Like Drew Barrymore and her endless ability to score the lead roles in sappy rom-coms, A Brit Out Of Water would be nothing without a stereotype. Don’t get me wrong, I like to tell it as I see it, but sometimes you just have to fall back on good old-fashioned exaggeration to get your point across. I am, after all, a man.
For instance, where would all the fun be if I didn’t characterise the British as ever-so-slightly repressed stuck-in-the-muds with a predilection towards moral superiority and a penchant for inbreeding. And if I didn’t insist that that the sun never shines and that black pudding is compulsory by law on Tuesdays and Fridays, you’d probably not even believe that I was British in the first place.
Meanwhile all Americans have cameras with lenses longer than their arms, eat sandwiches filled with enough meat to feed a small army, and have a commitment to pronunciation that can at best be described as ‘perfunctory’. Obviously, most New Yorkers are brash, rude, and wouldn’t know the phrase ‘thank you’ if it came up to them and whacked them in the head with a bag full of bagels.
If stereotypes were to be believed, of course, the French are garlic eating surrender monkeys whose all-encompassing arrogance makes them the most self-involved nation outside, well, Britain. Certainly, legend would have it (and occasional experience has confirmed) that as a general rule they’re not particularly patient when it comes to dealing with foreigners who get in their way. So when The Special One had a small vehicular malfunction on our holidayvacation on a narrow and hilly road last week, and the traffic built up around us, I expected the honking horns to rise to a rousing crescendo within a matter of moments.
Not a bit of it. Everybody got out of their cars and gathered around us, offering advice and comfort as we sought to get a car with the power of a small lawnmower over the brow of a particularly steep hill. There was practically wild applause as we finally got going, the locals waving us on our way as they joyfully returned to their cars. Stereotypes count for nothing in this beautiful part of the world, I can tell you.
Unless you’re talking about back seat drivers, that is. Fourteen years without having sat behind the wheel, and I still managed to offer a barrage of misplaced advice and unhelpful tips. I’m just grateful that The Special One didn’t have a bag of bagels with her…
I was back in the commuting saddle today, scuttling into the city with the rest of the ants. After a week in the sun, I don’t mind admitting that the experience was particularly painful. Almost as painful as a torturous opening sentence that mixes metaphors containing horses and insects, I’d imagine. I’ll get the hang of this blogging thing soon, I promise.
Heading home after a long day at the office, I was approached by a clearly nervous middle-aged American woman who managed to stutter out that she wanted to ask me a question. Embarrassingly, the New Yorker in me instantly became suspicious, and put my hand in my back pocket to check that she didn’t have an eight year old niece who was about to relieve me of the burdensome weight of my wallet and give it to a friendly Russian money launderer for safe keeping.
As it was, the woman was just a newcomer to the city who wanted to know which platform she had to use to get the L train from 8th Avenue to 3rd Avenue. I’d seen her from a distance as I entered the subway system, and she had clearly spent a short time attempting to make eye contact with someone in a bid to find out the information she needed. As anybody who has spent any length of time in New York will know, making eye contact was officially outlawed in 1961. I’d already watched her approach one young man, but I assume that she had misinterpreted his attempt to get a piece of subway grit out of his eye as a gesture of friendship and solidarity and was forced to come up to me instead.
It’s tragic that some ‘outsiders’ (of which I’m most definitely still one) feel unable to ask their fellow man for directions, for fear that they might get bad-mouthed or - worse still - ignored. And it’s even more tragic that I was suspicious enough of her motives to ponder what fate was going to befall me. New Yorkers may “want to be a part of it”, but that’s one characteristic I could well do without.
You will, however, be pleased to know that I successfully managed to direct her to the correct L train platform. Admittedly there are only two platforms, and all trains from both platforms went to her destination, but it’s the thought that counts.
I’ve been away for a week, sunning myself in the south of France and taking advantage of the lack of broadband to take an impromptu blog break. Fortunately, the presence of a The Special One, good friends, a big swimming pool, great food and plenty of the aforementioned sun, I seemed to get by…
The trip to the Cote D’Azur came via the wonders of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 last Friday, which may well be the quietest airport on earth - and all the more relaxing for it. Like most major construction projects in the UK, it took seventeen times as long to build as it should have done (and cost thirty four times its original budget) but it’s still a huge step forward in air travel as far as I’m concerned - especially as I’m well used to the limited facilities of New York’s JFK airport. As we slipped effortlessly away from the terminal in a taxi to stay with The Best Man and family, I felt proud to be British.
Then I saw a giant billboard for Nuts TV, proclaiming “every night, darts and fights.” I packed away the Union Jack, slipped the maroon passport back in my pocket, and pondered the day’s date, July 4. No wonder the Americans were so keen on independence.
When I was a mere glint in America’s eye, our French teacher told the likes of The Beancounter, Broadsheet Benny and I that we would only be fluent in the language when we thought in French. As it was, most of us couldn’t tell our derrieres from our coudes, let alone ponder the existential meaning of life in the tongue of our Gallic cousins. And besides, why would we think in French when it would leave less room for us to consider the important matters of the day, such as Ghostbusters, Panini stickers, the FA Cup draw, and how to snowball teachers and still get away with it?
Being no linguistic expert means that wherever I travel, I’m always translating from the local tongue into English, working out what I need to say, and then translating back into the relevant language. Such a laborious process can tragically turn into an internalised version of Chinese Whispers (or the markedly less impressive ‘Telephone’, as The Special One calls it), where a series of small mistranslations leads to me replying to a waiter asking if I want milk in my coffee with a suggestion that his wife did indeed look like an elephant.
But finally after nearly 35 years of trying, I think I’ve finally cracked it – I’ve mastered a foreign language to the point where I am now able to think and speak in the local tongue without translating into the English in between. Admittedly ‘American’ may be more of a dialect than a language, but you try living in a country that refuses to pronounce the ‘t’ in ‘water’ and see if you still feel the same then.
Today in a phone conversation with an American colleague, I managed to suggest (without even missing a beat) a series of non-specific options by using the phrase “we’ll need to go back to them with ‘ex’, ‘why’ and ‘zee’”. I was part way through the next sentence by the time I realised what I’d done, and had to stop myself and drop a random ‘zed’ into the conversation just to reiterate my Britishness.
Then on the way home I saw a billboard for the Home Run Derby. I have no idea what one of those is, although I suspect it involves slightly overweight men playing big boys rounders. The point is that I looked at the sign and wondered idly to myself what a ‘home run durr-bee’ was. That’s despite almost half my family having been born and raised in the East Midlands town of Derby, with its British pronunciation of ‘darr-bee’.
I can’t work out whether I’m proud or disturbed.
Ironically, the comfort with language won’t last as I’m off to France next week for a week of relaxation in the sun, and I’ll suddenly be back to struggling in a foreign tongue. Here’s hoping I can get my fair share of coffee and croissants without inadvertently reminding the waiting staff of the grey large eared mammal-esque qualities of their spouse, eh?
For the most part, I love high(er)-end/speciality food shops like Whole Foods or Balducci’s. Having been spoiled with Waitrose or Marks & Spencer’s food hall all my life, there’s something thoroughly decent about being treated like a discerning food lover once again. With lovingly prepared foods, a shockingly good cheese counter and fruit that doesn’t look like it’s been through a ten round battle with a sledgehammer, these places feed my inner foodie.
But what I can’t stand – nay, truly can’t abide – about these stores is their absolute stubborn pigheaded blindingly irritating insistence on referring to me as their ‘guest’. Every time I reach the head of the queueline, and get called forward to pay for my products, I’ll be greeted with the plaintiff cry of “next guest please” as if I’ve been personally invited into the home of Joel Dean and Giorgio DeLuca. And the practice is spreading – this weekend, spotty Bernice at the Gap deigned me with “guest” status as I waited to pay for my holiday shorts.
Look, I know you’re all just trying to be polite, and really I should be grateful at any pleasantry in a city where a grunt of sheer indifference is the closest you get to a term of endearment. But, let’s be honest, you don’t really view me as your guest, do you?
If I’m your guest, and you invite me to fill my trolley with as much gourmet grub as I like, I presume you’re not going to make me pay for it before I walk out? After all, I’m your guest, and which host with the most treats their guests like that?
If I’m your guest, I’m going straight to the tea section to help myself to some PG Tips, and then I’ll happily wander into the food preparation area to put the kettle on. Don’t worry, I’ll ask if anyone else wants a cuppa - I was brought up properly, after all.
And if I’m your guest, I’m sure you won’t mind if I pop in and borrow a shirt and a pair of jeans when I get soaked to the skin in an unexpected rainstorm. I’ll bring them back, obviously. It might take a couple of months, admittedly. Many apologies if that white top is a little bit pink, by the way – those red socks get everywhere, don’t they?
Finally, the list has been completed. So come on, what have I missed??
151. I love being preached at as much as the next man. But does it really have to be at 8 in the morning as I’m travelling into work on the subway?
152. Politics and bureaucracy is just as mindnumbingly ridiculous in New York as it is in London.
153. If you begin queuingget on line now, you will have a driving license by August 25, 2009.
154. Every second block in New York is a film set. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the only person you ever see is Becky from Roseanne.
155. Some of the best architecture in the world is in New York.
156. Some of the worst architecture in the world is in New York.
157. The more you honk a car horn on New York city streets, the more virile and attractive you become to members of the opposite sex. Apparently.
158. I’ve not been to Japan admittedly, but the best sushi I’ve ever tasted has been in this city.
159. There are more taxidermists in New York than good butchers.
160. I didn’t think it was possible, but residents have found a way to play their music on iPods (NB other MP3 players are available) at even higher ear splitting volumes to those utilised by London dwellers. Fortunately the practice of using the speakers on your phone to blast out music to an entire bus - much beloved of London kids - is yet to make its path to New York in any significant way.
161. You definitely get a better class of crazy in this city. Not just ‘erk, he’s a bit mad’, but more ‘should I phone the authorities just in case he’s escaped from somewhere?’
162. New Yorkers might like to suggest that they’ve got a thick skin, but if the comments I get on this blog are anything to go by, many of them are actually a big bunch of softies who get irate if anybody says anything even vaguely less-than-positive about their beloved city.
163. You can sit at the seat in Katz’s Deli where Sally embarrassed Harry. But if you really want an orgasm, you’d be better off having the pastrami sandwich and not bothering about where you sit.
164. Litter in the city could be reduced by half if they just stopped putting bits of paper into magazines begging readers to take up subscriptions.
165. On a packed subway train, the last space available to sit down in will be exactly 25% smaller than is necessary to fit your comfortable behind in.
166. With Greenwich Village, the West Village and the East Village, there’s a tiny little hamlet just waiting to burst out of New York.
167. There is literally nothing that can’t be purchased in this city.
168. With the wind whistling in off the Hudson, in the height of winter, New York is enough to make you cry frozen tears in pain at the cold.
169. The not-in-my-backyard brigade are possibly ten times more vociferous in Brooklyn than they could ever be in London.
170. Forget burgers and pancakes, New York could be home to some of the finest restaurants in the world.
171. Coats are for losers.
172. There are too many British people in this city. How is a Brit Out Of Water supposed to stand out when every sodding third person seems to have a working knowledge of Coronation Street and HP Sauce?
173. If the number of Nintendo DSs and Sony PSPs is anything to go by, New Yorkers require near constant stimulation if they’re not to die before the age of 40.
174. New York may well have invented Christmas.
175. If you want to go to the cinema in New York, your family must have a total annual income of at least $150,000. And that’s without popcorn.
176. If you’re a New Yorker and you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘jobsworth’, just go to any federal licensing authority. Watch and learn.
177. There’s no package too big that it can’t be carried on the subway.
178. Contrary to popular belief, it’s sodding easy to get lost in a city that’s governed by a grid system.
179. On a humid summer’s day, subway platforms in New York are hotter than the blazing bowels of hell.
180. On a cold winter’s day, subway platforms in New York are hotter than the blazing bowels of hell.
181. If you’re able to walk past the Flatiron building without wondering what the offices are like in the narrowest part of the building, you may want to check your pulse to ensure that you’re still alive.
182. Restaurants within a ten block radius of Times Square are required by law to charge 50% above all accepted levels for any given foodstuff.
183. There’s no getting away from the fact that the New York skyline is one of the most impressive sights in the world.
184. SwearingCursing in the workplace goes down like a cup of cold sick.
185. What’s not to like about a city that has four waterfalls installed, as an Olafur Eliasson living art piece? Obviously I would be negligent in my commitment to London if I were not to point out that he did something even more impressive in London almost five years ago.
186. Anybody who thinks it rains more in London than in New York is a liar and a cheat.
187. Every New Yorker is convinced that they would die of boredom outside the city. Clearly, there are no museums, books, movies, hobbies or conversation anywhere else in the world.
188. The best pickles (pickled cucumbers, to all non-New Yorkers) are found in this city. Clearly, they don’t bear any comparison to Branston Pickle, but they’ll do in an emergency.
189. New York has invented more ways to rob tourists of their hard-earned cash than any other city on earth. And if you don’t believe me, go and have your one cent piece turned into a New York commemorative coin. For $4.99.
190. If you want to see New York at its best, see it from the water.
191. That’s ‘floating on top of the water’ for the avoidance of doubt. Frankly you don’t want to be in the Hudson if you can possibly avoid it.
192. It’s difficult to take the city’s soccer team too seriously given that they’re named after the world’s most famous energy drink.
193. Junk mail is a way of life. If businesses in New York aren’t bombarding you with unwelcome crap, they’re not fulfilling their duty in this world.
194. With a 20% deposit necessary, it’s not surprising that most people don’t buy their own property in this city.
195. Given the amount of fuss that surrounded IKEA setting up in Red Hook, I can’t even begin to imagine the furore if Adolf & Eva’s Drive-Thru came to town.
196. Apparently New York’s water is so pure that it’s one of only a handful of American cities that doesn’t need to put its water through treatment plants. It allegdely comes from the Catskills – but lets face it, the Hudson’s much closer, and if you’ve read number 190, you’ll understand why I drink bottled water.
197. Reading the adverts on the New York subway would be enough to make you think that you can sue for anything in this city. And you probably wouldn’t be far wrong.
198. You can buy good cheese in New York. But it would be easier to find a squirrel with a hairlip.
199. Toilet paper was invented in New York. So was the Waldorf salad. Good grace was invented elsewhere.
200. If you’re going to blog about any city on Earth, New York’s probably the place to do it.
Customer satisfaction isn’t exactly a particular focus for New Yorkers. In fact, on the list of 500 Things Every Business Must Do To Be Successful in NYC, “making sure that the customer is happy” appears just below “don’t leave dead rats in your reception area.” It sometimes feels that if you walk into a shop to ask for a particular product, you should just be grateful to still be walking when you leave. Getting the product as well would be a minor miracle.
Being a New Yorker strikes me as being perfect training for life in a call centrecenter. After all, if you’re only interested in getting the answer you want, and you’ll repeat your point-of-view up to 327 times if it means that you’ll get it, you either live in New York or you make your living taking customer queries over the phone.
Personally I’d rather have pins stuck in my eyes than have to make contact with a call centrecenter, but sometimes you just can’t escape it. Like when your cable box decides not to operate for no apparent reason. Which – on the first day of the school summer holidayvacation – is about as popular as Hannah Montana being drafted in as a last minute rock festival replacement for Megadeth.
Maybe it was the latent panic in my voice, or perhaps it was my dulcet English tones, but I swear I had to repeat myself thirteen times just to make my unwitting ‘phone operative’ understand what I was saying. To be fair, that’s nothing unusual. What was slightly more disturbing was the start and end of the call, when the Time Warner Cable employee attempted to set a land speed record for most sales messages crammed into a three second spell. I’m pretty sure that she offered both broadband and telephone services in her patter, but to be honest she could have offered me a night with Drew Barrymore and I’d be none the wiser.
I assume that every employee is so used to New Yorkers hanging up on them as soon as they get the opportunity, that they’ve been told to talk as quickly as possible in the desperate hope that the person on the other end of the line catches a word or two. It may not result in many sales, but at least they can say that they got through the script.
Nothing beats Ticketmaster though. Calling them this morning, I was forced to enter into an extensive and fiendishly complicated automated phone system, input my 73 digit booking code, and then go on hold for fifteen minutes. And when I finally came off hold, the first thing the Ticketmaster employee said to me was “Good morning, my name is Tom, how might I offer you world-class customer service today?”
Is “stop talking like a robot, and tell your bosses not to lose my sodding tickets for Eddie Izzard next time” an acceptable answer?
After two long flights, and a lot of late nights with work and with friends, I’ve found myself encumbered with an early summer cold. Not the slight sniffles of a borderline hay fever attack, but the full on “I need thirty tissues to get through every hour” man cold, which could conceivably bring about my death in the next thirty six hours.
It’s bad enough trying to get myself understood in this city at the best of times, but when I’m bunged up with a cold I may as well be talking in Swahili for all the good my voice does me. Simple requests such as “can I have a glass of water” turn into “get the bath, I’m passing borders”. Which would be useful if I was, say, on the verge of entering Mexico and needed a scrub down. But not so much when I’m parched and desperate to get liquids into my system.
My sudden descent into languagelessness is at least an incentive to get better quickly, and with that in mind, I made the trip to Rite Aid at lunchtime to pick up all the potions and concoctions I could carry.
Rite Aid is a strange shop. I know it has been a pretty successful chain, but I have no idea how it managed to persuade people to shop there in the first place, and it’s now clinging on to its former glories. Their stock levels can only be described as pitiful, and their commitment to customer service is barely higher than Kraft’s commitment to producing one-off artisanal cheeses. I swear I stood waiting in a queueline for fifteen minutes today. There were only two people ahead of me.
But it’s not their ability to engender irrational hatred that bothers me, it’s their weird choice in products. Now, bear in mind that this place is a glorified pharmacy. Sure, they’ve got hairsprays, toothbrushes, deodorants and photo printing, but essentially it’s all about the vitamins, pain killers, creams and ointments. Things to help you get better if you’re ill. Items that will aid your recovery from trauma, and get you back on the road to fitness and health. A cornucopia of wellness restoration.
And beer.
Great big fridges of the stuff. Bottles and bottles of Corona, Heineken and Miller, chilled to perfection and waiting for a willing high blood pressure/broken arm/mosquito bite sufferer to take them home and numb the pain away. It’s like putting the Algerian branch of Agoraphobics Anonymous in the middle of the Sahara.
Personally I think Rite Aid are in cahoots with the makers of Tylenol in a desperate attempt to bump up sales. Buy two six packs and they’ll thrown in some liquid capsules for a dollar.
It’s good to be back in New York, although the sweltering heat and humid atmosphere means that I have as much desire to be outside as an agoraphobic slug who has been told that the only way for him to get back inside his garden shed is to slither through an industrial-size outdoor salt store.
The heat does nothing for people’s temper as they make their way around the city. Simple missions such as walking up the stairs from the subway to the exit are turned into Indiana Jones-style fights to the finish, as sweat-soaked crazies kick and punch their way to the top. And that’s just the women.
Earlier today, I saw a cyclist who had clearly determined that the worst possible thing that he could do in this weather would be to stand still. Of course, given the number of pedestrians and traffic lights in the city, that’s pretty much an impossible task. Not unless you take your life into your own hands.
Or in this case, take a whistle into your mouth.
Paying no particular heed for traffic lights, and a healthy disregard for the public, this cyclist simply put a small silver whistle between his lips, blasted out as shrill a note as he could possibly manage, and trusted in his ability to put the pedal to the metal to do the rest. I watched him for about a block and a half as he peeped and parped his way across the city at high speed to avoid slowing down, unsuspecting pedestrians scattering in his path as he frightened the living bejeesus out of anyone within a twenty yard radius.
And you wonder why some people accuse New Yorkers of impatience?
Unless I’m doing him a disservice. Perhaps he had a medical emergency, or he’d realised that he’d left the oven on? Or maybe he had Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves in his panniers, and he was having to keep up a constant 50mph for fear of untold damage to his spokes and handlebars?
With New York, you just never know.
When I first moved down to London, She Who Was Born To Worry (or my mum, as I generally know her) took the wind out of my fresh faced and eager sails by calling me a shandy-drinking southerner. The implication being that the north of England was rough, the south was posh, and I’d have to start watering my beer down with lemonade because I’d lose all my gritty ruggedness. Clearly the fact that I was always about as rugged as a baby’s bottom had slipped her mind. Not to mention the fact that my home county Cheshire sells more champagne per head of population per year than any other part of the UK. It’s hardly South Central LA, put it like that.
Of course, a move to New York has done nothing to dampen my status as a shandy drinking southerner. That’s despite the fact that a barman in New York is no more likely to know what a shandy is than Nigel at the Union Vaults in Chester would be able to make a decent Long Island Iced Tea.
But now I’m starting to fear that I am fulfilling the prophecy. Maybe I’m becoming a big softie after all.
I’m currently in the UK on business, and having previously checked the weather in London and found it to be in the high 60sF/20C, I merrily packed no jacket. After all the heat and humidity of New York, it’d be nice to get to the relative normality of British weather. But after walking down Kensington High Street yesterday afternoon, I suddenly realised that despite the sun shining, I was rubbing my arms to keep myself warm. All around me people are in summer gear, and yet I find myself wondering whether it would be a fashion faux-pas to wear a balaclava in June.
If that wasn’t bad enough, when I get inside the office or a shop, I’ve started to feel like I’m overheating, and regularly hear myself internally bemoaning the lack of air-conditioning in this country.
I fear that I may have turned into one of those Brazilian footballers who start wearing tights and gloves after their big money move to the Premiership, when they realise that a trip to Blackburn on a wet Tuesday night in January is marginally less appealing than a night at the Maracana.
It’s either that or I’m going through the change. You’ll read about me in the Lancet in years to come, I tell you.
Now, where can I get a shandy?
