Getting into a cab in New York is generally like entering a little yellow bubble. Sure, there might be a slightly musky smell from the previous passenger, or the driver’s lunchtime burger/kebab/sag paneer, but on the whole drivers keep themselves to themselves. Most drivers are too engrossed in impenetrable conversations with various family members, and don’t bother giving you a second glance after they’ve found out where you’re going. There might be a small exchange between the two of you when you realise that they’ve taken you to Central Park West rather than Brooklyn, but other than that you can largely enjoy your journey in relative peace.
The same can’t be said about a black cab journey in London, or indeed most places in the UK. Clearly there are some drivers who keep quiet, only speaking to ask their passengers questions such as “is that bloke going to throw up?” But there’s a sizeable proportion for whom the period of time between passengers is a temporary break in an otherwise non-stop all-day conversation. I say “conversation”, but really what I mean is a “bitter and marginally aggressive diatribe against anything and everything that moves”.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had to listen as a driver railed against governments, immigrants, teachers, parents, young people, Asians, the disabled, upper class prats and the police.
A faked phone call will get you out of listening to some of it. But eventually you just have to submit to the drivel, and hope that you don’t hit heavy traffic.
Taking a cab with The Best Man, The Beancounter and Sickly Child this weekend, we encountered the chattiest can driver in the world. Within a matter of minutes, he’d told us that his daughter was a top model (and showed us a picture), that he had accused his now son-in-law of being gay, and that he and his sons were all handy with their fists and would batter anybody who crossed them (or his daughter). That was shortly before he tried to marry off Sickly Child to one of his punch-happy boys, obviously. Oh, and that during the 60s he had been George Best’s driver who had once failed to persuade a drunken George to get out of bed to go and play for Manchester United.
We were only in the taxi for fifteen minutes, but by the time we got out of the car we were exhausted.
It’s enough to make you pine for the dubious odours of a yellow cab.
I’ve been a music fan for as long as I can remember. From listening to the Muppets album at my grandmother’s house as a five year old, through to playing a cassette of the soundtrack from Electric Dreams, and on to my first live gig (Heart, if you must know - credibility was a distant prospect at that point in my life), music was a central part of being a kid. Much to the dismay of She Who Was Born To Worry and Little Sis, who were forced to endure me listen to Kajagoogoo’s ‘White Feathers’ album more than was ever necessary.
Now I’m watching The Young Ones (the kids, that is, rather than Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer and co) grow up with an equal love of music, manifesting itself in hours wired up to their iPods or locked in their rooms listening to The Clash and the Arctic Monkeys (The Eldest) or Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry (The Youngest). To be honest, I don’t care what they like - I’m just happy to see them care about such an important art form. Although if I have to hear the Cheetah Girls again, I won’t be held responsible for my actions. No court in the land would convict me…
Tonight as I put The Youngest to bed, we ended up in a conversation about the relative merits of being an adult or a child. Delivering her killer blow, she triumphantly cried: “Children are the future!” All this succeeded in doing was making me sing a song with the opening lines “I believe the children are our future/teach them well and let them lead the way.” After a brief flirtation with believing that the song was USA For Africa’s “We Are The World”, I finally and proudly managed to work out that it was “The Greatest Love Of All.”
“Who’s that by?” questioned The Youngest.
“Whitney Houston, of course,” I replied.
“Whitney Houston? Who’s he?”
Welcome, my friends, to the all too fickle world of showbiz.
Back in the day, I used to be a man about (London) town. Snake Hips Allen and myself used to go to the opening of the envelope as long as there was the vague promise of a free beer and a couple of lukewarm canapes. And even if there wasn’t, we could generally be persuaded to pitch up anyway. Admittedly his then-girlfriend would generally turn up half way through proceedings and drag him back home with his tail between his legs, but that just meant more canapes for me.
After a few years, the sheer effort of socialising got to us both, and we independently hung up our party boots. Sure, I’ve had the occasional lapse since then, and Snake Hips has now resumed his antics with a move to San Francisco. But long before my move to the US, I’d happily settled for a quiet life of good food, fine wine and the company of friends.
That said, I’ve never been the most practical of people. I’ve stripped down and restored the odd piece of furniture, and put up the occasional shelf or two, but on the whole it’s fair to say that if friends have needed a bit of manual work done then I’ve not generally been their first port of call.
Getting married to The Special One has changed all that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pretty dreadful at the whole DIY malarkey, but I now I enter into it with the enthusiasm of a child that’s been given a hammer and told to batter the hell out of anything that moves. I walk into hardware stores with the supreme confidence of a man who knows what he’s doing. The effect is somewhat diminished by the fact that I have to beg for help about three minutes later, but for those three minutes I feel pretty damn good I can tell you.
My new found, ahem, ‘ruggedness’ reached its apotheosis this weekend, when I found myself on top of a barn in upstate New York, helping to construct a new roof. With a drill in hand and an electric saw by my side, I barely recognised myself. Even the fact that I got bitten by a mosquito on the middle of my forehead, and now resemble a latter-day unicorn, couldn’t ruin my sense of achievement.
Please don’t be suprised if I take up with the Amish over the coming years.
It’s wryly amusing seeing that the Evening Standard has been forced to apologise to Prince Philip for wrongly claiming that he was fighting prostate cancer. Not because of the nature of the illness that the Queen’s husband absolutely and categorically does not have, but just because it’s rare to hear a story that’s not about Philip himself having to say sorry for something he’s said.
Let’s face it, Philip only ever opens his mouth to insert his foot in it. From asking a Scottish driving instructor how he managed to keep locals off the booze long enough to get them to pass their test, to asking a Cayman Islander whether they were all descended from pirates, Prince Philip is the king of the inappropriate comment. After all, who can forget his 1986 comment on a state trip to China, when he told a group of British students that “if you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty eyed.” Or congratulating a native from Papua New Guinea on managing to not get eaten?
He’s an embarrassment to his country. Fortunately his country is Greece, but the British are all guilty by association.
The terrible irony, of course, is that the American equivalent of Prince Philip is the president of the entire country. Given that George Bush is in Beijing at the moment for the opening of the 2008 Olympics, here’s hoping the American embassy has got its crisis management team on 24 hour standby.
After about fifteen years of not eating breakfast (unless consuming my own body weight in sausage and bacon on the morning after the night before), I’ve recently taken up cereal. It’s hardly a lifestyle choice, more a doctor-enforced measure to counteract years of eating Iceland’s CJD Burgers, but actually it’s been nowhere near as painful as I’d imagined.
To be honest, even when I ate breakfast, I was never much of a fan of cereal. When we were kids, Little Sis and I used to get excited about the occasional appearance of a variety pack of cereals, but I think that was largely due to our fascination with the tiny boxes that looked exactly like scaled down versions of the real thing. We probably used to fight over who had the Sugar Puffs, although I must admit that my preoccupation was always with ensuring that I never had to eat the Coco Pops. I never did understand why ‘turning the milk brown’ was given as a unique selling point of that stuff. I don’t like milk at the best of times, but at least let it be white if I’ve got to drink it.
The cereal section of most grocery stores in America seems to be bigger than most supermarkets back home. As in ‘bigger than the supermarkets themselves’. It can take a good twenty minutes just to take in all the choices. But after your first visit to the cereal aisle, you quickly realise that the choice is illusory. Because when it comes down to it, all you have to decide is whether you want your cereal to taste of sugar or cardboard. Whether it’s made by familiar names like Kelloggs or Nestle, or the slightly more exotic Kashi or Peace Valley, there’s simply a straight selection between sickly sweet cinnamony frosted weird-coloured honey glazed crunchy stuff, or recycled cereal boxes that have ironically been turned into cereal themselves. With occasinal raisins thrown in to break up the paper-based monotony.
Once you’ve realised that, it’s just a matter of choosing between the two styles, and then picking the box with the nicest design on it.
I’ve taken to buying my cereal from a corner deli across the road from where I work, but I’ve finally decided that this has to stop. In part it’s because I don’t like the designs on their slightly more limited range cardboard cereals, and partly because their cereals are about $2 more expensive than the same thing in a normal grocery store.
But mainly it’s because they keep stealing a penny from me.
My personal cardboard selection costs $4.99 at this store. Every single time I go there, they tell me that the cereal costs $4.99 and I hand over a $5 note. And then I wait for the change. The change never comes. They just look at me blankly, and then call on the next customer to step forward.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need the single cent, and I’m not trying to be some kind of latter day Scrooge. I’ve never even asked that they hand it over. But there’s a principle at stake - why don’t they just label the box with a $5 price tag, instead of making me feel like I’ve been duped every time?
Or maybe it’s just that the dollar is so worthless these days that they think the penny has no use to anyone?
Especially to a namby pamby cardboard cereal muncher like me.
When it comes to fashion, I can hardly say that I am a thought leader. I try to keep it classic, but my look is very much ‘vaguely preppy 34 year old who wishes that he was still 25′ rather than ‘edgy style icon’. Recently, I’ve even found myself enjoying wearing suits for the first time in my life, even though - much to She Who Was Born To Worry’s dismay - I’ve never been employed in a job that has required me to wear one. Put simply, the chances of me appearing on a list of the world’s leading fashion figures is marginally more negligible than the likelihood of Mariah Carey receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature.
That said, I still think I have every right to rail against what seems to be a distinctly American male habit of wearing plaid shorts in public. Every day I get on the subway and see people who seem to be perfectly normal but for the fact that they are wearing shorts that resemble pyjamas. I know that this is the country that invented the fried peanut butter and banana sandwich and that ‘taste’ is therefore in limited supply, but surely everybody has to draw the line somewhere?
Next thing you know, it’ll be the mullet making a comeback.
One thing that I really do miss about being in the UK in the summer is the ability to sit having one-for-the-road in a riverside drinking establishment. Obviously this Brit Out Of Water is a complete tee-totaller (ahem), but the opportunity to drink a nice pint of, erm, ginger ale in a pub garden overlooking rowers and marine life as the sun gently sets is one that should never be turned down.
Britain’s river banks are littered with boozers, and the river has played a key part in my social upbringing as a result. My earliest days of boozing with The Beancounter et al saw us frequent places like The Boathouse in Chester, although we were admittedly in part attracted by their flexible approach to the legal requirement that you be 18 years old to get a drink. At university, lost afternoons might be spent at The Mill or The Anchor watching punts sail by as we collectively and conveniently overlooked the fact that we should probably be sat in the library. And then to London, where I never looked back after a first job that saw the nearest boozer located next to the water. Sadly it’s been demolished now. Rumours that its revenues never recovered after I moved on have yet to be confirmed.
I’ve already talked at length about the great difficulty in drinking outside in the US. But the fact is that it’s difficult getting a meal or a drink even in sight of the river(s) in New York. Sure, there is the occasional exception to prove the rule, but it’s almost as if the health and safety police have decided that anybody drinking (heavily or otherwise) near a river will automatically feel duty bound to leap into the water at the end of the evening. And just to make sure, New York has put some its major roadways next to the water, in the shape of the FDR Drive and the West Side Highway, making sure that anyone tempted to build a temple to hedonism anywhere near the Hudson or the East River is put off by the fumes and incessant car horns.
Desperate for some waterside relaxation this Friday, The Special One and I made our way down to South Street Seaport at the base of Manhattan, and one of the few areas of the city to combine the words ‘river’ and ‘food and drink’. I had images of the gentle breeze coming in off the water as we quaffed a deliciously dry Pouilly Fume and ate mountains of impossibly fresh seafood. I was, quite literally, in my element.
When we got there, it was like a cross between Covent Garden and Blackpool, with thousands of tourists combining with local office workers to create an atmosphere more redolent of an overcrowded amusement park than a peaceful riverside paradise. We walked straight past the chain restaurants, had a lukewarm glass of chardonnay in a plastic glass as we looked at the New York waterfalls, and quickly hightailed it out of there.
Next time I get the urge for waterside drinking, I’m buying a paddling pool and putting it in the back yard.
I was never a big fan of my name when I was a kid. After all, most people had normal names like Phil and Simon, and standing out from the crowd is the last thing you want when you’re an awkward ten year old who wants nothing more from life than an Eagle Eyes Action ManGI Joe.
Then when I got to big school, there were two other people with the same name as me. I’d never even met one person called Dylan, let alone expected to find a couple of them in a class of 30. It turned out that by that point everyone in Britain was naming their kids Dylan (probably thanks to Luke Perry and Beverly Hills 90210), and it’s consistently been in the top 50 names for British-born boys ever since.
I regularly lambast She Who Was Born To Worry about the new found commonness of my name, although she blames Brit Out Of Water Sr.
Reading the press recently, it seems I should count myself lucky. A court in New Zealand has decided that a child had been given a ’social disability’ when her parents named her Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. Apparently Number 16 Bus Shelter, Midnight Chardonnay and Violence are acceptable names, making the same court’s decision to refuse to accept Sex Fruit, Keenan Got Lucy and Yeah Detroit seem relatively strange.
Anyway, the point is that a person’s name plays a vital part in establishing the first impression that you have of them. And parents would do well to take that into consideration when naming their child.
Walking to work this morning, I passed a group of young kids on a trip to some unknown location. It was a picture of idyllic bliss, with each pair of children holding hands with a teacher or parent, and sporting rather natty self-designed name tags around their necks. I’m still getting used to the subtle differences between British and American names, but there seemed to be the usual selection of Kimberley’s, Ricardo’s, Amber’s and Zachary’s, as well as the occasional Jamarion or Amya.
And then, there at the front, holding hands alone with a single teacher, was little Messiah.
Talk about setting up your child for a fall. Or for a particularly lofty career as an award winning (but tortured) actor. Either way, it can’t be easy at school for the poor little kid.
My one comforting hope is that whenever his mother is cross with him, and his proud dad intervenes to ask what Messiah has done, she turns around angrily and shouts “He’s not Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.”
I was accidentally included on an email exchange today between a few intelligent Americans talking about Barack Obama’s recent Berlin speech. The back-and-forth quickly turned into a discussion regarding America’s role in the post-World War II rehabilitation of Europe. The Marshall Plan was, after all, one of a series of important measures that helped rebuild the economies and cities of the battered continent. Sure, there may have been a little bit of self-interest, but nobody’s doubting that America stepped up to the plate when it needed to.
But every so often in any debate about foreign policy, someone will make a comment that forces you to question whether you actually read the email correctly. The kind of statement that makes you wonder why Americans are surprised to find out that some people regard them as pariahs in the international arena.
A statement that in this case reads “if it wasn’t for us, 90% of the world would be speaking Russian.”
The 43rd President of the United States is near-universally derided as the worst occupant of the Oval Office, but you’ve got to imagine that even he would have second thoughts about saying something like this.
By the way, I read that an AOL poll on who should be the next president has John McCain ahead on 64%. Will the last person to leave America please turn the lights out?
I still vividly remember the feeling I had when I first lost a substantial amount of money. I was probably about twelve years old, and my sister and I were visiting my grandmother’s house with She Who Was Born To Worry (aka my mum). My grandmother lived just outside Chester, and I often used to be allowed to take a short walk to the corner to get a newspaper or some sweetscandy. Walking back from one such mission – no doubt with a sherbert fountain or a quarter of chocolate limes in my hand – I reassuringly patted the back pocket of my jeans to check for my money, only to find it was no longer there.
Obviously, I retraced my steps in an attempt to find the little leather wallet, getting more and more frantic as I remembered the £10 note (a birthday gift from one relative or another) that had been neatly folded up within. But it was nowhere to be found. I tearfully walked back to my grandmother’s house, and dutifully received the ten minute lecture on looking after my money. All I could think about for the next five days was the lucky git who had picked up my wallet, and was now probably sitting smugly in their house surrounded by what felt like a lifetime’s supply of cola cubes or wine gums.
Of course, since that day I’ve lost plenty more money. Sometimes it’s fallen out of my pocket, and on others it’s been willfully extracted by The Best Man, The Beancounter or Sickly Child playing poker on a trip up North to see Manchester United. I’ve also found money, although wherever possible I’ve tried to hand it in just in case it belonged to another forlorn 12 year old with an inability to keep his cash safe. That’s not to say that I haven’t seen a twenty quid note floating on the breeze with no one else in sight, and deftly pocketed it. I mean, I’m an idealist but I’m not a fool.
As a result, maybe last night was karma wreaking its revenge.
Picking up a few items at the local supermarketgrocery store in order to feed a sickly Special One, I pulled a twenty dollar note out of my jeans pocket at the cash desk. Given that the dollar is like toy money, and you can pick up a notebook worth of dollar bills in any one day, I have a startlingly bad habit of stuffing all my bills into a pocket in one giant (but worthless) wad. Sadly that wad sometimes includes a few coins, and last night three or four quarters came flying out and scuttled across the floor.
More embarrassed at the noise than anything else, I quickly picked up the three coins that had fallen at my feet. Another had rolled no more than a couple of yards away, and a man in his fifties kindly bent down to pick it up for me. I smiled self-consciously at the shop assistant, paid for my shopping, then turned to the good samaritan for him to return the coin.
Except the man wasn’t there any more. He’d picked up my quarter and walked off with it.
Community spirit - you can’t beat it.
