it: No wonder they hate us. Isn’t that what they say? About Al Qaeda, I mean? Except the dirty little secret is it’s not just the "terrrrrsts" - it’s everyone. Oh, yes. Look, there’s President Obama in D.C. earlier this month with his ever so "thoughtful" gift to Prime minister Gordon Brown, of 25 DVD’s. And now look, over here…

…in New York, where I used to think people came to escape the ignorant, intolerant, "Ugly American" attitudes found across the Hudson. New York, where people cycle, re-use, and recycle endless discussions about climate change and tut-tut - as I just did - about "the rest of America" and its gas guzzling ve-hicles. New York, where I still believed that Manhattan Island was like a magnificent ship moored just off the Eastern Seaboard - and not really America at all. 

By 8:33pm, I realized that though it may once have been true, I now live in Vegas on the Hudson, in all its cheesy, blazing, money-grabbing, selfish, pig ignorant, lard-arsed glory.

I would imagine the bright lights seemed to burn even a little brighter last night for those very few who cared enough to snuff out theirs. I am sure people have their excuses. Et tu, New York…

 

And where were you?

 

 

 

Copyright Britical, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

Dear Victoria,

What a slut, lounging supine and half-naked at the corner of 58th and Lex. Have you no shame? Someone has pasted a sign on your window - big, curly white letters saying: "Follow the Sun", and underneath that, in large caps, ‘SWIM’.
 
What?

It’s 22 degress out. Meanwhile, you’re all tarted up in a little bikini behind a thick pane of glass with your other strumpety friends. Gone is the usual uniform of frothy concoctions in pinks and baby blues in favour of sensible earth tones. I guess that’s something. But really, Victoria, what does "Follow the Sun" mean exactly? Are you suggesting we stand here and gawp at the thing as it crosses the skies above the city, plopping down some hours later behind the stern, grey canyon of Park Avenue?

And speaking of Park Avenue, presumably the still rich are still buying their swimsuits and underwear from Eres and La Perla and Agent Provocateur? - even if, as we’re told in mollifying fashion, they do now feel just a teensy weensy twinge of guilt, dahling, at this "conspicuous consumption". But not enough to slum it with you, I’ll bet. That would be far more embarassing.

Many people are frantic with worry over their financial survival. Familiar with end-of-the-world type movies like ‘Mad Max’ or ‘I Am Legend’, they might well be wondering if their lives will soon resemble one; that is, future worlds where peoples’ base stupidity, bad luck, or sub-par genetics (not yours, duh!) have left them stranded and pill-popping on a dying, perpetually raining/parched planet Earth while the haut monde leg it to somewhere even more "haut", Mars say (like St. Barts. Bit warmer.). Such a life might be advertised on giant, envy-inducing billboards (your "Follow the Sun" slogan is a perfect example - well done). A very few citizens might aspire to afford a genetically engineered pet, real ones having been polluted to death - as in Philip K. Dick’s book and ‘Blade Runner’ precursor ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ (No.)

But aside from the desire to own a fake pet, most of these scenarios have one thing in common: does anyone in them seem preoccupied by luxury items or accoutrements unnecessary to their very survival? No, Victoria, they do not. And why not? Because, in an age of looming ‘Mad Max’ or ‘Omega Man’ type desolation, these objects have become useless artifacts of a lost age - and we, as the viewer, understand this, which is why, as survivors dodge zombies and scavenge for guns and water, they are always, always shown doing so among dusty stores chock-a-block with unwanted luxury items. Brand new and untouched! There for the taking!! Imagine!!!
 
…It used to be a novel concept.
 
Though the streets of Manhattan are not yet filled with zombies (Upper East Side apart), and plucky regular folks and Will Smith smashing windows looting supermarkets for food, water and tinned goods - ignoring even Louboutin’s latest 5 inch heeled, red-soled long-distance running snakeskin slingbacks (or insert own preferred luxury item here) - we would be forgiven for wondering if it’s just a matter of months. People hurry by even H & M these days with nary a glance at the window - and the exchange rate crazed chav-ish Brits that used to infest the place like rats in a Taco Bell? All gone. Funny, that.

In fact, almost all the stores in the city, whether on lower Broadway or Madison Avenue, are more or less deserted, despite multiple SALE signs plastered over their windows. Granted, on Madison it will be a discreet yet still desperate little number in a gilt-edged frame. (It will be placed carefully in the bottom left hand corner. They must be mortified!) Shoes, bags, dresses, plates, Italian bed linens, jewellery….piles and piles and piles of… stuff. Just laying there unwanted. Prices have been violently slashed - 40%, 70%, 80% off. But no one’s buying.
 

Who can relate to these things anymore? We can do without them, can’t we, these things that are not rent, food, mortgage payments, electric bills, phone bills, medical bills, college fees…? Luxury purchases have, in 2009, started to acquire a weird patina of irrelevance. Their utter uselessness is thrown into surreal relief by our collective worry about the narrowing gap between us and the raving homeless guy on the 6 train. These shiny things in shop windows and magazines now induce a sort of vague apathy - or a disassociated curiosity as to what they’re really for. Or were for. What was it all about, the "It" bag? We feel like Shakespeare’s Titania in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ as she awakes from the wicked spell to find that in her reverie she had fallen in love with an ass. Or as the perpetually puzzled alien in ‘Star Trek’ might enquire: "What is this thing called……Prada, Captain?" - although judging by this season’s collection Miucca borrowed a lot of the alien’s clothing ideas.
  
 
Not only this but we sense there is no one to save us. Not Will, not his dog, not Roy Batty and, unless you’re a failed bank or the cause of one, definitely not the government. So we are having a go at "cutting back". Like Europe in World War II (history: look it up sometime). Maybe you hadn’t heard, darling? It’s the new black. In fact, the term "Luxury" now includes even shoddily made basics. Like your lovely swimsuits. Surely you cannot believe that the assorted size 14 semi-plebs among those who buy your undies can afford to jet off to somewhere sunny and St. Barts in February of 2009, or anywhere else for that matter, except by racking up more debt - which is, I’m afraid, what got us here in the first place, isn’t it?

So the question remains: why ever are you - bizarrely secret-obsessed Victoria - urging us all to splash out on expensive plane tickets, take a vacation and "Follow the Sun"? Am I missing something here? Why else a marketing strategy as patently absurd as urging your jobless, mortgaged to the hilt clientele to buy swimsuits of all things? Are you mad? Haven’t you been told that traditionally, during an economic downturn women forgo larger items in favour of a small indulgence here and there, usually lipstick? In fact, wait, don’t you even sell lipstick?? - lipstick and sparkly lipgloss! And body lotion that smells like a taxicab air freshener. Idea: why not put those in your window, slap on a ‘Treat Yourself!’ sign, and once you’ve enticed the guilty customers in you can do the old bait ‘n’ switch and make them buy a matching bikini.

 

See? It’s not as if I’m suggesting you start selling guns and Spam. But I just don’t get it, unless, posed vacantly in your window, you really are just as stupid as you look. But you know me, I like to see the best in people and hate to Judge. So last night a better idea just came to me….an epiphany if you will! Could "Follow the Sun" be code for something? Might it be you really do know something we don’t? That you have, as you have consistently and publicly maintained, a Secret? If so, maybe you’ve decided to finally reveal it. (We know you’re not shy at revealing anything else.)

 

Let me explain. And being an Occam’s Razor kinda gal, I will say it’s the simplest one I can come up with: it is obvious that you’ve morphed from a shallow dimwit into a secret superheroine in big fake angels’ wings and a nylon camisole. Having been reverse-engineered, then brainwashed and given emotions by a secret and powerful anti-globalization cult or cabal (can’t decide which) who deplore corporate anything (especially effective marketing) you are aware that The End is Nigh. So you have issued a coded warning: "Follow the Sun". The sky is falling and by next winter we’ll all need to head south for warmer climes - not to relax and swim on the beach - but to survive!

 

However, there’s one problem that I can see, Victoria: do you think your average, hefty-type customers will really get it? I fear they may not grasp its subtlety. I fear they will continue to lose their McMansions, their jobs, their giant SUV’s, and all eight or so of their children. I fear they will stick around and do nothing as the weeds have their way with the skyscrapers. As the Economy has their way with them. And come next winter, they will starve to death, oblivious to the cruel irony that right before they do, they might finally be able to fit into one of your itsy-bitsy bikinis. Then again, they will all be too busy duking it out on Mad(max)ison Avenue among the tumbleweeds, the zombies, and packs of rabid dogs to even care. There is some comfort and justice in that, at least. Oh yes.

 

Copyright Britical, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

Chir-rrRRUP, buzz and bzzzzzzzz…zzZZZZZ!! An ex of mine, now a mere friend, arrives of late equipped with a third wheel, an enemy commonly known as the Blackberry. Trilling angrily at regular four minute intervals, it demands attention - and gets it. And while I understand perfectly that this is how my friend can tell, in some flimsy fashion, that he is popular - with Amex, Verizon paperless billing, or whichever royal personage needs to get 3 billion out of Burkina Faso (it’s the new Nigeria, dahlink), for me, it’s even worse than people with babies. As a conversation killer, Blackberries rock.

Sometimes I wish he’d just lose the wretched thing, as he has lost hats, scarves, me and a bunch of other precious items over the years - some replaceable, some not. Still, losing a Blackberry would involve annoyance, effort, and eventually, especially if you’re someone afflicted with ADD, acquiring new friends. Sitting at his kitchen table the other night, though, I realized he had unconsciously stumbled upon the perfect solution to this problem.

Imagine if, upon losing your Blackberry, there was a surefire way to guarantee its safe return to you? Even if it was delivered in person at 3 in the morning along with a bottle of cheap wine and a large case of Rohypnol. Ooooh…. Yes, well, whether this was an appealing bonus or not would be up to you - and much dependent upon the physical properties of the bearer. They might, after all, be an utter minger.

But there are other downsides, one of which I tried valiantly and repeatedly to warn my friend about - just like that FBI guy right before 9/11. But mine is the story of how I learned to love the enemy, the Blackberry - or at least respect it.

Back to his kitchen over dinner, as I mentioned, and the thing dementedly vibrated and shuddered its way back and forth across the table. He would pick it up and go through his standard series of slight frown…raise eyebrow….smirk….followed by a few seconds of key-punching. This is all meant to be Very Mysterious, by the way. I have figured out it’s to give the impression of being popular, or, more effectively, is used to foster insecurity in the female observer. With me he just sometimes forgets that I simply don’t have a dog in the fight anymore, and thus don’t much care. Still, in defence of this ludicrous schtick, it serves as a handy reminder of how glad I am to be not dating him (anymore). Little did I suspect that something else would make me gladder still.
 
Because, ever-so-secret-message sent, he unexpectedly turned the Blackberry to face me. I was gobsmacked! This was a first, indeed, and certainly an unexpected honour.

"Hey, did I ever show you this?" he said. On the shiny black surface was something pale and curved, and for a moment I couldn’t quite make out what it was. Was it an alien? So I peered more closely - and was instantly sorry.

"Look at that piece of meat!", he crowed. "Whaddya think of that?"

Speechless. What ever was he thinking?? Not to mention that out of its more traditional context, it looked like a large, pale sea cucumber.

"It looks like a large, pale sea cucumber", I said.

He glared, flicking his hand at me in a dismissive gesture, "What do you know!"

Not as much as I thought, apparently. I was still stuck at why. Plus what can one even say in such a situation? I knew laughing was out of the question. I feared even social etiquette expert Emily Post would be struck dumb at this one. And "That’s nice, dear", would sound bland and uninterested. Did my friend require an artistic critique? Photoshop advice? Shrieking?

I took a stab at it. "Is it, um, yours….?"

"Of course it’s mine! I took it myself!! Whose else’s would it be??"

"Well, whose hand is that in the top left corner?" I said, knowing full well it was his, and imagining the contortions he’d accomplished to get the shot and the time it must have taken.

"Look", he said, huffily, "Don’t even bother, you’re just….weird!
 
Weird? Me? At least I wasn’t OUT OF MY MIND, I thought, but did not say. Fine, I decided. I would pretend to humour him, as I would with a mentally ill person who deliberately and with malice aforethought chose not to take their medication. Plus, as usual, I wanted to see what would happen. After all, I may not know what I was expected to say, but I sure knew what not to say and I intended to say it.

I said the photo would guarantee the Blackberry’s return allright (solution theory above), especially since he lives on the border between Chelsea and the West Village. Ignoring his grimace, I went on to suggest he take another photo but with something in it that provided the viewer with some reference in terms of scale….so they could fully appreciate….its girth, and so on. He ignored this helpful comment, too. Accurately sensing my mirth, my disbelief, he had written me off both as a worthy art critic, or, more crushingly for him, as someone driven instantly mad with desire by the towering white beastie on the screen.

As I failed to burn, he continued to fiddle - flicking, I noticed, through even more pictures of the same specimen. Stark and blanched against a blackish background, it did rather look like something preserved in formaldehyde; as if photographed by a bored pathologist or a keen and slightly pervy medical student - from all angles, above, below, one side, the other side, underneath….it was quite an exhaustive study.

I gazed at him across the table. He was oblivious, head down, entranced by the images on the little screen. Then: "You know…", he said, looking up, while a dopey and comically wistful expression crossed his face, "I never really realized how beautiful it was until I photographed it….."

That did it. Even I cannot not make this stuff up. The violent urge to giggle was almost too much. But I resisted, desperate to be privy to the suicidal cost-benefit ratio logic behind putting multiple photos of your own genitals on your Blackberry.

Did all men do this? And if so, how had I been so fortunate to not be aware of it? Did all men, plonked on the sofa with nothing to watch on cable, suddenly get up, put down the remote, undo their trousers, and start shooting away? And if so, did women do the same thing?

But there was no time to ponder this conundrum, as right then, something occurred to me (downside theory alluded to above), and I saw the opportunity to redeem myself by saying something undeniably useful:

"Hey, what if you left it somewhere? Like at work? Wouldn’t you be embarrassed? And couldn’t someone just send all these photos with some filthy message to everyone in your address book? Your Mum, your sisters, your clients….. "

"What are you talking about??" he barked, cutting me off. "You just think too much."

This stung. I had only been trying to help (sort of).

As providence would have it, he imprudently chose that very moment to stump off in a snit to the bathroom. I sat there and realized I’d lost my appetite for dessert. I thought, I’ve had enough of my kind efforts being rebuffed, my warnings going unheeded, not to mention this fucking device which made conversation impossible, and which, I now saw, he happen to have left on the table. Huh.

I picked it up. It had never held it in my hands before and it felt weird and wrong, and not just because it was a stupid, annoying Blackberry. I am not a snooper, you see, since I do believe that if you go looking for something, you will generally find it…

Meanwhile, the pallid creature in the photos stared balefully up at me with its gimlet eye. It looked lonely and I felt a bit sorry for it. But in just a few seconds, with the mere push of a few buttons, it could have a lot more friends and admirers, people who would appreciate it more than I. Hundreds of them. And maybe, if someone was feeling particularly benevolent that night, millions of them on its very own MySpace page. Gee, I thought, Blackberries could be pretty great, after all.

…And that, my friends, is how I learned to love the Blackberry.

 

Copyright Britical, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

A fat woman sidles out of the bathroom with a long ream of filthy toilet paper stuck to her left shoe. It drags along the carpet behind her, and though a few people clearly notice this, none of us says anything. There is nary even a snigger.

 

Thirty years ago we’d all have been called jetsetters. Not anymore. It’s a plane in 2008, we’re in coach, and, five hours into a transatlantic redeye flight - two and a half of them spent loitering on the runway - no one cares anymore. Not about the hapless fat lady, nor the economy, nor how they look nor how anyone else looks for that matter. They just want it to be over. Like camping, but more expensive and tiring. And lacking all that virtuous fresh air and smell of fires burning. Although there’s still time for that, isn’t there? I would just prefer it not be right after take-off, even if it’s both more likely and more survivable. How ignominous it would be, after all, to have it reported that you breathed your last breath in Queens or Long Island as opposed to the dramatic icy waters off Greenland, say, or picturesque Scotland. It makes me think of those ageing Hollywood starlets who would take poorly calculated drug overdoses. Carefully arranging themselves on satin sheets while dressed all way up in some awful nylon negligee, they were, I suppose, a peculiar hybrid of leaving a beautiful corpse and "He’ll be sorry when I’m gone!" type reasoning. They would inevitably be found by the maid the next day, facedown in a vomity toilet. Which all goes to show one simply cannot ever count on a glamourous demise, however well-planned, or a mid-air explosion over somewhere exotic. So with that in mind, I have counted the seatbacks, as I always do, to the exits fore and aft, just in case I need to bail out as we skid off the runway. I have also reacquainted myself with the protocols for yanking open the doors and getting the hell off this particular plane (one of my faves, a 777 - 200 ER) in sturdily soled boots perfect for sprinting through burning jet fuel. This is why I am in the exit row right next to the door. Yes, you may laugh nervously at my precaution taking - but I’m used to it. Tomorrow, though, it will be the 20th anniversary of the crash of PanAm flight 103. And the day after that it could be your turn to make history.
 
Meanwhile, though not dead yet, we are certainly all past caring - especially the air hosts and hostesses. They’ve had enough of us and don’t care who knows it. The males push past, flouncing in exaggerated fashion up and down the aisles hissing like ornery camels at a stray passenger foot or elbow, bad runway models all. The females just roll their eyes at them like teenagers, or smile their tight little smiles, like wives trying to keep the peace. And I, having basked in the paltry sense of cleverness that comes with snagging said exit row seat, I too now wish for death. I have fallen victim to an incessantly screeching couple from some former Soviet satellite country. One of them smells ever so slightly homeless and eats like it, too, her mouth a sticky, yawping maw of "chicken or beef": "Myap, myapp, myappp!".(She is probably reading this right now as I write. Do I care? Like I said….) It’s like the 6 train at rush hour in here, but the 6 train as if, pulling out of 14th Street, it suddenly jumped the track to the ‘Twilight Zone’ and careening down past the pipes and tunnels and sewers and alligators is making a beeline for hell.

Hell, but in this case (and Queens notwithstanding) at least 35,000 feet higher up: here we are, the coughers, the sneezers, the snorers, and the wankers in headphones laughing uproariously at their seatbacks. It’s 4am and it feels like it. Everyone appears pasty, overweight*, and cluelessly dressed.* (*The pound sterling lost value recently, so guess whose citizens are keen to cross the pond at the moment?) The luckier ones flopped down in their seats five hours ago and went straight to sleep. Oblivious bastards.

And then there’s the toilet. It’s inconveniently nearby, and is attended by a silent gaggle of people doing vague foot rolling and attempted toe touching to ward off the in-flight death by Deep Vein Thrombosis as explained to us all in the helpful inflight video. Some of their nylon arses bob in and out of my face. Every time the door folds open a foul aroma whooshes out, eau de airline - a potent blend of sickly sweet chemicals and poo. It’s a discouraging sort of smell, it occurs to me, if your sad little goal tonight was to join the rather quaint sounding ‘Mile High Club’. Heard of it? That’s right, dear readers, it used to be terribly outré and fashionable, upon alighting the plane, to fuck someone in the toilet. Preferably a stranger. Really. Nowadays, entering the average airline bathroom (let alone a stranger inside one) - even in international First Class, I’m afraid, despite the Molton Brown soap - is tinged with repulsion and cholera. People exit the toilet hurriedly with squares of tissue between their hands and the door handle. Nobody wants to touch anything in there let alone each other. So, for my younger readers, and to understand this strange, olde Mile High Club custom, we must briefly traverse the ages and look at a bit of flight history.

It was in 1958 that the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC)  started up the first civilian passenger service across the Atlantic. I know this because the magazine in my seat pocket says so and being British, this rather pleases me while leaving me distinctly unsurprised for the same smug reason. The piece also mentions the publicity concerning the décor of the cabin on these weekly flights; that is, ‘quietly elegant’ with ‘oyster blue ceilings’. Can this be true?? The casual airline passenger cannot help, upon reading this, but gawk and compare, non-plussed and newly appalled at the dribbling babies and drab, grey plastic. "It wasn’t cheap", declares the airline magazine, rather huffily. Oh, so what! I grew up watching footage of the famous war criminal Henry Kissinger on TV getting endlessly on and off planes via white rolling staircases. (I fear his days of carefree international travel are now somewhat over, but for other reasons.) But where are they now, those gleaming staircases? Ditto the glamourous air waitress sluts of the 60’s in their go-go boots and itchy orange "Space Age" outfits, and their occasional male counterparts, dressed like gay(er) ice skaters? Did they exist? Except for Aeroflot, by the time I managed to finagle my way onto a plane, entry and exit was already via giant, carpeted tubes. No Hollywood moments to be had there. Did passengers really used to dress up in their Sunday best to get on a plane? Neat little suits and perhaps a natty hat for the gentleman? According to the black & white photo of the first BOAC transatlantic flight, that’s exactly what one wore. Crossing the ocean, then, in 1958, was a grand Adventure not at all on a par with the weirdly fraught tedium we find ourselves lumbered with in 2008.

And so, come the 1970’s, especially since everyone was thinner, it is easy to imagine that the toilets were cavernous, fuckworthy powder rooms in which it was almost de riguer, dahling, to have fucked a stranger, a naughty badge of pride to be bandied about at dinner parties for weeks afterwards. I suspect it was around then that the word "jetsetter", a distinctly 70’s sounding term, was created. And although it sounds to me like a mere precursor to "Eurotrash", at the time it possessed enormous cachet. Bianca Jagger and Jackie Kennedy and all the rest, smiling, waving, and pausing in their giant sunglasses at the tippy-top step to have their photo taken. This back when Jackie’s husband, JFK, was just a future dead president and the name of the airport that would be consequently renamed for him still perfectly captured the sheer romance of flight and travel: ‘Idlewild’.

Even the poor Concorde is no more, undone by a 16 inch metal strip that fell off another plane. That and the looming shadow of Hubbert’s Peak. Mind you, it’s an interesting and rare example of something that moves us faster actually vanishing by the 21st Century, leaving us all ample time - as we watch ourselves on our tiny screens inch torturously up the Eastern Seaboard, past Boston, over Maine, across Newfoundland…..to ponder in astonishment the good old days when, for the price of a twelve bedroom Florida McMortgaged mansion today, you could get from New York to London and back again in time for a late lunch at Le Bernadin with perhaps a bit of Mile High hanky-panky in between.

No wonder that to us it now all seems a cruel myth from a bygone age as we endure ludicrous "security" checks where ugly peoples’ big, grubby sneakers bump along a conveyor belt with one’s rather nice bag. And no wonder that, trapped on a fair approximation of an airborne Greyhound bus, a person might try to stanch the mounting dismay by finding a sense of excitement, romance and adventure elsewhere. Even if that entails tasteless epic disaster scenarios and elaborate escape plans, up to and not limited to the sensational book deal they would undoubtedly secure during their fifteen minutes of, say, ‘Sole Survivor of World’s Worst Plane Crash!’ newspaper headline fame. Which might in turn make them wonder if the more impressive ‘Heroic Rescuer in World’s Worst Air Crash!!!’ might snag them very own talk show. That way they could fly their own private jet, carbon footprint be damned. So I peer once more into the former ‘quiet elegance’ of the flourescent gloom, now just a hot, stinky, snoring, tube bumping unceremoniously through the cold night sky. Seatbacks to exits: 0 fore, 12 aft. Check.

Copyright Britical, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

Even the rich, famous and gorgeous are not immune to the inevitable and slyly encroaching tedium of marriage. Any gossip mag will tell you that. Still, it’s interesting to observe it close up in all its banal splendour in people other than one’s friends. But more on that later (others, not friends).

 

The wretched entropy inherent in marriage is self-evident, and unfortunately has been scientifically proven to be unavoidable (sorry, kids, but it has. http://britical.blogsome.com/2007/05/24/sexless/). Some of you know this. And for those of you who don’t, or don’t want to, just look around. Or be patient. Right. Because one day, married-with-kids always wakes up and realises this is definitely not where they wanted to be. This sad fact is examined in Sam Mendes’ new production, ‘Revolutionary Road’. It stars, of all people, his own wife Kate Winslet (with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the husband). To me at least, this implies a shocking and deliciously intriguing possibility that Mendes and his wife have made an autobiographical film about marriage that is actually rather frank - which is to say, not too pretty.

 
I thought about the family thing this Thanksgiving, which holiday I spent with someone I barely knew, drinking lots of wine, walking by the river, eating cookies baked specially for me, and generally doing whatever we felt like doing the whole time. It turned out to be a very Happy Thanksgiving indeed. Who am I then, to have so often complained about having no set place to go or be expected at during holidays typically reserved for family (of which I am somewhat lacking)? Since after the fact - talking to friends who actually do have places to go and are expected to be in order to share the ordeal of complex family arguments and unpleasant in-laws - I always feel a bit guilty. Oh, and I do think I should add here, by way of clarity, that my occasional self-pity about family is limited to a big, jolly, posh family who gave birth to me and who live in some large country pile in New England. Like in the movies. That is, not a family I have had to create myself. Either way, the upshot is that I always have a conspicuously better time than any of the above put together: with friends, with strangers, perhaps in a foreign country or somewhere else entirely new and interesting. Without the ties of a spouse and children, after all, you’re free to do whatever the hell you want, however you want, whenever you want and with whoever you want. Which I do. And what’s not to like about that? Apparently not much, since despite the (deadly) comfort & convenience of the institution, these are the things that married people most often come to yearn for and envy in others not so unfortunate as themselves.

 

Even if they never knew what they wanted in the first place, that they usually discover that this, this {insert own nightmare reality or scenario here} is definitely it. And so they might privately dream that as a solo flyer there would be constant options and opportunities. Maybe spending Christmasses sailing with friends round the Poor Knights Islands of New Zealand, snorkeling through clammering dolphins, standing with amazed strangers on a monastery roof as hundreds of bells and thousands fireworks ring in the New Year in Florence, on expedition with your small brigade and sixteen dogs in a million acre snowy wilderness with not a bird, animal, or other human to be seen. Then alone there with just the wolves howling in the distance. Or wandering through inexplicable piles of dinosaur size driftwood on a beach of the Tasman Sea, then utterly lost in a wintry Venice. And the best things, goes their thinking, would be of the unplanned, adventurous variety, incompatible with having to "check-in" with or get permission from someone else - or several someones, actually, each of whom will whine in their own special way. And they would be right.

As I think about the depressing yet blindingly obvious implications of ‘Revolutionary Road’ given that marriage is still held up as the ideal state in our society (the Emperor decked out in his finery), I appreciated anew my own life. But just to check, as I walked along the street, I played a little thought experiment with myself: As I live now, and if I was completely honest with myself, could I think of anyone in this world, married or not, that I would swap lives with if given the chance? It took only a couple of blocks to cross all the names off my long list. Zero candidates.

O.K., so turning onto my street, and on to the rich and famous list. You know how it is. And I started to cross them off, too. The dopey New York socialite heiress and her Reputation spread all over YouTube? The young TV actress and her grinning, cult-bound older husband? Bill Gates? Oprah? Ed Witten? The Nazi Pope? Nope, nope, and…nope…yawn…..I looked up just then, and noticed a man staggering towards me. He was tugging a loudly fretful little kid alongside him. Ah, I thought, another poor married UES schmuck. Except, I then noticed, the poor married UES schmuck was none other than soon-to-be-divorced ‘Fox Mulder’ from ‘The X-Files’; more properly the actor David Duchovny, the current star of Showtime’’s hugely popular ‘Californication’.

 

Oh yes. In ‘Californication’ he plays Hank Moody, a "toxic bachelor", if you will. He has an uncontrollable jones for fornication with pretty much everything at least once, and, as they say, if it moves under its own steam, twice. But here on my street, dressed in naff looking jeans and an old anorak, the actor himself looked irritated and worn down. Had David Duchovny had ever gone through his own list of names and if so, had he paused at the name ‘Hank Moody’? Apparently he had. He recently checked himself into a rehab clinic for so-called "sex addiction" - or as Joe Sixpack might say, cheatin’ on the missus. And although we hear she may also have cheated, we can always assume the said sex addiction was not to her. Because he, like she, probably woke up one morning, and asked themselves, just like every other poor sod, the most ordinary thing in the world: what the fuck am I doing here?? And furthermore, who is this gorgeous person lying next to me that (to paraphrase Chris Rock) I am however sick of fucking?

 

Yes, et tu, Fox Mulder of ‘The X-Files’, who would nobly declare, "The truth is out there". He turned into Hank "The pussy is out there" Moody - and now the line has blurred between Hank and plain old David Duchovny himself, whose attitude seems to be, "The pussy is out there…and there…and there, and oh look! there’s some more! Show me the pussy!!" Sad, sure …but how satisfying to actually see its implications right in front of me - and to hear it, in its joyless mundanity as I hurried past him that night - as the child’s mewling noises grew fainter and fainter, like the Doppler of a receding ambulance siren - only much, much louder.
 
 
 
 
 Copyright Britical, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

Ooop, oh, there you are! Look, I really don’t know how it happened but I just destroyed half your bathroom. Even though I have lived in NYC for years and all the toilets look pretty much the same, I apparently thought that thin, delicate chain hanging from the ceiling that’s obviously the light pull was actually the flush. And I pulled it. Real hard. Yes, I guess it is odd seeing as I would have had to pull it to put the light on or I’d have peed in the dark. Huh. I can’t really explain that. I don’t remember….anyway…that really antique looking porcelain bit? And half the rest of it? It just…came off in my hand. Yes, I know, it’s strange that that old glass lightshade, though quite separately attached, as you say, came somehow unhooked from its moorings on the ceiling and fell with a deafening crash into the toilet and shattered into tiny pieces, and now there is glass everywhere. It’s not old, it’s Art Deco, you say? Oh. Well, it’s not like I’m drunk. Really. I’m really not. I know you didn’t invite me to this small dinner for just a very few close friends and that I showed up pretty much uninvited, but did I say I’m not drunk? Do you want me to pay for this? You say No, don’t be silly. O.K. phew, great! I expect that means no flowers or note of apology or e-mail or any sign of contrition tomorrow either. Or the day after that. Cool. So I’ll just go back into the other room now and eat all the dessert and keep talking loudly about my astrological sign and my past life experiences, shall I? Oh, by the way, do you have any more champagne? Yes, more champagne.

 

…You say wait just a minute. What? Now I am not sure… I think you say I could "perhaps at least offer to fucking hang myself from what’s left of the light pull"? I am not understanding. You are smiling at me in peculiar way that you have since you walk into bathroom and the glass make that crunch-crunch noise under your heels. Now you have face like FSB man from my country. Why are you close door? Oh, be careful, don’t cut yourself on that big piece of……. glass. Wait! Niet! What are you doing?? помощь! HELP! I’m…I tell you…I’m.. really….. not…… dru..nnn…nnn…n

Copyright Britical, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

On CNN yesterday, there was a long, awkward segment devoted to the "wonderful" opportunities to be had in the current economic downturn. The anchors flashed strained smiles, and it was obvious this was a lot of desperate whistling in the dark - a.k.a. bollocks, if you want to be technical. However, it later struck me that the piece also ignored certain other resourceful if intangible upsides…

Let’s get the boring but important stuff over first: to briefly recap, the week ending November 16th produced a stunning 16 year high of new jobless claims filed. And while November job losses were expected to be around 200,000, the Fed was forced to announce its economic growth outlook through 2009 to be at virtually stagnant levels. Thus, things will get worse before they get worser. But, unless you were busy stampeding WalMart this week, you knew that, didn’t you? - and likely, you have started to cut back on your expenses. And whether that means no more "$$$$" Zagat rated restaurants, firing your trainer, resisting pedicures, or moving to Queens - you might be wondering, like CNN, what’s in it for me?

Now let me say right here that I do not at ALL refer to the terrible, terrible stereotype of rich, male trolls with nothing to recommend them except their wallets, and the vaguely decorous female goldiggers who adore them. But in a society, and city where (as we have discussed here ad nauseum) many men expect and are expected to provide lavish dinners plus their most recent tax return to win the dubious affections of certain sorts of ladies, are these men cutting back at all vis-a-vis their dating habits? Because if so, I have another "upside" for CNN, and one word for my suffering male friends: Sluts. Because I cannot believe some men are not quietly taking advantage of the vast plethora of accomplished sluts galloping about the city who will show up at your very door and quite happily provide only slightly drunken and inept services free of charge - or if you’re keen to avoid that chewed-off arm look, at least for the price of a 3am cab back to where she came from.

So this weekend I asked a few guys about this and the unsurprising answer may be summed up as a resounding if somewhat shamefaced, "Yeah, actually, thinking about it…yes..". After a few more beers, I was also able to extract some fairly gleeful recent anecdotes involving the Meatpacking District and such-and-such girl from Jersey, and so on. The other men, the ones who said things like "No! Of course not!", etc., did nevertheless look awfully thoughtful…and who can blame them? I also spoke to a few self-professed sluts who confirmed that, yes, they’d had a damned good couple of months, even if they couldn’t remember bits of it.

Of course, as rampant strumpets of both sexes rejoice, this does leave all the goldiggers, women who truly couldn’t give a toss about anyone’s income, and anyone else (hookers), rather in the lurch - but there you go. I suggest staying home with a good book, taking pleasure in the knowledge that at least someone’s stock, along with a few other things, is rising fast. Just like the good folks at CNN (didn’t) say.

Copyright Britical 2008,. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

NYC

 

My favourite thing about arriving at London’s Gatwick Airport is not the sign at immigration that says "British & European Community" - but the other one placed slightly apart from it upon which is written, dismissively and rather damningly: "Rest of the World".

Among other entertaining implications, these signs make me think of the American custom of "dating", if, for the purposes of this discussion, we think of "Rest of the World" as the U.S.
N. B: Readers may want to reacquaint themselves with another rare entry from me re. this subject. Click here: http://britical.blogsome.com/2006/03/01/the-american-way-of-dating/     

This particular subject came up at a recent dinner party (which gathering comprised me - plus, yes, the rest of the world). The American woman sitting next to me - let’s call her "Jane" - told me she is dating or not dating a European man. Jane explained that, unlike with an American male, she could not actually tell if their outings were dates …. or just friends hanging out. She claimed he was giving her mixed signals. As with Erwin Schrodinger’s ambiguous Cat, she could just open the damn box, collapse the probability wave and find out - but this is fraught with cultural pitfalls….

As I have remarked (above referenced entry), European, and certainly British dating, is less about the ritualistic 1950’s era as things are practiced here - but more about sex on the first night, meeting in groups, asking someone along at the last minute, calling when you want, and other outrages that would shock and appall most Americans who are not men. Especially in New York.

But back to Jane, who, having lived and worked for a while in London, said that with the exception of the Swedes and the Italians, she always found European men to be more reticent than Americans in these matters. She acknowledged that it was often even expected that she - perceived as a dynamic and assertive sort, but actually rather shy - would make the first move. She found all this a bit new and daunting, but back in her native New York, with all its complicated dating rules and regulations, the idea petrifies her. I asked her if the gentleman had recently moved to the U.S. If he had, I pointed out, likely there wouldn’t have been time for any brainwashing to take place. He had not. (Bummer.) So, in order for her to know what’s going on (or not going on), here is the real question:

Whose rules is he playing by? British & European Community? Or, The Rest of the World?

I dug into my soufflé (white chocolate, hard crust, perfect melty hot centre, and lots of cream). Then, being a wonderfully reflective type of person, I stopped listening to Jane and thought about the bonuses of this or that set of rules. For instance, you do generally know with an American if your drink invitation is indeed a date simply by the way the invitation is phrased. So if you’re not interested and want to avoid any awkwardness, you can use these same American rules to just say you’re washing you’re hair, or, if pushed, "…sort of seeing someone right now…" or whatever - et voila, you’re excused. Done. You will not, at the end of an unwitting "third date" evening, be suddenly ambushed by an embarassing and icky kiss. On the other hand, if you’re not utterly repulsed, American rules command you to wait, while British rules give you the leeway to be a bit more pro-active (which these days in the U.K. means launching yourself with your tongue out at a stranger after puking your 3am kebab into the gutter of the Tottenham Court Road after a long night of binge-drinking).

"So….? What should I do?" she piped up.

"H’mmm…." I said.

"Well, what would you do if you were me?" she pleaded, changing tack and clutching at straws.

"You mean been in a situation with a guy where I can’t figure out what his intentions are?" I asked.

"Yes! Exactly!! What do you do?" she said, pouncing on an answer that wasn’t there .

"Um….." I mumbled, fiddling with my spoon, "That’s a good question, isn’t it?"

After dinner, Jane and I exchanged cards and she promised to email me if and when she got the answer to her conundrum. Walking home, I wondered about my own ex-pat playbook. Do I appear crystal clear, or as inscrutable as the officers behind my favo(u)rite immigration sign? Indeed, whose rules do I play by?

 

Copyright Britical, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

….for one night at least. And maybe in some eyes this makes me a Republican forever.

 

Last evening, a mere twelve days after moving to the Upper East Side, I gave money to the McCain/Palin campaign. $15 to be exact. Yes sirree. That is, exactly $15 more than what I’ve coughed up for Obama and Biden. Coincidence? Who knows. And even worse, $15 was the fee to watch the final presidential debates at the The New York Young Republican Club with some down-home "beer & pizza". I imagine most of you are aghast; some of you over the beer, some over the other thing.

The night before, I had attended something altogether different - about 180 degrees so: the world premiere of Oliver Stone’s new movie, ‘W’, at the Ziegfield Theatre here in New York. Even bathed in the smugness that comes with the best seats in the house, there was for me, among the extended SNL skit of laughs, impersonations and fantastic acting, a feeling of dismal hopelessness. My motive in attending being mere entertainment, it was my own self-sabotaging "mission creep", if you will, and this well before the credits swept up the screen.

Via Stone, the sorry life of George W. Bush is tracked in a way that is cleverly sympathetic-yet-damning -  like remarking, "Bless!" at someone’s inappropriate behaviour or naff outfit. He is seen as a tragic figure - wounded and angry, like a dumb but dangerous zoo animal escaped from its cage. So you leave the theatre understanding, according to Stone, why Mr. Bush is the way he is - but, for me at least, unable to forgive the twisted piles of maimed, wounded, tortured and killed.

From here my +1 and I strolled over to the after-party at The Metropolitan Club. With its vast, gilded rooms stuffed with oysters, Democrats, champagne, and the requisite endless co-producers, I, along with everyone else by the looks of it, forgot all about the piles of maimed, wounded, tortured and killed and in short order felt quite a bit more jolly. Indeed, by the next night, as I have just admitted, I was back up here on the UES at The New York Young Republican Club. Had I misunderstood ‘W’, and, unwittingly mistaking its Freudian explanations for excuses?

Maybe it’s not not Oliver Stone who’s the culprit for my possible born-again-Republicanism. And to take a leaf from the Republican play book, who can I blame? Well, there are, come to think of it, my first twelve, self-pitying, lonely days here on the Upper East Side where the breathtakingly pissy, attitudinous ways of the natives seem to be the norm. But if you live in New York you know that already. Still, it’s quite soul-destroying to experience it every single day. Can I blame the relentlessly sullen young woman in the coffee shop who each morning returns a bright "Hi!" with folded arms and a blank stare? Or the super who shouted at me and then refused to deliver my mail unless I gave him $100? Or the armies of frozen-faced, older "mommies" in tracksuits barrelling along the sidewalks with IVF-induced triple-wide prams (strollers)? Their eyes are always furious, just visible behind the enormous sunglasses that make them look like angry, swarming insects. Perhaps we should blame their harassed husbands, those anxious fathers, you know the ones, spit-up staining their bespoke Thomas Mahon suits. They are doing their best, I can tell, to coo convincingly at the children they wish sometimes, and with shame, they’d never had with the woman they should never have married (especially since they never get any anymore).

 

That is to say, had I, by some airbourne, UES osmosis, absorbed all their misery, negativity and sheer meanness and thus become a Republican?

 

I think not. Because I am still able to look at them with some noble pity and ask: are you fucking kidding me? Because here we are, folks, not on tony Madison or Fifth, but stuck way over in the grey nowheresville of 86th and First. Maybe that’s their problem.

Nope, there was no one to blame but myself. As I stood in mute wonderment in Republican central, NYC, a nice townhouse on East 83rd Street, I didn’t even try to see over the well-groomed heads to the tiny TV screen at the end of the room. (I had already been given a few "looks" by several of the ladies as I tried to sidle gently by them in the crush.) I was more curious to see what everyone would look like: to watch the watchers of the debate.

So these are real Republicans, I thought. In the flesh! They didn’t have three heads and just looked pretty much like anyone else you’d meet (on the UES, mind you). But you know, goshdarnit (to coin a popular phrase), they sure as heck sounded different to most of the people I know. More angry, for one. As if the poor wretches described just above all got together in one room. Like a lynchmob. But without the pitchforks and torches, and wearing blazers. For at the end of every single answer from Mr. McCain they rose up together in a crescendo of such deafening screaming, braying, whooping, and shouting that I thought my ears would bleed. It was all a bit too close for me to the Yale frathouse scenes in ‘W’ the night before.

I wandered out into the lobby to get some McCain/Palin stickers (I like stickers). With any luck, they’ll be an amusing relic come November 5th. But fate had something else in store, for as I passed the staircase there came an alarming clattering noise. And out of the corner of my eye, I just had time to see a plucky young Republican female aiming herself right at me! She was falling down the steps with impressive haste, right on her ass, clearly on some sort of suicide mission, or G.O.P. jihad: bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-BUMP!!!!! She fell at my feet. ‘Though a messy, twin-setted heap, one keen little heel, had unfortunately found my toe. Mission Accomplished. I leant to help her up. After all, maybe it was an accident. "Are you OK?", I asked. (No wonder Democrats never win.) She immediately got herself to her feet, brushing my arm away. "Fine, fine…" she hissed in a stage whisper, but she didn’t look fine at all. I knew from the throbbing in my toe the impact with which she must have hit the marble. I went to say something else and she frowned: "Shhhh…" she said. Then turned, and walked briskly, if shakily, back into the other room, into the zoo.

Understandably, she had looked embarrassed; falling over, watching fat people slip on a banana skin, is a traditional sight gag for a reason. But if a kindly stranger quietly offers a tactful hand, then we are grateful for their efforts. Aren’t we? On the contrary, this woman had been annoyed with me, as if her fall was something to be ignored, covered up, not spoken of - or, if deliberate, a failure, since her target was now lacking only a toe. Her demeanour said: this did not happen and if you say anything I will deny it.

I thought about this painful incident as an interesting catch-all metaphor for the nice ladies and gentlemen of The New York Young Republican Club to ponder. (How delicious it would be had an askew up-do and a smashed pair of rimless glasses been involved.) But my curiosity was satiated. Time to leave. I had enough for my blog so had got what I came for. But as a result, perhaps I had also gotten what I was asking for. But it was worth it, I thought, and I chuckled to myself, I’m afraid, at the Republican lady’s spectacular pratfall as I limped out into the night and hailed a cab: downtown.
 
Copyright Britical, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

NYC

 

 

"We’ll do all the DIRTY work. The city’s SEXY new address where MONEY can buy you everything."

So trumpets the vulgar poster the has been wrapped right around a tiny little corner lot one block north of me on 30th Street and Second Avenue. With Dirty, Sexy and Money in exactly those colours, in caps, with the "can" underlined. Huh. The building will be called ‘Darling Tower’. Really. And though the anouncement’s been stuck there for over two weeks, no one has defaced it or marked it in any way. This is a shame, and one of the less good features of New York in the 21st century. After all, it is such a tempting target. Maybe everyone here is a bit non-plussed by the un-irony of the thing (unlikely) or wondering why they’ve so blatantly copied the title of the TV series ‘Dirty, Sexy, Money’. Possibly they can’t think of anything to write…or, things being how they are around here, can’t write. However, as I mentioned in my last entry, my building does stand at the glittering apex of the DIRTY methadone clinic, Bellevue mental facility, and the SEXY nine hundred bed mens’ shelter. Not sure where the MONEY comes in, but given the economy, the slender, glass tower’s investors may find their MONEY has bought them not a little unhappiness. As to the location, the sign should probably say:

‘We’ll do all the PEEING on your stoop. The city’s latest UGLY, empty tower where METHADONE can make you forget it all.

Or something.

Anyway, don’t mind me, I’m just jealous. In my last week’s entry, I skewered the new people in my neigbourhood who have brought their vomity binge-drinkin’ ways down here from the frat-infested, grey environs of the far East 70’s and 80’s - only to find myself actually moving up there. On October 1st, too, the very date ‘Darling Tower’ starts to go up. Nice.

Next month, instead of strolling downtown or across town to see friends who will refuse to trek up to visit me, I will have to get acquainted with either staying home or catching the 86th Street crosstown bus, the express train and the L train. Which can be a hard train to find in the confusion at Union Square station. My tip? Just follow the ugly people (since a shocking amount of them seem to live in Williamsburg).

 

It’s fascinating to see how everyone both inside and outside the Brooklyn bound train struggles valiantly, risking limb if not life, to hinder the closing of the train doors for others - mere strangers! - who are always running at breakneck speed down the stairs so they don’t have to wait for the next train an hour or so later. Thank God I take the L that goes in the other direction (to the West Side of Manhattan) whose schedule seems much less infrequent. The transit authority here, the MTA, has cannily (for once) surmised that there is a greater volume of passengers want to leave Brooklyn than go there.

 

Using a process of elimination (not to mention fear of ending up on the wrong one), I can instantly tell if a train at the platform is Manhattan bound or Brooklyn bound. If it’s the latter, all the people clamouring to get on will be the aforementioned plug-ugly ones. And although they (male and female) no longer do the ironic t-shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, bumfluff semi-goatee thing - they remain quite perceptibly ugly in newer, more creative ways. For example, these are the concave-chested, pseudo-pauvre guys who still think wearing heavy-rimmed glasses is "cool", when in fact it has only ever been even a bit cool if you are a bit model gorgeous. That way, everyone around you gets to marvel at how you get away with such an ugly accessory and indeed, how it must be because the things serve to throw your shattering beauty into greater relief, which in its turn probably renders you extra blowjobs. I have never seen anyone like this heading for the Brooklyn train.

(Talking of accessorizing and blow-jobs, this reminds me of when, years and years ago, I reluctantly agreed to go for the weekend with a gay friend to Fire Island, which is a pointless spit of land with some pine trees on it. As two ferries came into sight across the water, the crowd immediately divided into two groups. The men getting the ferry going to the area known as ‘The Pines’ were good-looking, if in an overly-groomed, neurotically-accessorized way; your more high-end gays, if you like. We two, of course, were bound for ‘Cherry Grove’ and were thus stuck with the other group: a ragtag bunch of the conspicuously transgendered and the chubby, with a couple of lesbians in big Izod shirts thrown in for good measure.)

So, with Dirty Sexy Money setting up shop right up the street, even my stretch of the neighborhood is changing - and fast. But yesterday I discovered some perverse consolation and a very urgent reason to leave as soon as possible: I was in Starbucks and the girl at the cash register had some sort of mangled balloon party going on on top of her head. I said, "Why…?" She knew exactly what I meant and exclaimed, "Oh! The clown was here!! She lives round here." I was aghast: The Clown? Who. Lives. Round. Here. The balloon…"hat" was indication enough. Not even in a clever animal shape - an amusing deer, say, or a dog - the nonsensical tangle suggested that the maker of the thing was unhinged and dangerous. Worse, I knew with complete and vicious clarity exactly who she was referring to. And I took it as a sign! Because for years I have seen this orange fright-wigged person waddling along 28th Street. I always cross the road to avoid it. I have also, over the years, comforted myself with the thought that it must just have a LOT of kids parties to attend around here for some reason, and surely lives elsewhere - perhaps taking the L train in from Brooklyn every day. And here I will add that I am not ashamed to admit that like any normal person, I am coulrophobic: that is, I am very frightened by clowns, ventriloquists’ dummies, or anyone else that looks like a sub-par mortician has had their way with them. But according to the girl at Starbucks, such a creature lives in my neighbourhood!

Way up on the Upper East Side, then, it will be OK to leave some of this behind: the murderous clown…the dirty, sexy, money Darling Tower…the stinking piles of men passed out on my stoop. I will have new men on my stoop - doormen, in fact, who will be there to help keep out the clowns, the unwashed, the badly accessorized - and also to collect all the gifts and flowers that, during the 17 years I have lived here, presumably must have got lost or stolen somehow. There will be new places and people to constructively criticize - and that is very exciting. And since I used to work on the UES for a time, I know what I’m talking about when I say: watch out people who talk back to the cinema screen all through the movie, watch out gentlemen in those silly pink Nantucket trousers, and watch out blonde ladies with triple-wide strollers who don’t say thankyou when you hold the door open for them. I am on my way, coming soon, going up October 1st: and if not DIRTY, SEXY, MONEY - then definitely HEL-lo, Daahlings!!

Copyright Britical 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

NYC

 

 

Someone once suggested that a person may be permitted be slow, or stupid - but not both. They must choose. For quite some time here in New York, the ever-expanding pharmacy chain, Duane Reade, has managed to uphold the principle that people do not in fact have to choose at all - and that they can indeed multitask by being not only simultaneously slow and stupid but also overtly resentful. And be paid minimum wage for it. Indeed, I would venture to say that Duane Reade have made it their raison d’etre (as anyone working there would, let’s face it, probably never say).

To step into a Duane Reade is to be constantly reminded of this sorry state of affairs, as any New Yorker will tell you at some length. Speaking of which, waiting in line, only to reach the head of the queue 20 minutes later and, as you’re about to have, say, your box of tampons and large bar of chocolate either loudly price-checked or rammed slowly into an unnecessary little plastic bag, and despite your assuring them you have your environmentally sound one but thanks anyway, they will stop, and turn, oh so inevitably, to Shaniqua, to ask for the fucking key. Always. (Exception: the one at 32nd Street & Second Avenue where everyone is efficient, almost desperately helpful, and one lady always calls me "sweetie" and "baby", which seems about right to me, if all a bit suspect to any of you.)

If you don’t live in New York, you can be grateful that none of this will mean much to you. The company, whose stores infest our city in a deliberate campaign to deprivie us of alternatives, has large trucks which sport a big red and blue slogan which gaily pronounces: "Wherever you go, there we are!" As if that’s a good thing. As if, to most New Yorkers, it does not taunt us with the very root of problem itself. Not to mention that it sounds like something they nicked from a 12 Step programme warning addicts not to "take a geographic" in a vain attempt to escape their tortured soul ("Now look, Brad, as your sponsor, I know from when I myself fell off the wagon and started drinking again right after moving to Rio that ‘wherever you go there you are’… blah, blah, blah… burp…" etc.).

I live, with some disgust, as I may have mentioned before, in the middle of three blocks that are immune to gentrification. Within them lie a fatal triumverate of methadone clinic, Bellevue Hospital (mental outpatients galore), and 900 bed mens’ shelter (a sweet deal there, ladies, oh yes). So when Duane Reade opened a store next to my building a few years back, even they closed up shop and scarpered only a few months later. Surely a first for them, they have not ventured back in since.

Outside this Duane Reade DMZ, then, there has been plenty of construction and so-called gentrification. The "outer" neighbourhood, as I will refer to it, is now full of the sort of frat sports bars you used to find only way up in the most easterly of the East 70’s and 80’s. Those fine, upstanding residents have now taken their parents’ rent cheques and moved down here instead. So when I passed a building with a light green and white façade on Third Avenue the other day I barely glanced at it, assuming it was a Whole Foods or yet another stupid yoghurt shop. The next day, though, I noticed there had been a sign affixed to it: ‘DR Express’ it said. Come again? What fresh oxymoron of a horror was this?? I am not quite sure what they’re getting at with this: could it be a huge admission of guilt..?

Presumably, Duane Reade’s new "express" stores will now hire those who are a goodly bit more swift, yet still stupid and resentful. Like Nascar drivers. Whatever their dishonourable intentions may be, I now find myself looking perversely forward to my next trip to the pharmacy - even if the experience will now all be over in a resentful, stupid instant.

 
Copyright Britical 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

NYC 

 

Sometimes I fancy a nice apple. I once mentioned this, in passing, to a friend’s young son, who shot back snottily, "Why don’t you marry it, then?" Let’s ignore the fact that I took this excellent, if childish retort and have used it myself on many occasions, and say rather that he makes a good point. If I liked it so much, why wouldn’t I marry the apple? Or perhaps bring home many crates of them, or move myself and all my belongings onto an apple farm?

Most people would understand that part of the pleasure to be had in said apple depends not so much on the opportunity to have one when you feel like it, but rather in the privilege of not having one when you don’t. Why hoard the things in my apartment, only to become bored with eating them as they rot slowly in front of the television? And where’s the sport in that? This is, I think, the best way I can explain my own attitude to marriage to those curious souls who will not take a simple and tactful, "It’s just not for me." for an answer.

My grandmother was a saxophonist and trumpet player who toured the world in the 1920’s, then met and married a soldier whom she perhaps should not have. In divorce court, he complained to the judge that she gave him doughnuts for breakfast (instead of the proper cooked breakfast expected of a good wife in the 30’s). "But m’lud", she said, "they were very nice dougnuts; they had jam in them." Clearly she was clueless - and likely this was a characteristic passed down through my mother to me.

The other notable thing my Grandmother said, according to my Mother: "People who have been married ten years usually wish they weren’t." And the science backs her up …. except that the real timeline is actually 12 to 18 months. (See entry http://britical.blogsome.com/2007/05/24/sexless/) This being true, I have little appetite for dragging something jolly, romantic and even quite devoted, slowly, imperceptibly down the slippery slope to people leaving the bathroom door open, dealing with "in laws", and fights about who took out the trash. Not to mention the other things, you know, the ones that get lost in the fray of exciting domestic bliss…

I bring all this up because lately I notice I have been befriended by several different people (women people mainly) whose sole M.O. seems to be to corner me over coffee and express their consternation as to why I am not on some sort of husband-finding rampage. Since I generally get to hear for quite some time about their relationship (or lack thereof) woes - and their fruitless little adventures on match.com, I do try to be generous and diplomatic in my answer, but the "It’s just not for me" rarely cuts any ice with such people. Ditto when I offer brightly that I’d really like a dog. It all serves merely to inflame them. So I then try to explain how marriage was not part of my upbringing; that it was not something I ever had to make a Decision about one way or the other since it simply did not signify, in the same way that climbing K2 may not signify for them. I tell them that if I envisage my future, it has things like going to see the Northern Lights, and dogs and a bigger apartment and my pilots’ licence in it. (There are so many big adventures to be had and they do not involve having to factor in or "check-in" or ask permission re. someone else). But still they persist in their dogged questioning. Which brings us to, and reminds me of, the guy who said he used to have a dog who wanted to catch a car. And one day, she caught one…

 

Because inevitably, they all say exactly the same predictable thing: "But do you want to die ALONE…??" And I, amused - but also pushed, provoked and running out of patience, am then compelled ramp the conversation up a bit and state the bleeding obvious: that we all die alone. And to ask if, by the way, they think intense fear is a great reason to get themselves hitched. H’mm? "What do you think?" , I say. Also, that if they are female and choose a husband their own age, that he will die about seven years before they do. (This, I could further explain, is why we see all these little gaggles of elderly ladies gambling at Vegas, giggling together on cruises, and generally whooping it up high on the insurance money and their new found freedom. But I don’t say this. I do try to restrain myself. Somewhat.)

But sometimes their bemusement makes me feel vaguely autistic and backward for not wanting, nor quite understanding, what they want. I may feel pressured to frame my answers as vague excuses for my "condition". Later I regret this and come to resent them for it. After all, I take great pains, when friends announce they are getting married or are pregnant, to respect their choices; to master the technique of making the right face. I can now contort my mouth into a convincing rictus of joy combined with the required (if inexplicable) hint of underlying envy - but still, it feels fake, and I worry it looks fake, too, because sometimes I forget to crinkle my eyes up as I shriek, "I’m so happy for you!!" (the least untruthful thing I can say). If I have some lead time, I can prepare and pretend to myself that they have decided to, say, take a year off work, and go round the world together, or that they just inherited a chocolate factory or some place that makes fire engines - all things that to me would be great cause for celebration.

 

Ironically, and on a side note, it is the couples who try to break the mold and be "different" whose weddings are often the most annoying - and this seems to be most of them. Stuck on some stupid sand dune in East Hampton, or watching the ceremony from the ground as the happy pair are oh-so-amusingly married atop a bi-plane, you can’t help pondering that it is called The Happiest Day of Your Life. It’s all downhill from there. (I will say though that the unintended advantage to the bi-plane scenario, is that you may be spared the cringing torment that is listening to people who insist on making up and saying their "own vows"…) It all screams: weddings are historically and by their very nature contrived and institutionalized and thus inherently unromantic. Indeed they are deeply cheesy. We are thus making desperate efforts to be creative and quirky that will change neither this bitter fact nor our relationship. Later, and sooner than we could ever imagine, but definitely before the baby’s first birthday, we will realise they were probably a pitiful last hurrah amidst the death throws of dying freedom.

At some point my new best friend will give up; they will sit back, their skim latte forgotten and gone cold, and I will know by the funny and familiar look on their face that they have had the happy moment of realization: Finally - finally! - here is someone whom they’ll never have to repay in kind for the exquisite pleasure of going on and on and on and on about their travails in trying to Find a Man.

This moment never fails to make my heart sink. Because afterwards, I become invisible. Because since finding a man or not finding a man is apparently all there is in this wide world, then that is all there is and all there is to discuss. And so they do. A lot.

So in conclusion, and statistics, science and rotting apples aside, I can only offer these folks, in a very caring way, this one thing that I have noticed over and over again: it is usually not the married people who express their shock and disbelief, or who desire to convert me to reside, as some have put it, in "the tit-lined coffin" of marriage. There could be many explanations for these married peoples’ silence, couldn’t there? But I am usually left with the one glaring one - that my Grandmother was right: they Know…

Copyright Britical 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

NYC

 

How very useful it is, I thought, as I failed repeatedly to balance my chequebook, to actually know that you’re a fucking dimwit. I also thought about my bank, whose involvement in the mortgage crisis caused its stock to drop yet again yesterday. Which is not to forget (as some are apt to of late) the legion of other dimwits in denial who could not balance their own chequebooks nor read the not-so-small print, and so chose to sign up for loans they clearly could not afford. Thank goodness we live in America, where personal responsibility is but a nebulous concept and the biggest lenders, along with the borrowers, are now to be bailed out.

"Neither a borrower, not a lender be", warns Shakespeare, "for loan oft loses both itself and friends." Quite so. Most of my friends rent, and while we might yearn to own our very own apartment, we are painfully aware of our financial limits. One friend called me the other night to tell me to "pull all my money" out of my bank as she’d heard it was about to collapse. I explained that this would involve my actually entering my local branch (rather than hitting the ATM) and trying to make myself understood to whoever was the only employee on duty that day - arguably a more daunting prospect than the loss of my $228.43 (or whatever it actually was).

On several levels my bank is a distinctive experience. One comes from the fact that it is self-evidently inappropriate and unbecoming to give yourself your own nickname. It’s a bit like telling people that you’re "charismatic" or "sexy". But this happens to be a fact of no consequence to the bank, who has plastered a very silly nickname all over its walls….and on billboards, buses and television. Starring you, the would-be customer (say, a cheery, suited black man) in various scenarios of sticking it to The Man (for instance, a bewildered, half-naked elderly white banker man and his naked white man partners), the TV ads are deeply patronizing. You, yes, YOU!! the customer! is calling the shots! Telling those fancy schmancy, stuck-up bankers where to stick it!! (I would offer this up as an ad idea for the Obama campaign but sadly the bank’s style is not quite polished enough on the condescending front.)

I thought nostalgically back to when I had first opened an account at the bank in 2006. My Casual Friday dressed "associate" stood fearlessly all out in the open at a little plywood podium topped by a computer screen. To a bank with a nickname that rhymes roughly with "FUCK-U", and to people reassured by such things in a place that has all your money, it all looks ever so unconventional and urban folksy - just like that hip and kewl new store, Blockbuster Video. That and the 90’s trance house music they pump into the room at 9am. But I digress, because how very absorbing it was, as I stood at the podium practically in the guy’s armpit, to see the names, addresses and social security numbers of all the people with even slightly similar names as me scroll slowly up the screen. It might have crossed my mind there are those who would appreciate this even more than I did, but I was too impressed with how way cool it was they wouldn’t charge me to write cheques while they used my money to, say, deal in dodgy mortgage loans. Whatever. I realized it wasn’t even worth closing my meagre account. I would ask the bank to help me balance my chequebook instead.

I decided to go to the branch on Park Avenue where the bank strays confusingly from its grating just-folks mandate. It’s more bearable there, even if I find the fact of the contrast annoying. The lighting is less unflattering, and there is clearly an effort to cater to a more…upscale (i.e. needy and difficult) customer. There are actual tellers behind proper bank robber grilles. And though they are full of mute resentment, they do not act like the employee(s) at my local branch - that is, with the shockingly passive-aggressive bovine slowness found more at the Post Office where employees find their calling making it crystal clear they simply DO NOT CARE about your stupid package and practicing moving in slow motion. Even so, the teller looked miffed at my request to have someone check the bank’s records against mine. Where, I wanted to demand, was my posse of naked elderly banker dudes? She said, "If there’s someone back there you’d have to make an appointment…" I asked if maybe she could help me, then? Thus she scurried off and returned in short order with the happy news that "He (?) isn’t doing anything so you can go back there."

So I went back there. My "financial advisor", Carlos, looked simultaneously bored, overwhelmed and two years out of community college. To give him some credit, he tapped about quite earnestly on his calculator for 15 minutes or more, the numbers balancing perfectly each side…. and yet… not. (Ha!) He looked a bit tearful. This was consoling to me because it meant I was after all not the only fucking dimwit - and I wasn’t even a "financial advisor"!! Funnily enough, it was just then that I saw very clearly, amongst the jumble of numbers upside down across the desk, exactly where the mistake was. I didn’t have the heart to tell Carlos about this and set about generously trying to save his professional dignity, such as it might have been, or at least was before I walked in. "It’s fine, actually…", I said, "Hey, perhaps it’s a weird Twilight Zone, X Files thing, ha ha ha!" He looked at me vacantly. This aggravated me. I get profoundly cross when people fail to get really obvious pop culture references; when they fail, as someone once put it, to leap aboard the reference train. Fine, I thought, ignore my graciously proffered hand. "So what do we do now…?", I said. He looked uncomfortable and tried to shuffle, in some business-y way, the two pieces of paper that sat on his desk. It was futile. Why was I even surprised? I stood up, feeling a bit sorry for him but apparently not sorry enough to stop myself saying, "OK, well I’m sure I’ll figure it out…..oh, and by the way, are you guys going bust tonight like they say on CNN, or, like, more towards the end of the week?"

Oh sure, you might say, "If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?", like some grizzled old toothless geezer in a flannel shirt right before he spits tobacco on the barroom floor. Well, that’s why I live in this here hoity-toity New Yawk City and not Kentucky, Florida, East Texas or some other picturesque place where more people bought more houses. I may not be rich, but at least I ain’t stupid - and if I really can’t balance a cheque book I will say so. But still we have to watch the endless parade of these cretins victims on the news: the mewling children, the rusting SUV, the large empty rooms in which the ubiquitous and carefully placed teddy bear tugging at the heart strings is framed wistfully in the very last shot. And while there is much vitriol directed at, and some half-hearted mea culpas emanating from the lending institutions, I have yet to see any of the borrowers confess that, yeah, maybe they should have read the loan agreement properly. Even the reporters seem loath to declare the Emperor naked.

In one way, I appreciate (sort of) the elegant irony of how these same borrowers, armed with just their plucky willful ignorance, really have managed to stick it to The Man - just like my bank promises. But the joke is on us, the ones who have tried hard to neither a lender nor a borrower be, lest we lose friends, or homes. But no one is losing anything, least of all friends. In fact, guiltily entwined in flagrante delicto, the banks and the borrowers are all making new friends! Meaning us, the real dimwits evidently, who will foot the hefty bill. As we struggle to pay the rent, fearing for our jobs in the mortgage crisis recession, can we be blamed for wondering if we weren’t just too dimwitted to sign up for the fabulous bailout opportunity too?

I thought today about poor Carlos the financial advisor who, in answer to my reasonable if pissily put question, assured me that he himself had been "assured by the executives" (presumably the naked, elderly white banker and his cohorts now truly sweating through their Turnbull & Asser shirts) that the bank "…has enough capital to…."… but you’ve heard that line on CNN. Clearly, Carlos wasn’t going to be sticking it to The Man anytime soon. And neither was I. And neither, I am wagering my $238.64, will you.
 

 

Copyright Britical 2008. All Rights Reserved. 

 

NYC

Two weeks ago, I stopped carrying my knife. A gorgeous, Languiole instrument with a shiny 4 inch blade, I have carried it with me for over ten years. There was never any logical reason to think it would make me feel safe exactly, but as a rescue professional, and having carried and used it out on wilderness expeditions, it has always made me feel more …capable. And so, at some point, it must have become a talisman - my "lucky" knife, the vegetarian version of a rabbit’s foot.

Two weeks ago I was in the U.K. again. I spent quite a bit of time watching the news and what was news every day, it was shockingly clear to me, was teenagers stabbing other teenagers to death. In England! Those of you who live there will find my incredulity a bit shameful and hard to believe. But living in New York for so long, a city now declared one of the safest cities in the world (still a hard fact to digest, I know) I had had the luxury of not quite believing English friends who started to tell me, even ten years ago, about people getting stabbed and mugged for cellphones or footwear or for the dastardly crime of looking at someone, or not looking at someone, in the wrong way.

 

Despite my having all the usual credentials that get trotted out at these times - being a mixed race child brought up by a single mother on a council estate (projects in American) - I still found this inconceivable…in England. Perhaps even because my own upbringing would statistically suggest a perfect recipe for disaster. And then, almost laughably, it dawned on me, because I do, after all, carry a knife. And I have at times, to be really, really honest, carried it partly for the same reasons the perpetrators of stabbing say they do: protection.

Flopped in front of my Mum’s television, I didn’t have the knife with me anyway. The last time it travelled on a plane was the night of September 10th, 2001 when I flew into NYC from London. I am now too concerned for its welfare to chance putting it in checked baggage. So, knifeless, I watched endless BBC news footage of the bewildered, tearful relatives of the latest victim, a 19 year old actor in the upcoming Harry Potter film (of all things) stabbed to death outside a pub the night before for the usual reason: that is, no reason in particular.

But there it was anyway, scrolling across the TV screen, the technicolour parade of wounds inflicted by knives - presumably an attempt by the "authorities" in England to scare people into relinquishing their weapons. I expect someone thinks these tactics will go usefully hand-in-bloody-hand with the pleading, the outright begging, by stupefied looking dead childrens’ parents, to please, please, please just stop. It is a reasonable thought, after all - its flaw being it may appeal only to reasonable people. The gallery continues, of gaping, ragged holes in flesh surrounded by ripped, flapping skin, and unruly heaps of entrails piling uncontrollably, inappropriately even, out of places you’d think too tiny to hold such human soup. The victims’ faces are hidden, of course. It looks to me like the stuff of a combat medicine lecture I attended last year and not the surgically tidy if deadly slot machine incisions you (I) might naively imagine a stabbing to look like.

So I have stopped carrying the knife. Because of what I know now, I feel a bit ashamed. Meanwhile, here I am living in a safer city than London, but in a country where 2nd Amendment rights have been interpreted to allow the approximately 193 - 250 million guns currently in circulation. No surprise then that thirty thousand people are killed by guns every year in the U.S.- numbers that outstrip England’s puny efforts many times over. So here is my fear: that knives will turn inevitably into guns, and that this present murder epidemic of 2008 will be looked back on by the English, in years to come, in much the same way that England itself is still regarded from here: as something rather quaint. We may realise, with some awful nostalgia, that we didn’t know that we had it so good. That is the saddest part.

 

Note: On June 26th, just a few days after this was written, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, endorsed the personal right to own a gun. (District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07 - 290)

 

 

Copyright Britical 2008. All rights reserved. 

 

 

 

I rounded the corner of Fifth Avenue onto 42nd Street fully expecting to find the ‘’Tell Me Off for One Dollar" man waiting for me - in fact waiting just for me. After all, last week, rushing to class, I had had no time to tell him off for even a quarter. But it was not to be. Leaving myself some reasonable time for a good dressing down before my class started, and after a fruitless reconaissance of the vicinity, he was nowhere to be seen. I stumped off, now much too early for class, as the warm sun seemed to retract its rays grudgingly westwards along 42nd Street, its heat adding to my general feeling of dismal aggravation.
 
I had been very taken by Tell Me Off Man’s concept; also intrigued. He had not had any takers as far as I could see. Unsurprising, since there he sat in his stripey deckchair (of all things), a large black man in a black t-shirt, arms folded stubbornly across his chest. He was a regular Mr. T., inscrutable behind dark, wraparound sunglasses. People swarmed past him, glanced at him furtively if at all, and kept going, perhaps with a little more urgency to their stride than they had before. It was a wonder he had not sought employment abroad with some private security company in, say, Iraq. He’d be so very, very perfect for riding, sheathed in Kevlar, atop the Humvee in a red bandana, all cracked up on power and blithe ignorance of, say, Section 843, article 43 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If this felt too chancy, he could surely make a nice living as a bouncer. I couldn’t imagine him not enjoying that mean little club doorman fiction as he stood, looming at the rope, waiting for the poor, unsuspecting post-college cretins in white pleated chinos and blue chambray shirts to approach him, clear in their intentions, only to have him pretend to not understand quite what they wanted; to humiliate them, in front of their jeering mates or tottering girlfriends, by unnecessarily enquiring in an indetectable customs officer type sneer: "Can I help you?"

What was his …deal anyway? Was he really trying to make some money? For sure, he did not appear to be some sort of faux pauvre rich kid performance artist from the School of Performing Arts wedged midway up his own arsehole. Would a telling off provide him some form of challenge or self-punishment? And if so, what ever had he done to deserve it - and were there heads and buckets of blood involved? And if not, if he was some peculiar type of street dwelling masochist, shouldn’t he be paying me for the verbal spanking? I had to know, but more importantly, I simply couldn’t believe he wasn’t there. Wretched man.

Used to be you could rely on such people in New York.  Zoning out in class that night, Tell Me Off Man made me think, once again, how much the city is changing. Apparent lunatics are, after all, almost a tradition here, appearing to have a particular penchant for New York itself. They have always appeared on a regular basis and with a frequency unparalelled elsewhere. Ironically so, if you think about it, when their audience, New Yorkers, have perfected the blank middle distance stare that says, "I do not see you. But know also, especially if you’re a bit violent, that it’s not personal, merely I am in a preoccupied state of hurrying or intently checking my text messages here in the subway car, and indeed, may in fact have failed to register the fact you’re blaring at the top of your lungs about Jesus or how you fought in Vietnam before you were born." Then again, and the genuinely desperate and poor aside, maybe it is precisely because of this fact, that some relish the comfort and freedom to just be completely whacked out in public and have no one bat an eyelash. I know I myself have been grateful for this fact on occasion (occasions we will not go into here).

When I first moved to New York, I actually used to work very close to Tell Me Off Man’s corner, on 42nd and Madison. I walked home most nights, and would usually come across the terrifying "Sign the Pe-TI-tion, Ladies!!!!!" woman. Same stomping ground as Tell Me Off man, except she had a much bigger sign, and was surrounded by grim placards, depicting all sorts of alarmingly blown-up grainy photos of various women, always in the same uncomfortable, nipple-ripping, chain-encrusted poses.  It was torture porn allright, but worse, it was wantonly uncreative. I say this but then I didn’t have a fair comparison since I never saw the stuff anywhere else; only on her corner. I used to wonder if I should point this damning irony out to her - but I never did, and I never signed the petition either, because, quite honestly, even I am not that stupid.

But not so my boyfriend, S., who, having come to collect me from work one day announced he would actually go "Sign the Pe-TI-tion!!!!!!" himself. Sweet boy. I think he was puzzled that I, a woman, had not already done so, and wanted to set me an example. As it turned out, although he, like me, had witnessed her railing furiously against men in all their forms, he was falling victim to the naïve logic that she might appreciate one of them trying to help. So off he bounced as I lurked at a safe distance wondering what would happen. And what happened was that I will never forget her face as he, a tall, genial looking dirty blond, strolled towards her; and she, a fidgety, red-skinned, equally dirty, dangerously skinny person started to flap her scarecrow’s arms and then… opened her mouth in a howl of such screeching banshee fury that the whole of 42nd Street turned to stare. S. stopped dead in his tracks. He turned his head towards me, looking bemused in the way gormless people in movies look when an obviously menacingly overly-familiar hitchhiker suddenly produces an axe. I looked away, of course. I did not know him. And finally, as realisation dawned - that she was, in fact, as mad as a snake - he fled. And so did I. And after that, we were always on the lookout for her and an opportunity to quickly cross to the other side of the street - much as I do with clowns and people who walk on stilts.

On the other hand, there was the harmless Duck Man, who rode cheerfully around Soho on a rickety old bike to which were attached, in some tricksy way, a LOT of large, yellow, furry ducks such as you might be unfortunate enough to win at a fair. No one seemed to think him particularly unusual or strange. More mysterious still is that I would frequently see otherwise quite sophisticated looking post-diners (usually men) late at night, walking around Soho clearly having just purchased one of the plug ugly things. Since they’d not had to expertly shoot anything off something at the Jersey Shore to actually "win" the duck, their silly grins and the adoring expressions on their girlfriends’ faces always seemed to me rather undeserving.

There are, these days, less of these "characters" (as they would likely be described by some). I suppose less are able to live in the city or cannot afford the commute. The artists, writers, or even just plain old bartenders and restaurant people have all moved further and further out - to Red Hook and beyond, to upstate New York, to Jersey, Pennsylvania and even (shudder) Queens. And I fear the Tell Me Off Man types may be ridiculed, less appreciated or respected for their utter weirdness by the more recent immigrants to Manhattan: the eternally blow dried Heathers and Melissas and the aformentioned doughy post-college fratboys in blue chambray shirts and pleated chinos who are more likely to shriek, respectively, "Omigod, euuwwww!" or "Dude! Check it out! Gross!" rather than respectfully walk on by, stop out of curiosity, or at least enjoy this phenomenon as a uniquely New York entertainment.

Now, unless you’re selling fake Balenciaga bags, or the Euro tourists find you amusing, you are much less likely, as an inventive or slightly deranged yet admirably resourceful person like Tell Me Off Man, to gather an audience on the corner of 42nd and Fifth by offering the unique bargain, in democratic tradition, to anyone at all in possession of a mere dollar to verbally rip you a new arsehole. It seems a shame.
 

Copyright Britical 2008. All rights reserved. 

 

 

NYC

This November, as we all know and have already had it up to here with, there will be a presidential election here in the U.S. I wouldn’t bring it up, but it made me think about someone I had almost forgotten about, a young man I dated - briefly - a few weeks before the last election. There is some lame comfort in knowing it was now almost a whole four years ago. Because as is often the way, and with time, I now wonder, "Why?"

He was waiting at the gate of the small Soho park he’d described on the phone, and he had a large bag over one shoulder. “What’s in the bag?”, I said, amused he would bring an accessory of such size on a "first date" (as the whole performance is known here). I was really hoping the inexplicable bag was a wily fail safe rather than an overnighter into which he’d just put his toothbrush and some clean socks. “My computer…might have to do some errands after this…”, he answered, unconvincingly. "Oh, really?" I said, and made a note to use that one myself some time – far more novel than the mid-dinner Dire Emergency phone call. 

Later on that night he admitted this was essentially a blind date for him. He actually hadn’t got a proper look at me the night we sort of met. I could see why - so I must say I admired his bravery. Viciously prodded by a friend who was impatient to leave some lacklustre after-party, I had got my nerve up and marched over to this guy we had been scrutinizing all evening, tapped him on the shoulder, and, for all the world as if serving the poor fellow legal papers, thrust my number into his hand. He had looked up, taken aback, as well he might be - but likely I was already barrelling away again as fast as my would-be killer heels would let me, feeling appalled and exhilarated.

We walk up West Broadway (I’m assuming. Quite honestly, I can’t remember.) and I sense he seems quite reserved – not, I hasten to add, in a serial killer way, but like a much older man, minus the sagging skin, budding beer belly and the inevitable desire for children. Perfect. Naturally, this attractive “reserve” would, within weeks, morph smoothly into "stodgy". This is how it often goes, doesn’t it? But for now, entranced by almost comic-book heroic straight dark brows slashed above clear grey eyes, what did I care? He also, later, turned out to be a Republican. Oops. I was baffled and dismayed, of course, but took it on the chin and indeed patted myself on the back for seeing it as an opportunity for "self-growth" in the open-minded and "non-judgemental" department and in that uniquely American style. Oh yes.

In this smug vein, a few weeks later, I graciously took the Republican for drinks on election night, full to bursting with my own magnanimity. Still, I was already becoming profoundly irritated by him for some reason I couldn’t quite fathom and was feeling simultaneously guilty about. What was it about him, I kept asking myself, that just pissed me off lately?

And then it happened: at some sorry point that election night, I glanced over at him, his face lit by the blue glare of the bar’s television, and realized with a horrible, horrible start that he looked physically and with unnerving precision, exactly like the Republican presidential candidate. I wasn’t imagining it either. How ever had I missed this?? It was in that moment that he finally lost my vote. It was an image I knew I wouldn’t be able to shake, even with my eyes tightly shut….

But that first date night, after a dinner I can’t now, shamefully, remember anything about either, he asks would I mind if we drop by his friend’s birthday party. Sure, I say, why not! – and off we go to a loud, post-college-y East Village bar. It reminds me of places I hated even ten years ago. But as we enter he puts an arm round my shoulders, carefully shielding from the heaving, raucous, beer sodden crowd as we push our way through to the back. His friends seem younger, more immature than him. Or perhaps it’s my wishful thinking and the only thing separating them and him at this moment is his sobriety. A tall, concave-chested man suddenly appears lurching towards us like an extra from a zombie movie. I can see he’s winding up for one of those drunken, latently homosexual back-slapping sessions of “I love you, maan! I fucking love you!!”. I recoil. And then my date does an impressive thing: He smiles genially at the zombie, sticks his hand straight out to shake hello, and as he introduces me, manages simultaneously to neatly place his body between me and the threat of being puked or fallen on. It’s a skillful and considerate bit of manoevering and I am struck by the grown-uppy gentlemanliness of the gesture. Yet within minutes I find myself thinking, ungratefully, of an unhappy friend who’s dating a much younger woman. Her friends, he complains, can only speak in uptalk? About college? And beer kegs?

“Let’s get out of here”, he says, sooner rather than later. I wonder if this is code for Let’s go back to my place. Or not. I am never sure. So we leave and take a zig-zaggy path across town at the whim of the traffic lights. He’s quite new to the city, so I lead us through various streets I’m fond of and think might interest him. One of these is 9th Street between University and Fifth. For as long as I can remember there has been a large parrot in the window of one of the  brownstones there. It has always been an immense treat for me to go and peer through the gap in the curtains, preferably with someone in tow who can be suitably awed by my vague acquaintance with the creature. But, as we walk by, the curtains are, for the first time, completely closed.

Ahead, a couple turns off Fifth and wobbles towards us. They’re clearly 2am tipsy, holding hands with their arms spread wide, giggling, and taking up the whole pavement. But at a few feet, we make eye contact and their arms lift into an arch, as I somehow knew they would, and I run underneath, as they somehow knew I would. We all laugh - delighted, I suppose, at the spontaneity of strangers in this city - and keep going. No one stops to chat or needs to – it happens in a strangely choreographed instant, a typically perfect and silly New York moment. It reminds me – as I am reminded about eight times a day – why I moved here in the first place.

I want to share this thought with my date, but for the first time that night, he is not by my side. I turn and see him just a few feet behind me stepping back onto the curb. He is scowling slightly, his mouth a sour moue of distaste, and I realize he must have decided to step into the street rather than indulge the silly New York moment. Oh well, I think - and dismiss it.

But as the tipsy couple’s footsteps recede behind me, the man turns back and delivers a disconcerting and rather unkind parting shot.  “She gets it, he doesn’t!!”, he shouts. And in my head, a soft little voice pipes up immediately. If the voice was a person it would be the cliched gay best friend, and he would be hissing at me in a stage whisper, and furiously waving a red flag.

But I ignore the pesky voice. Even, within two weeks, when I find out my date is a Republican…that he doesn’t believe in universal healthcare because his Dad doesn’t…that he uses a PC and not a Mac….that he ran with the bulls in Pamplona. I willfully ignore all these damning facts.

The day after the election I did the considerate thing and tried to dump him via email.  Maddeningly, he insisted on meeting up to "discuss this in person". I skulked along, to the same bar, untactfully enough, from the night before, mainly because it was close to my house and I couldn’t be bothered to travel further downtown. We sat in the corner this time and I played my brilliant trump card: "It’s the age difference…" I lied. He was silent. "I’m sorry, but it’s really the truth. You’ll understand when you’re older. It’s an inchoate thing, just a….feeling". I was floundering and I knew it, and maybe he did too. This pitch was bad and condescending, even for me. It sounded like a combination of a teenager’s parent and an ad for Coca Cola, but I didn’t care. He looked stony. I blundered on, taking another blabbering stab at it (him): "Besides, if we continue, one day you’ll want to move to Connecticut and have children and I want to live by myself and have a dog." That bit was the truth, actually. I instantly felt better about myself. (How American I was becoming.)

 

But he was quite unmoved by all this. Instead, he looked into my eyes, paused, and said simply, "But age does not necessarily breed wisdom." I have only lately wondered if this was a perceptive little dig. But at the time, caught up in my own sense of perceptiveness, I just sneered inwardly and thought, Ain’t that the damn truth! "Mmm..", I said, distractedly, and took another sip of my drink, wondering if I could get home in time for Gilmore Girls on TV.

 

Copyright Britical 2008 All Rights Reserved

 

 

My mother did eventually make an appearance in my dreams. It was evening, and she, my brother and I were, improbably enough, standing about in a fairly grand hotel room in a city somewhere. Old school grand, meaning grandiose - inefested with thick, heavy curtains and carpets and silk tassels. The sort of overdone room that makes you wonder what stains would show up if you went over the place with a UV light, and what chance you’d have in a fire.

My mother is dressed beautifully and is announcing her intention in slightly distracted tones, to see us in the morning. We understand she is going out on a date, we all understand she is dying, and as she leaves she turns, at the door, like some 1940’s movie star and trills, "Oh, and I’ll pop into Tiffany and pick up a little something!" My Mother would never just "pop" into Tiffany or anywhere else like that for that matter: she is not some frivolous Manhattan socialite - but there you go, that’s dreams for you. My brother and I, though slightly hurt, apparently do not begrudge her a last night on the town. I whisper to him that I think she is going to Tiffany to pick out a small keepsake for each of us - a keyring, or something to remember her by. Through the large windows, the sky, well past twilight, forms the darkening blues and purples of a rapidly spreading bruise, and I say, "I cannot believe this is Mum’s last night on earth."

I thought of this dream today, Mothers’ Day in the U.S., on the phone with my mother, as she almost squealed with delight at the news her D.N.R. bracelet was arriving. "It has my name on one side and on the other it says, ‘Do not resucitate. Let die naturally’ or something like that." I say to her, "Die ‘naturally’? What does that mean - die surrounded by low fat yoghurt? Not be tied to an electric chair? Not be injected, malice aforethought, by lethal injection?" She giggles. She is most certainly back.  

On March 12th, she was a 3 on the Glasgow Coma Scale. This is a measurement of how alive/dead you are. "How low can you go?" That would be it: 3 - Utterly unresponsive to anything, even pain. Were she an organ donor they would have been standing by her bed with the portable ice box, the helicopter idling on the roof.

Someone, around this time, told me about a friend of theirs who would say, obsessively, after his mother died, "There was just one thing…one more thing I wanted to ask her…" There is always something. I tried to accept this idea. I am luckier than most, after all - having always been acutely aware for some reason of death, loss and all the rest. But there was one thing, actually: in January my mother had sent me a postcard, the front divided into four smaller photos, the whole titled "Sussex Cottages". About Christmas, the first we had spent together in over 20 years, she had written, "We had fun, didn’t we?" These words, infused with some premature nostalgia, made me very sad. Sadder still in February when I noticed, turning the thing over and over in my hands, that one of the cottages was in Bracklesham Bay, the small town she and her mother had been evacuated to during World War II. Did she know this? Is that why she sent it to me? Only to have me, her careless daughter, not even notice it? Or did she herself not realise? - but if so, how very much I wanted to be able to tell her!

 

And then, one day, very suddenly, as we were all gathered around her bedside, she woke up. Not really. In movies and soap operas, people come to all of a sudden - in a foggy but miraculous, decorous way. This, though, is not quite how it goes for most - and it’s not how it went for us either. But it happened….slowly, gradually, and then very definitely. Not like the coming of dawn exactly, but, you know, something like that. It took many weeks.

Then there were the inevitable medical blunders, the negligence, as she started to be shunted, often without notice, from one filthy hospital to another where the other patients screamed and moaned and even stole her belongings. Then, to neatly top it all off, a massive clot in her leg that went undiagnosed despite her complaints. Frantic and shocked, my brother and I chased and pleaded and phoned to no avail and finally resorted to the sort of threats found mainly on this side of the Atlantic. Things suddenly got done. But I digress.

For now, unsupervised by any physio, she is getting herself out of bed and taking a Zimmer frame to walk the empty hospital corridor, carefully and patiently placing one foot after the other, five times a day - "no less!" (I run the risk here of making her sound like Katherine Hepburn, or some "plucky", martryish Mrs. Miniver type. She is neither of these.) She tells me the others in her ward, "the poor old ducks", she calls them, just lay there. She’d like to be outside, in the fresh air, she says. But she has discovered in the women’s toilets a small, low window through which you can just about see the street outside and beyond that, a tiny, precious sliver of sea.

But here we are on this day, I remind myself, and we are chatting on the phone. She sounds, finally, like herself again: mordant, nervous, slightly miffed at one of the nurses. "You can tell within a few days," she says in a low voice, "whether your nurse should’ve been a nurse or not." I roar with laughter at this. She is dismayed, though, to hear that on my little daytrip to Green-Wood cemetery yesterday I didn’t make my friend lie down in one of the mausoleums while I took a photo of her looking dead. "Tell her to sort of drop her chin and let her jaw go slack and suck her cheeks in and try and look leathery!" she had instructed me yesterday. (I should add here, as partial explanation, that when my mother and I visited the catacombs of Rome last Christmas, we both felt a bit ripped-off at the lack of bodies in evidence.)

There is one thing though. In every way herself as she is, there is something different about her. I am astonished at the ability of the body to fight, and her spirit, now, in continuing to do so. And yet, she has also always been, emotionally, a bit of a glass half empty kind of gal. So I was pleasantly flummoxed when she had this to say:

 

"You know, I was feeling a bit down yesterday…and I asked myself why, why I felt like that, and I suddenly realized…it was just a habit! And then I felt OK again."

This struck me as incredibly self-reflective and insightful, and I told her as much. I also told her we might, as a result, have to re-think the "no brain damage" diagnosis. We laughed. But really who cares, I thought. I got to ask my postcard question, after all.

 

Copyright Britical 2008

 

When I got home I must have looked like some distraught victim of sexual assault. I tore off all the clothes I was wearing and put them into a plastic bag. I then stood in a hot shower resisting the impulse to scrub myself raw with disinfectant. I washed my hair, though I had washed it that morning – and getting out at last, downed a big handful of Vitamin C tablets. This is not my usual routine on coming home. But I had been at the hospital, you see.

It is assumed that everyone hates hospitals. The bleak, institutional hallways, the putrid school dinner smell, the sheer sadness and stink of the place. Not that I was even in there for long. Most of the time was spent showing I.D. and standing in little lines behind frantic people who didn’t speak English. When it was my turn, I was handed a huge, letter size fluorescent pink pass – the pink indicating, they told me, that you’re visiting someone who’s in critical condition. Going up to the 10th floor then, I fancied that everyone in the lift might be staring at me in some sort of awed pity. Presumably all of them there to see people with broken ankles and other would-be ailments since they were carrying “lesser” coloured blue passes. And presumably they were merely appalled at my large, furry hat - but I ignored this pesky thought and looked valiantly straight ahead trying to appear to be nobly suffering, a Brave Little Woman in the vein of a black & white WWII movie. How hateful I am.

Speaking of which, and FYI, none of the nurses was like the snappy yet teary-eyed, earnest ones in ‘Atonement’. Lost in the vast, shiny corridors I asked a whole disobliging, sullen, series of them for directions. Lolling, like postal service workers, at their little white melamine desks, most of them shrugged and directed me to someone else. Apparently they lack even the courtesy to try and pretend to be harried and overworked.

I am at last in this overheated, white room. I am shocked by how many machines there are surrounding the bed. Certainly more than in any TV or movie hospital I have ever seen. They are both worrying and reassuring, I suppose. But their constant beeping, burping, whoosh-whooshing sounds, the forced breath of the ventilator, cannot disguise how unacceptably silent the room feels. But they give me something to look at that’s not my friend. I am conscious of the glass walls of the room, and wonder what the staff think of this person examining the machines so intently and barely glancing at the woman in the bed.

She is lying as if dropped from a great height – head twisted to one side, mouth hanging open, lips white, breathing but not breathing. Barely visible amid her tangle of inexplicable wires and blinking lights and tubes and tape, she looks for the first time I can remember supremely unapproachable. And so I do not dare, and then notice I am holding my breath. At that moment a nurse comes in to tell me I cannot leave the tulips in the room. I had always thought this no flowers business was a legend. Not so. However, the suddenly immense and pressing issue of where to leave the tulip plant is my opportunity to leave the room and I take it.

 The nurse has no interest in my placing the thing on her empty desk so that my friend might see it if she wakes up. So I apologize for the trouble and ask her name – blatantly trying to establish some sort of connection. “How is “the patient” doing?” I say. She’s immune. Perhaps she has compassion fatigue. Perhaps they all do. She gazes at me dully, trying, I realize, to figure out who I am to this patient who has had almost no visitors.

I leave the tuilps on her desk anyway, knowing they might go straight into the trash the moment I leave, and go back into the room to leave the card I brought. But there is literally nowhere to put it. It then dawns on me that there are no cards or silly plush toys or balloons or anything you might usually find in someone’s room. The surfaces swarm with wires and machines. It’s a brand new wing of this hospital and yet, while they clearly thought of everything, I notice there is nowhere for a person to put anything that belongs to them. I place the card on the edge of the sink – glad that before I left the house I had, for some typically bizarre reason, put it in a Ziplock bag.

There is nothing for me to do here. I hover by the bed a little longer – and, taking the doctors at their word that she is completely unconscious and cannot hear or feel anything, I leave. On the way out, and crossing First Avenue, an unfamiliar unease clings to me. In the shower, I do my best to scrub off whatever it is.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2008. All rights reserved. 

 

NYC

 

"Now Madam, how about another glass of champagne?” And perhaps also, I thought, a cigarette, since I was now no longer an Upper Class virgin.

I took a nice big swig and asked the flight attendant (one of a whole, hovering flock of them on soft little cat feet) who the uniformed older man was. He was perched in a overly casual way (it seemed to me) on the arm of a seat a few rows up, chortling away with a thrilled-looking passenger. “That’s the captain, Madam”. Oh, I see. I felt instantly, ludicrously jealous - then vaguely worried for obvious reasons: do Evildoers not think to travel Upper Class, where there is plenty real silverware and the captain is allowed to leave the flight deck and wander about unsupervised? After all, I now recalled, on the way over they had let me hang about on the flight deck for twenty minutes badgering the pilot and co-pilot about flight paths and wind shear. They had even pulled out their maps…. and managed to look quite sorry when I went back to my seat.

 

But these thoughts soon evaporated. It’s hard to think about anything dismaying when you’re being plied with all sorts of luxurious un-necessities. I wondered then if I, too, could request a visit from the captain.

So it goes here at 35,000 feet above the Atlantic ocean, where you’re shocked to discover you’re sorry – for once! - that the flight isn’t longer. Even at the airport - at festering, unlovely Heathrow - you arrive at a serene, almost empty check-in area, separated, natch, from the economy class riff-raff by velvet ropes and pink neon lighting. You instantly acquire a soft, pretty glow. From there you’re whisked up in the lift to Virgin Atlantic’s own, private security point. Yep. They purchased for some vast, unimaginable sum their very own security machine for Upper Class passengers so that you, a lone and presumably delicate upper class flower, may tiptoe quietly past the scanner where the security folks are only minimally less mollycoddling than the rest of the Virgin staff.

No, it doesn’t get much better than this. Though it has been pointed out that of course you are paying a lot of money for the privilege, I say you pay a lot of money for a lot of things (my apartment comes to mind) yet often don’t feel you’re getting what you pay for. 

But here, witness the recently revamped Virgin Lounge where you can book a free spa treatment…..and look, over there, where you can stuff your face with a frustrating array of food items…lounge in one of the giant sofas with a big, glossy magazine….shoot pool…browse in the library….make phone calls and surf the internet…..or just sit at the huge bar and drink yourself stupid. Option paralysis abounds, and like the Vatican or the Hermitage, you really need several days to fully appreciate it.

Once on board it gets worse. There is more champagne, and your very own fully flat private bed with duvet and pillows and pajamas. There are gourmet chocolates and shiny silverware, thick napkins and marvellous soup, and onboard shoulder, neck and scalp massages. (However, there is no Ambien, and that seems a shame.)

If you really can’t sleep on your private, fully flat bed with duvet and pillows, you can wander in your pyjamas and socks up to the bar to chitchat with other wealthy insomniacs. Who can bear to slumber unconscious through all this luxury? But the lights are dimmed when they should be, and there is no startling “BING-BONG!” noise. Ever. Except something feint – a discreet “ding!” perhaps - when the seatbelt light goes on or off. There are no pesky seatmates – no having to pull out a book, your I-Pod, or feign alarming coughing fits to avoid talking to some large, chatty stranger.

Waking up from a little nap, I felt peckish, as you do. A flight attendant appeared (for you Brits reading this, it is not unlike like the magically apparating shopkeeper in “Mr.Ben”) as did, a little later, a pair of charming, fat, miniature plane-shaped salt & pepper shakers. “How do you stop people from stealing these??” I asked. “We don’t”, he said. “Go ahead and take them - it’s Christmas!!”

The staff here seem to have mastered the exacting and subtle art of walking the line between deferential and chummy. How do they do it? I suspect they are hired partly based on their perceptiveness and ability to read each person and to act accordingly. This stuff is usually hardwired quite early in life and makes me worry – for a couple of seconds anyway - that they learned this from having difficult or abusive parents whose every move they had to predict and manoeuvre around. I resolve to be the model passenger and to not pester them. Still, it’s obvious they already love me – why else encourage me to steal their salt and pepper shakers?

A day or so later, back in New York, I find the perfectly darling objects where I had carefully hidden in paranoid fashion at the bottom of my hand luggage. Weighing them in my hand, I notice they aren’t actually metal but metal-coloured plastic. I feel a bit guilty stealing them, but remember the flight attendant’s wink-wink suggestion to go ahead and do so. I must admit, it had made me feel awfully special. But then for some reason I turn them over in my hand, and see, neatly printed on the bottom of each: 

 

“Pinched from Virgin Atlantic”.

 

 

Oh. Oh dear. Have I been had? Maybe. But it was fun while it lasted.

 

 

 

Copyright Britical 2008. All rights reserved.

 

 

New York, New York 

 

 

I’ve had it with the damn tourists. If it’s not listening to their delighted British accents as they paw hysterically over the absurd exchange rate created bargains in H & M (yes, I am pathetically envious), it’s the large pink and turquoise clad American ones loudly comparing their un-amusing tourist anecdotes on the 6 train, and looking too scrubbed and clean in that hefty, Midwestern Germanic way one comes to loathe.

I realise this is all par for the course. And I myself have no doubt been far more annoying taking twenty-three pictures of evil Hannibal Lector’s house in Florence and gawping stupidly at dolphins (themselves sinister and smiling a la Hannibal) in New Zealand. So it goes. We are all tourists.

But a few weeks ago new depths were reached, and thank God not by me. Ladies and Gents, I would like to introduce: The tourist who thinks he knows your city better than you do.

My French tourist friend and I had dinner and caught up and that was lovely. And then he wanted to go to a club and that was not. I had, I said, already explained that to him, no? That I no longer go to clubs in New York, but that I had found a party we could go to. Simple, n’est-ce pas?  Non.

He had seemed OK with the party scenario, looking about beaming and exclaiming at this and that thing he found charmant and whatnot. But then my friend T.W. arrived and for some reason The Tourist seemed suddenly peeved. He soon pulled out his shiny Blackberry and began punching at it in some desultory way. We ignored this rudeness, and him, until it got late and T. was preparing to leave and I said that I too must be off.

 “WHAT???” said the Tourist, and launched into a bizarre, petulant tirade:

“You are leaving?? You bring me…here and then you say you are leaving! Why did you bring me here anyway…look at these people {most of them looked just like him}….how can you bring me here?… how can you leave?? You should be taking me to a club somewhere with beer on the floor and intellectuals! If….if you came to Paris I would take you…I would take you to some cool place with a little door and people fucking against the walls inside!”

“Uh…I have to be up early”, I said.

And then I should have left.

But, typically, I didn’t. I was angry this person took me for some rube who didn’t know her own city and so I waded, inevitably, into a ludicrous and upsetting argument with a tourist.

I tried to explain that now, as opposed to the arguably mythical “then” of New York nightlife, it is all bottle service and reserved tables, conservative rich folks and doughy men from the Upper East Side in pleated chinos and blue chambray shirts. That after-hours places like Save the Robots had vanished long, long ago back in the 20th Century with the advent of Rudolph Giuliani’s “no dancing!” cabaret laws…that even if he went all the way to Brooklyn and thought he’d found somewhere…some damp basement which felt thrillingly “edgy” and dangerous, that it would be full of hipsters  - and, after all, scratch a hipster and there’s a trustafarian underneath. I said, “So if you find what you’re looking for, you let me know.”

The Tourist was unconvinced, seemingly sure I had secreted about my person the ornate, rusty keys to some fabulous, rickety old town house on the Lower East Side where Fellini-esque midgets cavorted in the hall and naked eunuchs in tutus swung from art nouveau chandeliers, Jack Kerouac, Roland Barthes and an assortment of beatniks lounging below sipping absinthe  – something, perhaps, like the embarrassing scenes from Eyes Wide Shut crossed with the bar in the first Star Wars.

He stomped outside in his loafers, and I stood at a loss, nonplussed, on 20th Street as he muttered furiously and Frenchly, and stabbed at his little Blackberry (perhaps it knew the answer). But I knew I was more angry than he. And so I crossed the street away from him, and headed up Park Avenue and assume we were both relieved.

On the way home, I thought to myself how we all complain about Times Square becoming “Disneyfied” and have done so for quite a few years now. Perhaps it is time for a Disney version of New York, a miniature ride through the gritty streets of times past. Not that I miss them that much, actually – but, in principle I do, because I miss the variety of the city and the people who used to live here. Now most of them have moved elsewhere, leaving behind the bankers, lawyers, real estate developers and other subjects of the infamous “Die, yuppie, die!” slogans sprayed on East Village walls back in the late 80’s when such slogans were derided as an overreaction. How wrong we were.

Then, a week before Christmas, a shiny new Chase Bank opened next door in a spot where a few years ago even a Duane Reade (the omnipresent drugstore here in NYC) had once shuttered its windows and moved out – even they worn down by the methadone clinic, the overflow of mental patients from Bellevue, the 900 bed mens’ shelter, and the projects – all within a two block radius here. These annoyances exist still – in fact it occurs to me my block is the perfect candidate for the gritty Disney. But I have always appreciated the implicit bargain: that the fact of my wretched sketchy block, the hallways that smell perpetually of garbage -  kept my rent a little bit manageable.

 

Two days before Christmas, an ominous white envelope dropped into my mailbox and in a horrible and personal way proved my point with the Tourist. It was from my landlord. Barely a week hence, it announced, and on my Birthday, my rent would be increased by a whopping 25%. Et tu, East 28th Street.

I immediately called X, distraught. “What am I going to do????” I sobbed.  “I guess you’ll have to move to Queens – or maybe New Jersey”, he said, typically helpful and sympathetic.

“Actually”, I said, “I was thinking about Paris.”

 

 

Copyright Britical 2007, 2008. All rights reserved.

 

 

Now that so many of us have been reluctantly sucked into the mesmerizing time sink vortex that is Facebook, I can’t tell you how often I hear myself and others use the sheepish and justifying sentence, "Well, it’s not like it’s myspace…"

 

That and "But it’s actually really useful!"

 

It concerns me that when I say these things I sound defensive, like women dating married men ("But she so doesn’t get him!"); people who "forget" to tell you there’s meat in the soup ("It’s only a little bit of bacon!")…

 

….but most of all, the drug addicts ("It’s just coke, it’s not like it’s heroin!").

 

 

H’mm… 

 

 

Copyright Britical 2007. All rights reserved. 

 

 

Have you ever been picked up on a plane? Well, I hadn’t, actually.

Thanksgiving Eve, I was on my way North on what we’re always warned is one of the lousiest travel days of the year. But after a suspiciously traffic free journey to La Guardia airport, and an overly jolly ticket agent with a twirly moustache at the empty U.S. Airways counter who greeted me with, “Did you get you some pie?” (“Free pie! Apple, pumpkin or both!”), it occurred to me that matters were proceeding entirely too well.

Allrighty, then, I thought, absentmindedly wandering through the deserted security point to eat both my pies at the hushed gate area. Much too easy. Pleasant even. I mentally prepared myself for the certain fiery but karmically balanced crash landing later on.

The plane was a teeny tiny De Havilland 8, about 38 seats. There were the propellers that cause many a traveller’s heart to sink. And here, at the very back of the plane – where I was sitting – there was one long seat, which, like the lone flight attendant’s irritated head count, made me feel like I was on a school bus. Still, the place next to me was the only empty one on the whole flight - and for that I am always grateful.

Somewhere over Massachusetts a good looking young guy one seat up and across called the flight attendant over and murmured something to her to which I am sure I heard her respond, “Oh, see someone you like? Okay.” The rather large party sitting next to him then heaved herself out of her seat while he clambered past her. I realized he was coming to sit next to me. There was some excuse about leg room that I took little notice of followed by a few minutes of inexplicably awkward silence. Then he commented, (using the ploy chatty Cathy types like to use on planes) on the book I was reading. But he seemed intelligent (read: good looking) enough and also quite weird, so I allowed us to fall into conversation.

He was an Air Force cadet, traveling home from Colorado for the holiday, and in shockingly short order he made it known it was not the seat he was after but me. How importunate, how impertinent, I thought, matronishly. Is this the sort of thing they teach the youngsters at the academy these days? I pondered the Tailhook scandal.

There were odd non sequiturs in his conversation that reminded me of my own conversational weirdness at times. Out of the blue, he had asked how tall I was. Optimistic sorts might say he going to murder me and needed to know how big to make the grave. I didn’t ask. He also corrected me on a couple of things. Perversely enough, I happen to like being corrected. It rarely happens (for a variety of reasons…fear, usually) but there is novelty in the illusion that someone has something to teach one, however trifling, isn’t there?

Not five minutes later and I was feeling a little befuddled. It seems when I wasn’t paying attention we had taken a flying leap through the Looking Glass and here I was in the most surreally matter-of-fact…negotiation (there is no other word for it) concerning if/where/when I would consent to kiss him. (How did I get here?) He even seemed puzzled at my refusal, “Why not?” he said.

And how old did you say you were….? I tried to counter, giving him a hard, disapproving stare. He did not blink.

We disembarked at the tiny airport and walked across the tarmac and into the terminal together. I laughed a bit too derisively, asking him why ever he didn’t just say he was “shipping out to Iraq tomorrow” – surely a much more effective (and classic) line. “Because it’s not true”, he said simply.

The terminal was quite empty by now – we must have been meandering and the rest of the passengers had hurried past us and gone their way. I could almost hear him calculating the distance, the time left to the exit, as it loomed about 20 metres and about 28 seconds ahead. I thought, “I wonder what someone in a movie would do?” The bathroom was on my left, so, feeling I should be saying something flinty and hardboiled like, You got balls kid for just askin’!, I said rather primly, “Look, I’m going into the ladies room. If you’re still here when I come out then I’ll think about it.”

When I came out he was still there, looking quite solemn, sitting ramrod straight on an orange plastic seat. He looked like a lost dog who didn’t yet realize it.

 

 

 

Copyright Britical 2007. All rights reserved. 

Miami, FL
 
The widely held notion that Hallowe’en is a chance for the entire female population of New York City to dress like sluts (slut nurses, slut bunnies, slut sluts, etc.), is surely moot in Miami. In Miami, apparently, every day is Hallowe’en.

Even though I am here “off season”, the weather is just warm enough, the place is blissfully empty, and what wildlife can be observed looks, to my eyes, very much “in season” (as in ovulating mares). Looking in a shop window, even a female mannequin lounges supine front and centre, legs akimbo - and knickerless. Over lunch, I see little herds of women who resemble unconvincing yet ever so slightly restrained female impersonators in lots of Cavalli and weird plastic surgery. They perch at their tables looking as if they just discovered the word “vivacious” and have resolved to practice very hard. They twitter away and flutter their super-sized eyelashes at no one in particular. Probably a South American thing, I think generously. It isn’t quite as advertised here (legions of people who look like Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie models strolling hand in hand down Ocean Avenue), but all the more fascinating for that.

Not that I didn’t make some sort of When in Rome effort myself. But teetering gamely around Bal Harbor one afternoon on three and a half inch Manolo leopard mules and wearing a giant hat (I’m still not willing to take the sun, not even here, especially not here), I felt like I was playing dress up. Plus, it’s a lot of fucking work. And my goodness, it’s not even “the season” yet!

Of course, I had asked several friends what there was to do here apart from clubs and hotel pools and clubs and snarfing stuff up your nose at 4am, and most exchanges can be boiled down to the following:

Me: Guess what? I’m going down to Miami this weekend, is there anything to do besides clubs and hotel pools and stuff?

Friend:   Uh, no…..what do you mean? Why are you going anyway?

Most of them rolled their eyes, tickled that I would ever go there, even if they like to. “Oooh, you’ll hate it, ha ha ha!”

They all rack their brains and they all come up with the same thing: “the design district”. Though one lovely friend thinks there is a botanical garden somewhere or other. But Lord knows the place is already stuffed to bursting with shiny palm trees, lizards, and some sort of dark green shrub that I saw outside a mall full of lovely pink flowers among which were nestled lots and lots of fat, fluffy, very contented looking little sparrows. I thought this was very cool – a sparrow bush! But no one seemed very impressed and they kept walking.

I will say I was surprised to see how long the pool was at the Delano: “Oooh, look!”, I squealed idiotly, “I could swim laps here!” My friend just said “Mmm…” and gave me an odd, inscrutable sidelong glance that I only understood when we’d strolled to the end of it and I realized the water is only an inch or two deep for almost half its length. What’s the point? Dismaying, unless you’re wanting to convert your sensible atheist friends by pretending to be Jesus.

Feeling bitter and misled, I went home to my friend’s apartment – a lovely penthouse, where what was to be done except open another bottle of champagne and scoff down yet more caviar for dinner (third night in a row we couldn’t be bothered to get the ready-made salads from Whole Foods out the fridge. Miami will do this to you, I guess.). We sat on the floor trying to figure out the cable TV system. This, I think then, is much more fun than than South Beach.

Below us the building is "off season" empty. The windows across the way do not blaze with light and parties; the harbour does not glister. It is dark. The hallways remind me, excitingly, of ‘The Shining’ - but even the twins are elsewhere. There is a spa and pool on the 5th floor which we don’t bother with after being accosted by an alarming man covered in hair who came galloping towards us, maybe just happy for some company: “Well, hello, ladies..!”.

In Miami you can frolic and shop  – and then lay on the beach all afternoon until your skin resembles an Hermes bag. That’s expected, after all. And without wanting to damn with faint praise, I will say the clouds down here are very nice: dramatic, stormy, if promising much and not delivering, at least this weekend. I had been hoping for a big hurricane, some alligators, or maybe get to Disneyland – but the driver informs me it is four hours away. Four hours?? How can this be? Who knew the land of the hanging chads was so large. Clearly, I am in the wrong place. Then again I may be back in December, when the crowds return, when no doubt it will be clear that Disneyland has, in fact, come to me. As they say, it is what it is and I feel certain whatever it is, it’ll be highly entertaining.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2007. All rights reserved.

 

NYC 

 

Perhaps if I did more yoga I really would be able to kick myself in the ass for not buying the ‘Yoga Kills’ t-shirt I saw a few years ago.

Yesterday, I was reminded of yoga’s unparalleled ability to enrage as I glowered and scowled my way through an hour of pointless and pointlessly excruciating silly positions. The well-meaning inevitably perky instructor took us through the usual, bland (yes, bland yet unfathomably painful, like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons) series of downward dog, asana whatever… this and that ligament snapping idiocy.

I follow as best I can and ponder why it is that every few years, I will take a yoga class thinking that it will have morphed into something bearable. But like the therapists say, if the tree grew apples last year, it won’t grow oranges this year. Over at last, I heard someone saying, "Hey, this has really lengthened me and given me balance." I pointed out, with some asperity, that neither limbs nor muscles can be lengthened and that balance is specific to an activity. You only have to observe an equestrian trying to snowboard to see that one in action.

As usual, yoga left me in a filthy mood, and very far from blissful. I stomped off went about my wholly horrible day of being seatless on the subway while oversized people with blue and yellow kittens holding fishing rods painted on their billowing t-shirts lounged fatly, spilling onto all the seats and the six pharmacies I visited were out of stock of some mundane product I discovered later simply does not exist. And so on and so on.

But this evening, returning home at last, and having snagged a seat on the train, a little bright place in the day: a huge, black labrador plonked himself down onto the floor right next to me. Of course his owner, backing his way into the seat beside me, was blind, and, in the nature of some blind people, seemed slightly gruff; which is to say, too proud to accept too much help.

I knew not to pet a working dog, but the look on the animal’s face made it challenging. He had immediately rested his big head on his owner’s lap (if I was horrid, I’d say he was firing up to deliver a particularly skillful session of fellatio, but his expression was not calculating enough for that). The dog’s face was absolutely possessed by the most rapturous look of Go-to-Hell-and-Back reverence I have ever seen on the face of anyone anywhere - parent, child, rapturous sportsfan, or recently converted religious hysteric. It was mesmerizing.

I was only person on the train in a position to see the dog’s gaze. It made me sad his owner could not see it. But then it came to me, in the way these things sometimes do, as he spoke gently to the animal, that the feelings were entirely mutual: "Come on, turn round, you know what happens if you sit that way…" (Tail gets stepped on, I assume). The dog slowly manoeuvered himself to face away from the precious lap - and reluctantly so, or so I fancied.

 

Still, seeing the blissful expression on the dog’s face yesterday, there was one thing I just knew with absolute certainty: he did not practice yoga. There is, dear reader, a lesson in that.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2007. All rights reserved.

Rome, Italy

In Rome this evening, I was reminded of a long ago
someone in New York; G., a very handsome whiney,
Italian boy in his thirties who still lived with his
parents in Brooklyn. He was also a Tortured Poet and
actor who, on account of being so unbelievably
emotional and sensitive, had a whole complicated
ritual of jobless self-indulgence that he would toil
through each and every morning - much to my irritation
and amusement.

Most days, around 11am or so, would heave himself
slowly out of bed as if suffering terrible pain. He
would then lie immobile in a hot bath for half an hour
to comfort his allegedly aching limbs. Stretching
exercises followed for another half an hour for the
same reason. And, last but not least (and in
retrospect, my very, very wicked favourite): he would
solemnly disappear into the bathroom to sit on the
toilet in the dark to make himself cry. I joke not -
and worse, reader, I dated him.

Still, in my defence, his parents’ house had a huge,
slobbery dog to play with and there were always good
things to eat and so I grimly put up with it. But as I
soon came to see it, the real problem in our
relationship was the lighting. Because despite having
a whole house to themselves, his family insisted on
living in the basement, a dank, underground room lit
by hideous flourescent lights. Why? Upstairs, after
all, was a perfectly nice kitchen and living room,
although puzzlingly, the latter was cordoned off, like
some unlikely VIP room, with a little blue rope. I
never saw a soul go in there. But like those furniture
rooms at the Met Museum, you were allowed peer inside.
At G.’s house, though, all the chairs and sofas had
evidently never, ever been used and were indeed still
covered in their brand new shiny plastic wrapping.

I simply didn’t understand any of this nonsense and
G., when I carefully broached the subject one
Christmas Day, got exasperated and stormed off, no
doubt for another cry and a long sulky poetry session.
I hated the idea of spending Christmas Day in that
room with his huge noisy extended family and their
spawn, wretched under the harsh, depressing lights.
Nothing about it felt Christmassy. In fact, it’s when
I realised that the true meaning of Christmas, even
more than goodwill to all, baby Jesus, and lots of
presents, surely lies in how things are lit. And as if
the whining, crying and cringe-making poetry about
Madonnas, whores, guilt and the crucifixion were not
enough, it was only then that I realised once and for
all that things were simply not going to work out
between us.

Years later, I understand his family a little better
than I did back then. Mama’s boy’s parents were from
Bari and barely spoke any English; in fact they
usually spoke in dialect rather than what has now
become standard Italian. Used perhaps to dim interiors
and sofas constructed entirely from mud and straw, and
outdoor toilets full of chickens and goats, bright
lighting would have been some sort of status symbol
for them. Huddled on the boat coming over it was
probably all they could think about. How marvellously
decadent, nay, de rigeur once you arrived in the New
World, to have everything lit up like a hospital O.R.
simply because you could, because you’d made it at
last.

I realise now that their spanking new sofas were "for
show", being hard won and not to be used for what they
were intended lest they wear out. My Mother, a child
of WWII, the British equivalalent of the Depression
era in terms of scrimping and scraping, can have a
similar atttitude about things. Perfume is saved "for
best", as are numerous odds and ends, bits of string
and cardboard, all saved for goodness knows what
emergency and apt to tumble out of cupboards and
drawers while searching for the useful things which
are inevitably not to be found.

I am reminded of all this in Rome. Because apart from
the unexpectedly grand, ochre beauty of this city it
is the one other thing I’ve been surprised by. Not
that I expected or wanted a parody of creaky little
joints run by jolly, opera singing Italians with
drippy candles stuck in Chianti bottles,  God no, but
still… even many of the more upscale restaurants
here could light a runway for an A380. I am dismayed.
No one looks good under this clinical glare. If I want
to see my food that closely I’d have just taken the F
train to Brooklyn. But then again, why wouldn’t Rome
be like Brooklyn? - and all the other places poor
people go to make both life and rooms a little bit
brighter.

Over dinner tonight, squinting into the glare, I
peered with some astonishment at the stark new
topography of my dinner partner’s face until I
realised, with some alarm, that he might well be doing
the same thing to me. I looked quickly back down at my
well-lit food. Too late. "Wow", he said, his mouth
full of pasta," you know I never noticed before but
your nose is really crooked, isn’t it!" It seemed to
me in that moment that there is indeed a bright side
to all this inappropriate brightness: you are able to
see not only a fly in your soup, but then and now, a
fly in the ointment or your distinctly ungentlemanly
dinner partner.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2006

 

       

 

New York City, New York

If I am no longer completely English, neither am I quite an American. I live in New York and arrived the day the Berlin Wall was finally pulled down. Quitting Europe for the New World on a PanAm jet, I hopped from one small island to another.

NYC

Last night, while you were being piously wholesome in the country, I made sure to go see ‘Renee Risque and the Art Lovers’. They’re just the most cheerfully, mock degenerate band with brilliant tunes, a packed house and outre pottymouths. Afterwards, we decided to skip the post-gig after-party discussions and jumped in a cab to Gramercy Park heading for a party at The Players Club. Odd crowd there. It seemed to be accessorized with a bunch of peacocky Conde Nast trustfunder interns and fashion photographers all trying to outglitter the chandeliers and Tiffany glass as they swarmed underneath. Interestingly, I did notice a rather suspect and probably deliberate dearth of Vogue’s “latest fall looks” - perhaps because they are slightly behind the Manhattan curve and thus fit only to be foisted upon the plebes who actually read the glossy thing. There was also a woman floating about in the bathroom who looked exactly like Heather Graham - but prettier, less Tweety Bird. Later, we realised this was Heather Graham. An amusing party, then.

Did you ever see that film, the annoyingly titled ‘What the *&%$##@ Do We Know?’? It was, I suppose, a well-meaning beginners primer on quantum theory and its connections with Eastern thought and mysticism. Yes, the usual stuff. And yes, I am being horribly condescending. The filmmakers had, bless ‘em, tried to dramatize said theory using a lengthy and highly irritating cartoon wedding sequence and Marlee Matalin. I suppose if you’ve been living in a hole and never heard of sub-atomic particle physics then this was no doubt all a fabulous, mind-bending revelation for you. But for me the only fascinating section of the film was getting to watch all these CalTech-y physicists talk about the nature of energy - presumably quantum energy - and their belief that things can become manifest simply by a person willing it to be so. This notion of being able to bring things into your life is an old one of course, and was long ago adopted by hippies and therapists, in both cases to let you know your misery was self-induced. However, I think the idea can have value.

Stuck in traffic on the way to the party, I was thinking about this and decided to attempt a little experiment to try and summon up an actual person, through dodgy quantum means. Of course, I have tried this exercise on a couple of occcasions before, usually involving wads of cash or being left an entire brownstone in some kindly stranger’s will - to no avail. Mais voila, not fifteen minutes after this silly thought, my friend, in the words of Harry Potter, apparated. And in the very same room with me to boot. He was wearing some ill-advised red chequered riff on Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz’s shirt, and, sitting at an empty table with a couple of people, looked as scruffy as advertized. He was wrapped up in an apparently earnest discussion with an anonymous pudgy man, and seemingly immune to the rest of the party whirling self-consciously around him. Alas, this obliviousness extended to a small blonde woman sitting to his right. She looked sulky, and, not being a “sultry” brunettish sort, this made her look merely peevish; tight-lipped, perhaps impatient to just leave. Once, on my rounds of the giddy room, I glanced over and saw her pat weakly, briefly, at his back. If he was aware of her ministrations it didn’t show. He was still talking intensely to the man, head nodding vigourously as he made some vital, Serious point, finger stabbing the empty air.

As you may know, this person is generally regarded as unforgivably ubiquitous in these parts. This is galling. And such complaining seems rather tactless when performed in front of this writer. As for me, vaguely aghast at all the desperate, competing Conde Nast fabulousness in the room, I wondered if I hadn’t just started my own alarming trend: quantum stalking.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2005

NYC

It’s said you’re a real New Yorker after five years of being here, although in typical New York fashion, this definition is self-servingly malleable according to who is laying claim - and why. In this way we end up with SoHo House 2.1 - the inevitable New York version. No, the place is not quite a theme park - a la the hilarious Ralph Lauren Manse on 72nd Street - but I wonder if it shouldn’t be. It is, after all, dismayingly short of what I had naively imagined would be one of those stuffy, cigar smoke-filled sanctuaries full of crusty old waiters, thrillingly misogynistic old rich geysers, huge sofas with the stuffing spilling out and gorgeous women with long, Bakelite cigarette holders shrieking, “Oh but dahling, you simply must…!” Perhaps this is because I have never gotten around to visiting the London original, and why it is probably best that I never do.

My few ex-pat friends here loudly complain that SoHo House NY is “trashy”, that they “let effing anyone in” and that the rules for admittance in London are more stringent. I wonder if this is true, or if we’ve all, pond and island-hopping opportunists that we are, simply drunk our own Anglo-flavoured Kool Aid. After all, any Brit here will slyly tell you (if you’re also British), that it does not behoove you, even nowadays, even in Manhattan, to misplace your English accent.

Gain admittance to what many think of as fortress SoHo House NYC and among all the bewilderingly dressed way up, the jarring American accented and the uptalking PR girls with their hair stuck to their lipgloss, is the miniature special smoking section cunningly disguised as: The Games Room. This is arguably the most English room in the place because it is here that daringly decadent sorts are permitted to smoke. Aware that this dubious privilege, together with the $1000 plus yearly membership dues, allow you to indulge on a mere whim in a thrilling game of table football, well, you feel almost obliged to coincidentally fancy lighting up a fag when you’re in there whether you want to or not, don’t you? It really makes you feel like a Someone.

But wearying of this, faced with the rather impolite coughing up of your own lung tissue, you are entitled to stagger up to the weirdly self-congratulatory ambience of the roof deck where the “swimming” pool may as well be rubber and is fit only for self-consciously paddling-while-drinking (surely a misdemeanor) and the displaying of flesh (usually disappointing, and therefore in my view a felony). Everyone everywhere is terribly busy protesting too much, sartorially or otherwise - not least myself because, apart from writing this, and horrid secret-snob that I am, I recently had Amex amend the first name on my credit card to an initial only. This was in no small part to thwart the christian name greetings of “the help” (so much for noblesse oblige), an over-familiarity that in England would be regarded as rather an affront - to both parties.

Perhaps it is just accents. I wonder how different the two places can really be at, say, 2am on a Sunday morning? You say, Sybil, that the British version is fuelled by the great levellers of powder and champagne, as must be the American copycat. Ditto, surely, the schmoozing, skirt/pants-chasing and general atmosphere of anxiety, of imminent status slippage. In London I can only assume the typically English habit of consciously dressing down makes it seem even less some ridiculous jazz age fever dream of my Americanly Brideshead imagination than the SoHo House I have here, right in New York - a city that is, as you say, my very own.

As Brits we do pride ourselves on both our deliberate crudeness on one hand, and our would-be lack of crassness and upright composure at the other. (At worst we might charitably admit to a surfeit of sarcasm, while the Americans, baffled by the puzzling combination of MerchantIvory films and English football hooligans, try just too hard and too loudly.) We take it for granted that we can have it both ways. Anyone else (unless British) trying to pull off this nifty trick is a wanker - doomed to failure, or at least a Paddington Hard Stare. But put a bunch of Brits in SoHo House NY for an evening, turn the sound down to mute, and I wonder if you’d be able to tell the difference? Possibly not. Except the Yanks, bless ‘em, would be better dressed.

Have a nice day!

 

 

Copyright Britical 2005

Copyright Britical 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008