NYC

New York was all too brief for Champ, a day and a half in one of the biggest cities in the world and one of those places that tops those lists compiled by Timeout or Lonely Planet or those kind of people. Work awaited back in London. For me, it was a lot longer than anywhere else we’d stayed in the States and because of that and the sheer variety and depth to the city, it felt like a holiday within a holiday, a little greedy even.

We stayed with Nat in Lower Manhatten and toasted the sunset and the skyline from his rooftop and ate oblong pizza the width of the table.

Then I stayed with Laci and Zooey from the Bronx with her big ole ears prick up something batlike for a dog in hipster Williamsburg, where alternative has become a norm in itself like when the avant garde becomes the accepted and is begging to be undone by the post-avant garde, but just for a night there.

Next, further south Brooklyn in Prospect Heights with Mike and his touchstone, the zeitgeist, and dependability to pick the places that are justifiably most popular. Though we didn’t go, he knew the pizza place run by a grumpy old salt who handled each base dough himself where the smoke thickens the room and seeps into the pores of a 2 hour queue for a taste of all the fuss. He knew the restaurant burger restaurant and where the best karaoke deal was at, where the best coffee was and the second best at Second Stop where he knew the $10,000 Clover coffee machine, written off than no better than by his own fair hand with an Aeropress.

After that I stayed with Julia who is on food stamps working rough neighbourhoods flyering doing community organisation, and who met Michelle Obama the day I left. We talked old and new news and mollycoddled Momo-chan the cat sick with cold and ear infection. Why is it cats get sick so rarely?

Finally, I left NYC. I was more than ready to come back home and cut my teeth on something to matter to me for a long time, to plunge into London and see what I can surface clutching or whether I’ll sink ankles shackled to shuffle never run down amongst the nearest town to my own.