Everybody likes to get something for nothing. Whether it’s the complete stranger walking up to you outside a cinemamovie theatreer and offering you tickets that they can no longer use, or a snack company giving away sample products on the streets, there’s no greater bargain than ‘free’.
But like a junkie desperate for just one more fix, the joy of the occasional complimentary Mars bar sends some people into a desperate downward cycle to get everything for free. Whether it’s a few illicit music downloads or a pad of Post-It notes from the office, no ill-gotten cost saving is too small for the true freeloader.
I don’t have categorical proof, but I bet Buster Edwards and the rest of the Great Train Robbers pinched a pint of milk or two off Mrs Miggins’ doorstep when they were mere nippers. And if Jesse James worked as an intern in Corporate America today, I’d say there’s a fair chance you’d need to pay closer-than-normal attention to your paper clip supplies in the stationery cupboard. The acorn of today is the oak tree of tomorrow. Actually the acorn of today is still an acorn tomorrow, but I think you take my point.
Most freeloading I can deal with. That’s not surprising given that I work in the entertainment industry, the whole foundations of which would fall apart if it weren’t for the phrases ‘guestlist’ and ‘plus one’. But sometimes, the something-for-nothing brigade really just get my goat. Especially when they’re breaking The Rules.
The Special One often tires of my unwillingness to break The Rules. She’ll happily get up on a plane when the seatbelt signs are illuminated, or smuggle food into the movies, leaving me to harrumph quietly in the corner. She thinks her refusal to play the game makes her a maverick. I tried to point out that mavericks don’t read the Pottery Barn catalogue, but she was too busy plotting her next coup d’etat to listen.
In any case, I’ve got no problem with rule breaking. It’s just that if I’ve got to pay for a product or service, it’s pretty galling to see somebody next to me taking the same thing for free. Particularly when it comes to public transport.
In London, the fare evader generally takes one of two forms. There’s The Athlete, who looks at the ticket barrier in the same eager-to-jump kind of way that Colin Jackson or Ed Moses used to look at hurdles on a sports track. If you see somebody travelling on a tube train casually carrying around a pole vault pole, you can pretty much be sure that they’re just planning to do a runner when they get off at Edgware Road. Well, either that or they’re Sergei Bubka, obviously.
And then there’s The Close Companion. It may initially seem that The Close Companion is attracted to you by your irresistible scent or ability to pull off that ‘just stepped out of a hedge’ look. But don’t be fooled, he’s just trying to get through the ticket barrier in the same 2.8 seconds as you. By the time you realise what’s happened, you’re either flat on the floor or you’re being sworn at by a scrawny man with ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on his knuckles.
Here in New York, the fare evader takes on a completely different guise. Sure, there’s the occasional student jumping the barrier, or the otherwise well-to-do person who forgot their Metrocard and hasn’t got time – or more likely, the inclination – to go home for it. But when it comes down to it, the ultimate New York fare evader is The Parent Of A Six Year Old.
Apparently travel on the subway is free until you reach the height of 44 inches. But given that there’s no Alton TowersSix Flags style height measurement by the turnstiles into the subway, it’s difficult to prove who is or isn’t entitled to travel for nothing.
The ridiculousness of the whole thing reached new heights this morning when a kid who was practically as tall as me was prompted to duck the barriers by his mum. Such was his size, he practically had to slither sniper-style to get underneath. It was like watching Shaquille O’Neal’s mother forcing him to duck under the turnstile on a shopping trip to the Big Apple.
With the desire for free stuff so strong among New Yorkers, most parents seem to shove any child they can lay their hands on under the turnstile paddles in an attempt to beat the system. Don’t even think of crouching down to tie your shoelaces near the entrance to the subway – you’ll be mistaken for little Johnny and thrust under the barriers before you can say Harry Potter.
I’m proud to say that I come from the home of the sandwich. You can’t beat a simple sandwich, freshly made with great bread and quality ingredients, and preferably accompanied by a bag of crisps. Admittedly the Earl of Sandwich probably didn’t go for cheese and Branston Pickle butties with an accompanying pile of cheese’n’onion flavour potato-based snacks, but I’m pretty sure that he would approve. If he hadn’t been dead for 200 years, that is.
Here in the States, the sandwich is equally revered, but over-complicated. It’s like comparing a 70s prog rock double headed guitar solo with the beautiful simplicity of an acoustic guitar track. By law, every US sandwich must have 73 ingredients, of which 18 are legally required to be cheese. Lettuce and salad can be included if absolutely necessary, but this can sometimes result in only a two inch thickness of turkey being added rather than the statutory four. The Subway chain gets around this by making sure every sandwich filling is actually made of turkey. Including the tomatoes. The only exception is the lettuce, which has to be cut at least six days before being used to ensure that it develops their patented Brown & Unappealing™ look.
Americans make a big play of the fact that they don’t put butter on sandwiches, while neglecting to mention that they smear so much mayonnaise on everything that Brooklyn alone ensures that senior Hellman executives have earned their annual bonus every year since 1934. The inhabitants of some small villages in the Cotswolds have a lower collective calorific intake than the consumers of certain New York sandwiches.
Most egregious of all, as I have indicated before, is the American obsession with putting peanut butter on sandwiches. Peanut butter is neither big nor clever. It is the devil’s food, and its combination with jelly (or ‘poor man’s jam’ as I like to call it) is simply wrong.
In fact, the only good thing about peanut butter is that it ensures that I never drink too much on a weeknight. The Young Ones love peanut butter on the sandwiches they take to school, and even the thought of making them while nursing a large hangover is enough to make me nauseous.
I never really minded going back to school when I was a kid. I lived a fair way from the rest of my schoolmates, so it was always good to catch up with friends. And besides, I always had a relatively immature fascination with getting a new pencil case, and filling it with HB pencils, a four colour crayon pen, and a rubbereraser that I’d probably picked up as a souvenir from Rhyl or Porthmadog.
Fast forward 20 years, and The Young Ones are currently in bed ahead of their first day back at school after more than eight weeks of blissful freedom. To say that they’re less keen on the first day back (and for The Youngest, the first day at a new school) would be an understatement. I’ve seen happier inmates chomping down a last cheeseburger on Death Row.
The dismay they’re feeling right now is nothing compared to what I felt trooping around Staples on Saturday, seeking all the items on a school supplies list that covered two sides of a fairly large piece of paper. From a set square that The Youngest will categorically never use in her life right through to a remarkable sixty ballpoint pens, I’ve seen shorter Oscar acceptance speeches than this list.
Some of the requirements made no sense. Is there really any need for two pencil sharpeners, for example? The Young Ones are pretty damn talented, don’t get me wrong, but even they draw the line at sharpening two pencils at once.
The thing that I quickly realised is that all the pens, mechanical pencils and paper aren’t even for the individual use of The Youngest and The Eldest. The school they both attend is extremely well-regarded and successful, but like most state-funded schools in the US it would appear, the phrase “state-funded” doesn’t actually mean that much. And it certainly doesn’t mean “we’ll buy pens and paper so that your kids can get a basic education.” Luckily, if the government gets parents to buy all this stuff instead so that the class can have a well stocked stationery store for the year ahead, it can afford to spend that little bit extra on new air fresheners for tanks in Iraq. Makes me proud to be a taxpayer, I can tell you.
With the whole of New York seemingly heading back to school on Tuesday, one of those tanks would actually have been useful in navigating the aisles of Staples. Imagine the carnage of the JanuaryThanksgiving sales, but with the unmistakeable candy-induced violent blood-curdling screaming that can only brought on by being unwillingly dragged around a store. Luckily the effect of the Skittles I’d eaten wore off eventually, and I calmed down long enough to engage in a lengthy discussion with The Youngest about the dubious merits of buying left handed scissors when you’re distinctly right-handed.
All I want to know is why we didn’t have to buy a protracter or a pair of compasses? I’m guessing that trigonometry is dead. Who needs angles when you’ve got the Jonas Brothers, eh?
Having tired of the geographical incorrectness of calling me a shandy drinking southerner, She Who Was Born To Worry has now taken to calling me her ‘Yank son’. Not that she actually has another son and needs to differentiate us as a result. Although there has been talk of an elusive half-brother called Eric (the forklift truck driver from Belgium) now that I come to think about it…
Actually, I think she just imagines that I’ll pick up the phone to her one day and start talking with the mid-Atlantic twang much beloved of the likes of Joan Collins and Shirley Bassey. As it happens, I’m taking active measures to ensure that never happens, including listening to plenty of podcasts from British radio, and a compulsory three hours of BBC America every week. I’ve even persuaded The Special One to watch the first series of Spooks with me, having picked the DVD up on a whim at Heathrow Airport. She’s not so keen on the presence of Keeley Hawes, but as I’ve presented it as a means to maintain my British identity, I think I’m going to get away with it.
The strange thing is that while She Who Was Born To Worry thinks I might be in danger of turning into an American, America is pretty convinced that I’m not even British in the first place.
When accent identification skills were being handed out, America was obviously eating a burger and fries, and reading Entertainment Weekly. In what is rapidly becoming the linguistic equivalent of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, I’ve lost count of the number of people who, on hearing my pretty robustly English voice, have firmly identified me as an Australian. I’m not alone in the problem either – as far as most Americans are concerned, Brits must be walking around with metaphorical corks dangling from metaphorical hats, throwing virtual shrimps on the barbie. The grill, that is, not the faintly pneumatic Mattel creation.
The strange thing is that Australia has a population three times smaller than the UK’s, and most Americans will never even have met an Australian, let alone correctly identified one. In contrast, the relatively close relationship between Britain and the USA (and the fact that it only takes seven hours to get between the two, rather than more than twenty) means that Britain and the British are a much more familiar concept than Australia and Australians. Of course, with many Americans still struggling to understand the need for a passport, it’s likely that Lilliput and Lilliputians are more familiar than the two combined, but that’s a side issue.
Incidentally, I’ve been also been identified as Irish, German and Scandinavian as well since arriving in the States. It’s a source of undeniable pleasure that nobody’s accused me of beingcalled me an American yet. It’s only a matter of time.
As I cooked dinner tonight, The Special One and The Young Ones sat down to watch the X Men movie. Having seen an interview with the cast half way through, The Youngest excitedly bound into the kitchen to say that she had no idea that Wolverine was British. Ironically, Hugh Jackman’s actually an Australian. The three of them have been living me for a year now, so their ‘all foreigners must be Australians’ radar will have to go in for a 10,000 mile service.
Once upon a time, I used to work in the murky world of cable and satellite television. How the channels I worked for ever got to air I’m not sure, given that they were almost entirely populated by 25 year olds in their first jobs and with a near-universal penchant for binge drinking. And that was just the presenters. The staff themselves were a good few years younger, and made the on-air team look like responsible upstanding citizens.
Clearly, I was a man amongst boys, with a responsible attitude that marked me out from my colleagues. But on the occasions when I wasn’t drinking and partying, I did have some cause to deal with the people who gave us license to be on air in the first place – the satellite and cable companies.
Now, some of my best friends have worked in the provider end of multichannel TV, and those people including Wesley Two Scoops (accountant from the South of England, rather than former American Gladiators champion) are some of the most intelligent people I know. But even they would say that such talent doesn’t extend to the staff of their call centrescenters.
Put simply, I would rather eat my own armpit hair than have to get on the phone to a cable or satellite call centre ‘worker’. The only way to get them to do anything vaguely helpful is to threaten to leave. Even that empty threat gets a little tiring after the thirteenth attempt to get them to fix a box that, let’s face it, only really gives you access to fifteen year old repeatsre-runs of Hill Street Blues. If it wasn’t for my all-encompassing love of footballsoccer, I would have told them exactly where they could stick their Remington Steele.
Moving to the United States, of course, everything would be different. This is, after all, the land of customer service. Ahem.
As it turns out, the only difference between cable company customer service in the two countries is that here you have the added bonus of walk-in customer centers that allow you to get incredibly annoyed in person as well as on the telephone.
Don’t get me wrong, the phone option is as irritating as ever. The Special One was cut off three times shortly before completing her order, after spending 20 minutes each time battling to make herself understood. If you know The Special One, you’ll know that cutting her off in her prime only makes her angry. And if you’re a customer service center worker, you really wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.
After that experience, the only option left was for me to go into Time Warner Cable’s frankly somewhat frightening customer center. For a start, there was the clientele. After making my way through the doors, I briefly had to walk out again just to check that I hadn’t accidentally walked into the nearby New York Clinic For The Terminally Strange. Even the simple exchange of a remote control seemed to take a twenty minute discussion regarding the position of the old lady or tattooed pensioner’s TV and the difficulty of accessing Bravo.
And then there was the lucky staff member who had to deal with me. We’ll call her Brenda, although given the darkness and bushiness of her moustache, she may well have been a slightly effeminate Brendan for all I know. Brenda tapped away at her keyboard for nothing less than 45 minutes in an attempt to solve a rather simple problem. All I wanted to do was add some additional channels to our TV package, and get a DVR. Apparently this meant breaking our existing contract and paying a hefty cancellation fee. All for the right to pay them more money every single month. Suffice to say that I wasn’t having any of it, but sadly, nor was her computer.
In the end, she decided to escalate it upwards. Her supervisor, maybe? The local area manager of Time Warner Cable, perhaps? No, she picked up the phone and called the sodding customer service center that we’d been ringing in the first place. Inevitably she got cut off after twenty minutes.
To be honest, I feel sorry for the center’s employees. After all, I’m now going to have to send The Special One in.
You’ll probably see the resultant carnage on CNN. As long as you don’t get your TV through Time Warner Cable, obviously.
My ability to waste away hours upon end talking non-stop about very little is the stuff of legend. If Inane Chat was an Olympic sport, I’d have played an integral role in the triumphant Team GB homecoming from Beijing at Heathrow earlier today. Arguably the title of Sir Brit Out Of Water would have been a little excessive for one whose major talent is to be able to blather on about next-to-nothing, but I would have accepted the knighthood with the quiet dignity and grace that it so richly deserved.
The problem with being a Brit Out Of Water is that it’s kind of like undergoing the surgical removal of your small talk. The delicate seven hour operation, which conveniently takes place at high altitude as you fly across the Atlantic, extracts all of the cultural and conversational touchpoints that you’ve held so dear for upwards of thirty years, and leaves you almost 100% chat free for at least the next year. Sure, you can talk about events that have happened directly to you, the news, or universal feelings of love and loathing. But if an expat even thinks about straying into an extended discussion about anything else with a local, you may as well pull out a sudoku puzzle and settle down in a corner on your own for twenty minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some great conversations with people I’ve met since I’ve been here, and I’ve met some fascinating folk. But having spent the last twenty years or so talking about football and the joy of Spangles, suddenly my capacity to connect with people on a sporting or nostalgic level has disappeared. While my ability to name every FA Cup winning side since 1968 may have made me a must-have on the London party circuit, my distinct lack of knowledge regarding the preferred starting line-up of the New York Knicks makes me a social pariah in some city circles. And while my witty bon-mots regarding Roland Rat or Multi-Coloured Swap Shop were the talk of the town, my vacant expression at the very mention of Three’s Company or Alice marks me out as a sad and lonely televisual outcast.
I’ve recently started paying a bit more attention to the Yankees (much to the dismay of The Special One) in the hope that I might be able to ferret away a few choice facts about Johnny Damon’s RBI or Derek Jeter’s OBP for use in a future conversation. The fact that I don’t know what an RBI or OBP is (and wouldn’t be able to pick Johnny Damon out of a police line-up) is neither here nor there. And I’ve decided that all future TV nostalgia chats will be veered towards Chips or Cagney & Lacey, given that I have more than a working knowledge of each. Admittedly it may get boring for my new friends to have to talk about Frank Poncherello or Sharon Gless week-in week-out, but some sacrifices simply have to be made.
In the meantime, any conversational cheat sheets from US readers would be extremely welcome. Packets of Chewits and cans of Irn Bru to anybody who helps me pass my forthcoming PhD in Trivial American Conversational Nuggets.
I’ve finally made it to a whole year out of water. That’s 365* days of living with The Special One, 365 days of working in the United States, and 365 days of thinking “blimey, what just happened to me?!”
So, other than 365 days, what other 365s has the last year held for me?
365 times that I’ve wanted to have an everything bagel for breakfast. I have only given in on 207 of those occasions.
365 pushes and shoves against me on the subway. That’s approximately 1.83 shoves per journey.
365 times when I’ve been forced to ponder why the UK doesn’t have an all-encompassing commitment to the hot dog too.
365 inadvertent steps into dubious standing water.
365 wrong turns by taxi drivers with only a passing knowledge of the streets of the city.
365 sightings of the Empire State Building which have prompted an internal response of “crikey, that’s the Empire State Building.”
365 times I’ve been grateful for a summer that lasts more than 365 minutes.
365 passers-by who have stared at me for not wearing a coat in March.
365 occasions on which I’ve cursed the fact that you have to pay a fee to use an ATM that’s not one of your own bank’s. As well as a fee to your own bank for the privilege.
365 minutes in total sat listening to assorted weirdoes espouse their sanctimonious claptrap on the subway.
365 times I’ve struggled to remember which one’s a nickel and which one’s a dime.
365 times I’ve emerged from a subway station and stood on the street corner for ten minutes trying to work out whether I’m facing north or south.
365 people who’ve attempted to imitate my English accent with a passable impression of Dick van Dyke.
365 occasions on which I’ve used a swear word in the workplace (and 364 on which I’ve been rebuked for it).
365 moments when I’ve thought “I’m sure I’ve seen this in a movie.”
365 times that I’ve had to apologisze for alleged anti-American sentiments.
Thanks for keeping me company over the last year, and to all those who have tipped off friends, colleagues and readers about the blog. I’m 365 times more grateful than I can ever tell you.
* If anybody even thinks about saying it’s a leap year and that I’ve been out of water for 366 days, there’s going to be trouble.
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.
