New York, New York

According to various members of my family, my previous blog post on New York was not sufficiently detailed.  I confess I didn't think a blog post detailing our trip would be of interest to anyone; after all, New York has been described in countless movies, TV shows and songs.  Musicians as diverse as Alica Keys, Frank Sinatra and Ryan Adams have written odes to the city.  And years of American TV shows like Sex and the City being syndicated around the world have resulted in images of the city forming part of most Westerners' cultural iconography. 

I blog about London, but then I think London is so badly represented in movies, songs and TV shows that there's still plenty to say.  When you try and think of a song dedicated to London, you end up with the Clash's London Calling, with its chorus:

The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in

Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning and I, I live by the river

Hardly descriptive of London.

The movies seem to show London either as a breeding ground for zombies (think 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead) or a place of bumbling, posh but oh-so-charming men (think Notting Hill or any movie from the nauseating corpus of  Richard Curtis' work).  Alternatively, you get the grimy, mockney gangster movies.  In short: Londoners pretend to hate London (and make it out to be a city of flesh-eating zombies) or exploit the stereotypes of it to sell movies abroad.  And the stereotypes are far from the reality:  posh public school-educated men are no more charming than their working class counterparts.  And most gangs in London consist of council estate teenagers carrying knives, rather than being full of lovable rouges with amusing accents and their own strict moral code.  The positive side of this representation of London is that I doubt visitors to the city expect London to be romantic or wonderful.  Londoners will rarely admit it to be either of those things, as it's far more in keeping with the British psyche to moan about the city.  But often London can be wonderful.  I don't know that anyone can walk through Regent's park on a sunny day or have a drink in an ancient, dingy London pub without being seduced by the city's charms.

In contrast, we know a lot about New York.  New Yorkers don't seem able to stop enthusing about the city.  All that talk and praise is pretty tough to live up to and I confess that, for me, New York didn't get there.

Perhaps I've become too English over the time I've been here, but I found that in New York, people just talk. They talk a lot.  Even when they're on their own, walking the streets, they talk.  They all seem to have a blue tooth headset perched in an ear and to be either having a shouty conversation through it or anxiously waiting to have a shouty conversation.  There are a lot of people in London who talk when on their own, but they are usually talking to themselves and are the sort of people one crosses the street to avoid. 

New York also has a reputation for being friendly.  In part that seemed correct, but people varied from being incredibly friendly to incredibly rude.  The former tended to be people working for commission (shop assistants) or tips (waiters) and the latter anyone who knew there was no hope of them getting a tip (eg, anyone on the other end of a telephone).  At least in London you know people will be rude or, at best, indifferent.  I find that just a bit more predictable and easy to deal with.  To be frank, I don't want to converse with the gym staff about my horoscope.  Nor do I want to discuss in detail my holiday with waiters or plans for the upcoming weekend.  But maybe I'm just becoming too English and/or grumpy.

The things I did love about New York were the restaurants (we ate at far too many), slick bars and coffee shops.  New Yorkers know how to mix a cocktail (English bartenders frequently do not).  And G and I greatly enjoyed the culture of the brunch: the day that starts with an enormous meal, a bloody mary or mimosa and strong coffee (with endless free refills).  I loved the diversity of the neighbourhoods; from the neighbourhoods of orthodox Jews through to the trendy gay Chelsea and the ultra hip Williamsburg.  I'll also admit that sometimes I liked the fact you could talk to strangers about things other than the weather.  Aspects of the city were also really beautiful, such as the view from Brooklyn Bridge and the city lights at night.  The Statue of Liberty is impressive and the Chrysler building stunning.  And New York was, I admit, very, very cool.  There were more hipsters than you could poke a stick at.  All this made for an absolutely fantastic holiday.

In Sex and the City, Carrie once commented that she was dating New York.  I think that if New York was a person, it would be the cool, slick bad boy of a teen soapy (think Dylan from 90210, the original).  That might be fun for a little while, but I think I would rather date his older, scruffier but ultimately more lovable friend.

The reign of terror continues

The office farter continues his reign of terror.

A co-worker and I were having a serious discussion today about how to tackle this issue. Afterwards, I went back to my desk, and wondered whether anyone else in the world had ever encountered this problem and, if so, how they resolved it. I did a quick google search of "fart, office" and discovered numerous websites of varying degrees of usefulness. Two were particularly helpful, discussing the matter in a serious way with suggestions made by people who (at least claim to) work in HR.

Given the websites offered practical, helpful advice I thought it would be useful for me to forward them to my co-worker. Sadly, I didn't think about the various popup ads embedded in the sites. When my co-worker clicked on one of the links she found her screen suddenly filled by an advertisement asking "do you have fishy, vaginal odour"? Conscious that she was sitting in an open-plan workplace, where numerous people had sight of her computer, she quickly shut the site down.

It seems popups can be just as troublesome in the work place as pop offs.

Weird stuff in NYC

G and I have returned from two weeks in New York.   It was a great holiday, even though G and I found ourselves going mad with Alicia Keys' song New York stuck in our heads the whole time we were there. 

The trip confirmed my view that Americans (or at least New Yorkers) are weird.  Below, in no particular order, is a list of some of the weird stuff we saw in New York.

A cafe in East Village that takes an interesting approach to attracting customers to its outdoor seating.

An urban junkyard in Brooklyn containing toy gorillas displayed to look like office workers.

People so beautiful they could wear "I love New York" t-shirts in New York and make them look cool.

A bar so exclusive that it has no signage. To get to it you have to go through a dingy looking hot dog stand and into a telephone booth.  There, you have to follow the strict instructions on the wall in order to be let in to the bar through a secret door in the telephone booth, while those eating their hotdogs stare at you in bemusement.  The name of the bar?  PDT (please don't tell). 

Fine wine bars containing advertisements that would make any English gentleperson blush.

Really old, tall and mulleted hipsters in Bloomingdales.

A relative at the Natural History Museum (in the evolution display).

A poorly placed plaque at the Natural History museum.  It took me some time to realise that the display is not intended to immortalise Mr and Ms Goldstein by way of statues in their images.  Or at least I hope it's not. 

Hasidic Jews wearing beaver hats, competing for space on the pavement in East Williamsburg with homeboys, dodgy white guys and numerous brothers who need to pull their pants up.

An Easter greeting outside a Baptist church.

 A diner so relaxed that the menu (without any prices) is written on your table by the waitperson. 

A random pair of shoes left on the pavement.  These weren't the only ownerless shoes we saw that were inexplicably lying around in New York.

And, finally (and there's no picture for this one), a very large and disheveled  white guy berating his son for trying to cross the street without holding an adult's hand ("you know better than that, you know the rules"), all the while puffing on an enormous joint.  For obvious reasons, I didn't try and take a photo of that one.

A Sizzling summer?

Apparently this year we're going to get a sizzling summer.  I'm not holding my breath.  Last year was meant to be a barbecue summer.  My wardrobe is still full of the summer clothes I optimistically bought last year, waiting for those barbecue days that never happened. 

I am quickly learning that the only way to guarantee a summer is to travel to the continent during the summer season.  The only certainty one has about an English summer is that it will rain and it will be awful more days than it is not.
 

The Office

 

When I last wrote about the office farter, I did so from the relatively luxurious position of being seated far away from him.  His emissions affected me only if I happened to walk past that area of the office.  Otherwise, I could laugh at the problem, knowing as I did that only those less fortunately seated colleagues had to suffer the smell on a regular basis.  All that has changed now.

This week, in a brand new cost-cutting measure, we moved into a new open plan, hot desking arrangement.  Work has used a lot of jargon to describe the new arrangement; we’ve been told not to call it “hot desking” but “flexible working” and that instead of it being called “open plan” it should be called a “free flow area”.  In reality, what has happened is that they have removed all of the privacy dividers between desks, given us smaller desks and crammed 3 times as many people into the same space.  The best part is they have provided us with fewer desks than people, on the assumption that there will always be a few people out of the office attending court, clients or working from home.  Sadly, all too frequently all of us are in the office on any given day. Mornings are therefore a fight to get in early and nab one of the few available desks, as those who miss out find themselves sitting at tiny temporary desks near the boss (the professional version of wearing a dunce hat and sitting in the corner).  It’s all rather unpleasant.

What is perhaps most unpleasant is that it means each of us in the office finds ourselves on various occasions sitting next to the farter.  And as someone who was in that unfortunate position today, I can say that it is one of the most unpleasant experiences one can have in a professional environment.  Indeed, it took me some time to work out just what was happening on the first occasion, as the smell was so foul and odorous I simply didn’t think it could come from a human being.

No one in the office knows where to begin to resolve this problem.  A conversation with the farter needs to be had, but who is to have it?  Perhaps I have been in this country too long, and I am starting to become a Brit, but I am increasingly thinking that it might be easier to change jobs than to confront the farter.  So if you hear of anyone needing a (mostly pretty useless) lawyer, let me know.

Bad Theatre

The blog has been fairly silent over the last week.  This is largely because G and I haven't been home much.  That implies we've been doing exciting things.  We haven't.  With the exception of a lovely dinner party with friends, we've been seeing bad and depressing theatre.  First off was the Caretaker. Even Jonathan Pryce's excellent acting couldn't save Pinter's play from being a snooze-fest.  The only entertainment came when G's seat broke, and a theatre employee engaged in a Fawlty Towers-esque rearranging of all of the theatre goers so that everyone had a seat. 

Last night we saw Serenading Louie at the Donmar.  I highly recommend you avoid seeing the latter.  In fact, it probably ranks as one of the worst plays I have seen in London.  A quick read of the reviews this morning shows the critics are in agreement, with the Guardian giving it two stars out of five.  The Independent and the Times were slightly more positive (three stars out of five) while the Telegraph struggled to find anything good to say about the play.

I have just invested most of my worldly fortune in seats in each of the plays showing in the Summer and Winter seasons at the Donmar (usually a reliable bastion of good theatre).  Therefore, I sincerely hope that Serenading Louie isn't a taste of what's to come.

Acclimatising

Childhood is regarded by most as an age of learning. At the very least, it's a period during which we adjust, or acclimatise, to most aspects of life. We learn about, and get used to, the concept of things that embarrass us. We develop from children giggling at the word "sex" to learning about its meaning (even if still grossed out by it), becoming teenagers who are greatly excited by seeing it on mainstream TV and, finally, hardened adults who aren't in the least bit titillated or bothered by Sex And The City.

However, there are some that we simply never acclimatise to and so find ourselves manifestly ill-equipped to deal with as adults.

Flatulence is one such thing.

As a child, I remember there was nothing quite so hilarious as when a child would accidentally fart in the classroom. However, back then we didn't use the word "fart" (which made several of us in my nice girls' school uncomfortable) but referred to them as "pop offs". After this early period, it seems people were divided into one of two extreme camps: those that in adulthood still find a fart hilarious (evident by the numerous fart scenes still appearing in movies) and those who find the whole thing too disgusting to even talk about out loud. No one that I know became acclimatised to, and comfortable with, farts. I know that I certainly haven't become acclimatised to them. Although, depending on the context, I alternate between the two camps: someone else's inappropriate and unintended noise will always be hilarious but any smell will make me both blush and gag.

My failure to get to grips with this issue has now come back to haunt me as I now find myself sharing an office with a farter. Thankfully, I'm not sharing a desk with the farter. But the poor colleague of mine who does share a desk with the farter is in a complete quandary. We can't even think of appropriate adult language to use to discuss this problem, and the phrase "silent but deadly" has been used, accompanied (I confess) by a great deal of giggling on my part. We don't know whether it's a medical problem or whether we can even ask - is farting something that you can raise with the farter or is it a no-go zone? Life has left me manifestly ill-equipped to deal with this current problem; I don't even know where to begin. How on earth does one deal with an office farter?