New York, Mon Amour

I can't believe it's time to leave lovely New York so soon after arriving. I packed in a hell of a lot of stuff and that's without considering shopping as an activity. I really don't want to leave and it was quite a sad moment in the limo back to JFK and as we drove over the Queensboro Bridge, when I turned around and caught a final glimpse of the skyline glinting in the evening sun, the pivotal moment being when the Chrysler and the Empire State Building were framed either side of some other tall skyscraper. 

New York does look beautiful in June when the days are long and the weather isn't too hot and muggy. But then, I would happily go there at any time of year. In this respect, I am not fussy.

Yesterday, after SoHo, Mum and I paid a trip to the Met, mainly because neither of us had ever visited before and felt we ought to do so. I don't really like art but I do like naked men and there were plenty of Greek and Roman statues to satisfy my marble-lust (though I prefer Abercrombie's take on the statue: buff jock in the style of a naked man). 

Museum #2 was the American Museum of Natural History, which I always enjoy, particularly the space show, which is amazing, although the "highlights" tour I went on was very interesting too (how to tell the difference between male and female bears: male bears pee forwards, females pee backwards, apparently).

I walked back down through Central Park to Whole Foods (a gourmet food store, which has recently taken South Ken by storm) where we acquired a veritable feast on which we picnicked in the park to celebrate the brother's birthday. It was a typical sunny Sunday afternoon in the park: busy and lively and so much nicer than Hyde Park (let alone Jesus Green). After a final shop and a final steak, we headed off to the airport.

I was pretty agitated as the flight was booked solid so there was no chance of an upgrade (and I got lumbered with a crappy middle seat) but the cheerful check-in chick did let the bro and me into the First Class lounge — a favour for which I was immensely grateful given the various flight delays. 

So, here I am in the First lounge where they don't even give you free wireless internet but where there is a free bar so I have been helping myself to plenty of Bombay Sapphire and tonic. Even though I have a crap seat on the plane, at least I will sleep well. À bientôt, NYC!

State licence plates spotted: 29 (our longstanding family tradition)
Burgers/steaks consumed: 3
Amount spent on clothing: Don't want to think about it
Number of G and Ts drunk in the lounge: err...

Expresso Love

I am incredibly jittery but have had an excellent first full day in NYC. This is, in part, due to some great coffee moments. The aforementioned 24-hour cappuccino maker at the hotel is amazing — it grinds the beans to-order and makes one of the best coffees I've had in America, all at the touch of a button.

Great Coffee Moment #2 was my obligatory trip to Jack's Stir Brew, in the Village, which is by far my favourite coffee house in the city (not least because the coffee tastes great). It is tiny inside with only about 4 tables and I was lucky today because Jack, the owner, was there. Jack is incredibly friendly. We had a good chat about the difficulty of finding decent coffee in New York (and in America more generally) before I sat down with my iced espresso macchiato and poppy seed bagel. 

In non-coffee news, after a Shoreham Happy Martini (melon vodka, pineapple, etc.) in the hotel's turquoise bar, we dined last night at P.J. Clarke's which is in the running for best burger in New York. They also have a decent wine list and the atmosphere is perfect: there is a lively crowd with a mixture of age-groups and great background music. I couldn't manage a pudding but the burger was great. It was then getting on for 10 p.m. so having been up for over 20 hours, I called it a night.

This morning, I took my cappuccino for a walk in Central Park and then walked the 60 blocks down to Greenwich Village for assorted wandering, coffee-drinking, shopping and flirting opportunities. Then walked all the way back up, via Bloomies. Tonight, we're off to see some off-Broadway show and then the brother and I will hopefully hit the town with his NY friend. This certainly is the life...

New York Countdown

After months of deprivation, I am finally returning to my first love, the Big Apple. My use of love tends to be restricted to things that really merit this weighty word: basically to Google and to New York City (and around the time of my first visit to New York (circa 1995) I was still into Yahoo (shh, don't tell anyone!)). Yes, I really do love New York more than any other place in the world and I am sure that my 12th (ish) visit will be as memorable as every other trip.

So, what's so great about New York? Well, of course there's the shopping and the bagels and the restaurants and the fact that the city is so diverse (take 5th Avenue, for example, that at its northern extreme, is in the heart of Harlem, then runs down Museum Mile (the Met, the Gug, etc.) bordering Central Park, through the flashy department stores and shops in Midtown (Saks, Abercrombie, big Barnes and Noble), past the New York Public Library and the Empire State Building, right down to Washington Square Park (NYU central), where it ends by a marble arch in midst of lovely Greenwich Village with its brownstone buildings and cobbled streets). 

Maybe it's the Village itself that wins me over with its independent bookstores (Three Lives and Co. being by far the best for the selection and service) and coffee houses (Jack's Stir Brew, just down the street from Three Lives and Co. and run by a part-time Broadway actor (the titular Jack) is easily my favourite) and pleasant side streets in which one can happily spend hours wandering and wondering.

But then, don't most cities have these things? There seems to be something magical about New York — its very New Yorkiness (conceptually speaking, there no necessary and sufficient conditions, just the very essence of the place) — that wins me over every time. Even the taxi ride into the city from Newark can't detract from the frisson of excitement I feel at the first stolen glimpse of that famous skyline: the Empire State, tallest once again, and, of course, my favourite building: the Chrysler.

On the other hand, maybe I am linking the memories I have with experiences I have had in New York while there with friends and family. My family holidays are always fun and usually result in lots of great meals out and family banter. S and I got together in New York almost four years ago now, in a little Starbucks near the Empire State. In a very circular fashion, it was also the last holiday we took together (along with my family) before we broke up. 

Then there was the last trip, the week before my birthday last November. This was a spontaneous visit: my parents were going anyway (Dad on business, Mum for the ride) and once I had got a job, Dad suggested I checked out BA for flights and I ended up going too for three short but full days.

The acquisition of my Moleskine New York City Guide has made planning trips a lot easier and I have already filled in lots of restaurants, shops, coffee houses, bars, museums and assorted other places, all organised by location with my colour-coded system. A few planned activities this trip are:

1. Apple Store, Soho to acquire iPod Nano for the gym (black, naturellement).

2. Three Lives and Co. for the purchasing of new fiction, to be digested at Jack's with coffee.

3. Kate's Paperie to stock up on gorgeous paper for all of my belles lettres (oh for the days of epistolary communication à la Dangerous Liaisons...).

4. Walk over Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan, hopefully early enough for sunrise.

5. Grand Central at 5 p.m. on Friday to lose self amidst the commuters.

6. Dean & Deluca at Rockefeller Plaza for passable cappuccino and delicious breakfast while watching Good Morning America being filmed next door at NBC studios or at the Soho branch for the most amazing deli and cake selection (it even makes me want to cook).

7. The American Museum of Natural History - for the amazing space show.

8. Breakfast at Balthazar in Soho (must remember to book on behalf of la famille).

That's plenty to be going on with - I'm sure I won't manage the full list and that I will do plenty of things not on the list. Our hotel — the Shoreham on W.55th between 5th and 6th Avenues — sounds very cool (minimalist chic, awesome bar, 24-hour cappuccini, great location) and my brother and I are sharing a suite. Now I just make sure I'm SFU on Thursday morning.

The Most Reliable Form Of Pleasure?

Monsieur E's recent visit to England, spent at my London pad, got me thinking about the good old days when we were still resident on the same continent before he abandoned Cambridge for Paris, Berkeley, Paris again (now) and (soon) Philly. Not that I can really blame him.

Back in the day, Monsieur E and I would spend hours trying to out-pretentious each other and he was absolutely adamant that his favourite quotation — anticipation is the purest form of pleasure — came from Flaubert's L'Éducation Sentimentale in its English translation. 

However, trusty Google disagreed. In fact, the only source that kept coming up was episode 16 of season 5 of Dawson's Creek (then my favourite TV program and much maligned by Monsieur E), in an exchange between heroine Joey and her English lit professor, while discussing their favourite novel endings:

Joey: How do you remember something that never happened?

Professor Wilder: Fondly. You see, Flaubert believed that anticipation was the purest form of pleasure...and the most reliable. And that while the things that actually happen to you would invariably disappoint, the things that never happened to you would never dim. Never fade. They would always be engraved in your heart with a sort of sweet sadness.

I was delighted at the thought that Monsieur E's favourite quotation could have come from DC but eventually, the mystery was solved; the DC episode is very closely paraphrasing Julian Barnes' novel Flaubert's Parrot, which lets Monsieur E off the hook to some extent. I hadn't read anything by Barnes at the time but went right out and bought the book, found the extract and immediately emailed Monsieur E. 

It turns out that Flaubert merely implied that anticipation was the purest form of pleasure but the quotation is definitely all Barnes' (I think to infer this, you really have to read the whole of L'Éducation Sentimentale in the original French, which sounded like much too much effort just to prove a point):

Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic?

Appletiser begs to differ, claiming to be "100% Pure Pleasure," which would therefore mean that Appletiser is the purest form of pleasure, or that anticipation is the purest form of Appletiser? Or something.

STOP PRESS: Bex Finds Fun Activity In Cambridge

Almost by chance, I ended up going to see a French film at the Arts Picturehouse yesterday. I was beginning to lose faith in recent movies altogether and so perhaps it was partly because of this that I enjoyed Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) so much. Or maybe it was because the advance preview screening of the film involved a Q&A session with the director afterwards. 

It was only as the opening credits rolled that I realised that as Guillaume Canet was the director and as the director was going to be in the cinema after the film, therefore Guillaume Canet was going to be in the cinema after the film (go, go, propositional logic!).

In 2000, everyone read Alex Garland's book The Beach, myself not excepted, though opinions were much more mixed about the film adaptation, starring Leo DiCaprio. I loved it and even went to see it twice, partly because of the soundtrack and partly because Canet was playing the role of Étienne, the guy whose girlfriend Leo's character stole. 

More recently, I loved Jeux d'Enfants (Love Me If You Dare) about childhood friends who, since the age of about 8, have been involved in an increasingly high-stakes game of dare and mess with each other's heads and hearts a lot in the process.

I wasn't aware that Monsieur Canet had branched out into the world of directing but Tell No One was pretty awesome (gripping, convoluted, moving thriller with a strong emphasis on the love and passion the main character feels for his wife and with a fantastic score apparently composed in only two hours) and the Q&A was great too, Guillaume being very funny and witty and, well, sexy! 

For example, one of the scenes involved the main character having to run across the périphérique in Paris as part of a big chase scene, which involved this massively busy road being shut off for a whole day, close to Charles de Gaulle airport. As this was France, no one announced this until the day itself at which point all of the local radio stations named, shamed and blamed Canet for the delays.

Incidentally, the film is based on the "best-selling US thriller of the same name by Harlan Coben" and some American director originally had the rights to make a film version starring George Clooney or Keanu Reeves (Monsieur Canet was not consistent in this anecdote but with those two, I'm easy either way!) but that was very different from the book (and from Canet's film). For example, the main character remarried after his wife's death in this US version because "it just isn't believable that George Clooney could stay single."


I was cursing afterwards though when I morphed into a fangirl and ran off to get his autograph as I had forgotten to bring my camera with me (or not thought that I might need it) and my mobile phone is pretty '90s and so I had to make do with an autograph in my Moleskine.

Maybe Next Season

Once again, Wolves reached the play-offs and once again, they failed to achieve promotion to the top flight (the fact that we lost to our old rivals, the Baggies makes it all the more irritating)... It's great though: no matter how unpredictable the rest of life may be, I can always rely on the Wolves to almost get promoted.

After all, every Wolves supporter's favourite saying is, "oh well; maybe next season then."

Mourning May Morning

If I were in Oxford right now, I would probably still be in the pub, staying in for a lock-in before heading off to Magdalen Bridge at 6 am to hear the choir of Magdalen College sing from the top of their chapel tower. Late-night drinking laws have meant that lock-ins have become a less enticing option if not a complete anachronism.

Having grown up in Oxford, I assumed that May Morning was a national event but my enjoyment thereof was always thwarted by the fact that a) I lived in a tiny village outside of Oxford and was — until the age of 18 — without a car and b) I almost always had school the following day. 

I was so excited when I went up to Cambridge and found that I was living in the centre of town — party on! Or not... I was sad to discover that the celebrations this side of the world are, like most things, less exciting than outside of Nowhereshire.

The first May Morning I went to, I was about ten. I camped in the garden with my dad and brother the night before and then we all went into Oxford at about four-thirty. The town was heaving and we watched some morris dancing in Radcliffe Square before going to watch the singing.

The last May Morning I attended (on account of studying in the Other Place, which is now my "here") was during my last year of school. I stayed up drinking in the pub until midnight, got a lift home, slept until 3 am and then drove back into town to work a 5-hour shift in the Sandwich Shop of Dreams, which was right next to Magdalen Bridge. 

That shift was pretty entertaining given that all of the customers were absolutely wasted and in serious need of coffee and bacon sarnies, hence orders like, "Give me two quadruple espressos and a large breakfast bap!" were the norm. At 8 am I drove to school and had a full day of lessons and then, as if all that wasn't enough, drove to my rowing club after school for a two-hour outing on the river! Not everyone's idea of fun but it was certainly an experience.

I imagine that 1 May, 2007 will pass — as most days tend to in Cambridge — without event. At least us Cambridge students are far too sensible to throw ourselves off bridges into water that is way too shallow (ah hem — except during May Week, but that's not until June!), despite the police's best attempts to prevent them from doing so and thus spending May Day in hospital. In comparison, work seems almost fun.