NYC
3rd-6th of July 2002

It’s strange coming back to New York the following day. We only left twelve days ago but it feels like so much longer. We get a shared minibus into the city from Newark. The minibus is driven by a complete lunatic who shouts at himself and we’re relieved to be dropped off at our hotel in one piece forty minutes later. As is our custom by now, we're staying in five-star luxury in one of the poshest hotels in town, Donald Trump’s Plaza

Having spent the past three days trapped inside air-conditioned mausoleums, we’re quite keen to do something al fresco, so peruse the magazines in our hotel room and find ourselves a restaurant with a courtyard garden to have dinner. It was incredibly hot when we landed this afternoon but we figure that by the time the sun goes down it will have cooled off into a balmy city night. Wrong. By the time we sit down for dinner at nine o’clock the temperature is hovering around the late nineties, but I'm so determined that we’re going to do this, that we’re going to have our dinner outside goddamit, that despite gentle protestations from the sweetly concerned staff, they lay us a solitary table out in the courtyard and we begin our meal all alone. Ten minutes later we’re starting to feel light-headed and are finding it quite hard to breathe, let alone eat or drink so we admit defeat and ask to be moved inside. The maitre d’ is visibly relieved.

We go for a wander after dinner and find a cat in a newsagent who expresses more eloquently than I ever could the intensity of a steamy New York night:

We get back to the hotel and put on the TV. It’s official. New York is having a heat wave. Great.

*

We wake up the next morning and New York, unfortunately, is still having a heat wave. As all the things we'd been looking forward to doing in New York (ie; shopping) involve copious amounts of walking, we know it’s going to be a tough day. We set off and have breakfast in a Dean and deLuca and then we give up on the idea of walking anywhere (which is a shame, because city-walking is one of my favourite things in the world) and get on the subway:

It’s the 4th July and the whole of America is on holiday. Half the shops are closed and the streets are deserted. We decide to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

It’s excellent. Another sign that’s it July 4th is the fact that everyone’s dressed in red white and blue, including the woman below. I tried to get a shot of her from in front, but failed which is a shame because she’s about sixty years old and wearing a stars and stripes bikini top. In a gallery. Not a good look:

More patriotism greets us on our return to the Plaza:

On our way down to the river to watch the July 4th Fireworks, we stop for a drink in a really cool bar at Grand Central Station called The Campbell Apartment.

There’s something vaguely unsettling about the atmosphere, as thousands of New Yorkers and out-of-towners head silently towards the river. It’s the first chance New Yorkers have had to celebrate en masse since September 11th, but there’s no sense of imminent celebration - it’s more like a memorial march.

Jascha and I feel slightly dislocated and out of place, like we’re crashing something deeply personal, a funeral, or a wedding. We talk softly, feeling that our accents will pick us out as interlopers. Being foreign seems vulgar somehow in these circumstances, insensitive.

The ponderous semi-silence is broken only by an extremely drunk Hispanic man, playing spin the bottle with his over-excited nieces. A family in front of us have fold-out chairs and a transistor. We’re incredibly jealous. We’ve walked for an age to get here in a humid 100º heatwave and I'd give them $100 now for just ten minutes in one of their chairs.

We can barely hear the speeches and messages from the other end of the river, but we can hear the cheers and applause and can only assume that rousing and reassuring things are being said. There’s music and more talk and then the fireworks begin. It’s not like the Jubilee fireworks in London the previous month. Nobody oohs or aahs. Nobody screams or laughs. There’s no sense of excitement. People aren’t here to enjoy themselves. They’re here as an act of defiance.

Thousands of people silently file away from the river as the fireworks come to a halt and Jascha and I decide we’re ready for another drink. We find an Irish pub for a cool and incredibly refreshing pint and than we head into Chinatown for our dinner. And guess what? Chinatown is dead. The City That Never Sleeps is out cold. The streets are empty. Restaurants literally lock their doors in front of our very eyes. It’s not even ten o’clock. We wander round with sore feet and empty stomachs for about twenty minutes until we stumble upon the only open restaurant in the area and stuff our faces with huge portions of delicious food.

Back at our hotel we fall into bed after what suddenly feels like a very long day and the phone rings. It’s our friend Peter from London. Patch and Nic, two of our closest friends, have had a baby girl. She's called Emily and I can't believe she didn’t wait until we got home to make her entrance into the world! Patch and Nic are the first of our social circle of friends to sprog, the first of the people we see every Friday night, go drinking with, eating with, playing with. We go to bed with the feeling like that it's the end of an era.

*

We wake up the next morning to find that the heatwave has finally broken. We celebrate by going and having lunch at an unbelievably civilised restaurant in Central Park called the Boathouse:

It’s so nice to be able to walk around without feeling like you’re going to pass out at any moment, so after lunch we hit the streets of New York with a vengeance. We go to Bloomingdales and Macy’s and Bergdorf Goodmans. We go down to Canal Street and spend far too long in jeans shops. We have half price Margheritas in a bar called Angie’s and then we just wander around aimlessly as the sun sets on a city we’re finally having a chance to appreciate:

Dinner is Malaysian. I can’t remember where it was, but it was very good. We get lost in Soho after dinner, trying to find a bar we’d seen on our first night when it was too hot to walk anywhere at all:

We give up after an hour and get a cab back to the Plaza, where we have a drink in the wondrous Oak Bar:

And then we go to bed. The adventure’s over.

*

Our flight home doesn't leave until 4pm so we’ve got a whole morning to play around with, but we’ve got that end-of-holiday feeling and can't really muster up the enthusiasm to do anything. We have an enormous lunch in a Korean restaurant and replace half our body mass with garlic:

Then we go to the Empire State Building, but the queue’s so long and so overheated due to the aircon not working and we both reek so badly of garlic that we give up halfway down the line and give our tickets to someone as we leave. We didn’t really want to go up anyway, did we?

We collect our luggage from the hotel and get in a cab to Newark. The blow of leaving America and having to go home is softened somewhat by the fact that we’re flying Business class, and we spend an hour in the BA Lounge drinking free beer, eating free snacks and playing around on the internet. And then it’s time to say Goodbye America.

I feel quite emotional about leaving. I've only been on American soil for a couple of weeks but I've managed to squeeze a hell of a lot in and it feels like I've been here for at least two months. As we sit in Business Class luxury, drinking complimentary champagne, eating our three-course gourmet dinner with plastic cutlery and watching Monsters Inc on our personal screens, I think about my preconceptions of the USA and how they’ve been affected.

Preconception:

Americans are over-confident and have no concept of personal space.

Truth:

Americans are generally speaking, quiet, humble and keep themselves to themselves. No-one attempted to make conversation with me when I travelled alone. No-one was loud or over-bearing. Everyone was incredibly polite, and old-fashioned good manners were the order of the day. They are much nicer than English people.

Preconception:

Lots of Americans are obesely overweight.

Truth:

The vast majority of Americans are trim, slim and healthy-looking. It’s just that when they get fat, they get really fat and somehow manage to find jeans that fit.

Preconception:

America is generic and over-commercialised.

Truth:

America is generic and over-commercialised, but the few corners I saw that weren’t, like Louisville and New York, just made me want to explore further. I want to go to Louisiana and New Orleans and North Carolina and South Carolina and Maine and New England and New Mexico. I want to come back and see the rest of it.

Preconception:

American food is junk food.

Truth:

I did some of the best eating of my life in the States and had some truly memorable meals.

Preconception:

Americans are bland.

Truth:

The truth is that Americans are not bland - they’re just not like the English. Not at all. I didn’t swear while I was in the States, not once, and that was because nobody else did. Whether that was because they were too polite to swear because they thought I was English and easily offended, or because they just didn’t swear, I don't know but I really wanted someone to say, oh, for fuck’s sake, you’re fucking kidding me, fuck off, no fucking way. I really missed swearing so badly. I missed people being rude. I missed the English accent. There’s something so bizarre about being surrounded by the American accent for two weeks, like being in a two-week-long episode of Frasier. Americans just aren’t crude enough for my tastes. They’re way too nice. I felt like I held back my true personality while I was there because I didn’t want to be seen as vulgar or ill-mannered. Which is daft really as I was out there promoting a book with an unbelievably crude British heroine who makes liberal use of the ‘c’ word and is utterly obnoxious, which everyone seemed to love. Maybe it’s all an act. Maybe behind closed doors, Americans are as foul-mouthed, toilet-obsessed, heavy-drinking and dysfunctional as us. They certainly come across that way in their films, their TV shows and their books. Maybe it's the English accent - maybe it puts them on their best behaviour. I don’t know.

But ultimately I loved America for being so incredibly, incredibly American. With the exception of the weather in San Francisco, everything was exactly as I'd imagined it would be. The shopping malls, the fridges, the cars, the clothes, the police, the cityscapes, the people, the roads. Going to America is like finally meeting someone you’ve been told about all your life. ‘Hi, how nice to meet you at last, I've heard so much about you.’ There were no surprises, no disappointments, nothing unexpected. America, you see, does exactly what it says on the tin.

God Bless Her!

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