Happy New Year!!

It's been a busy old time. Susan arrived in August, we got married in October and then into the festive season. Not had much time for anything else, but I have been feeling guilty about leaving Dodophobia alone, so here's a post.

On 19th August, myself, my mother and my two sisters headed out to the airport, clad in Susan's favourite colour, purple, to meet her plane. She was flying in from Iceland, but I found out just before leaving that they were landing first in Manchester, so we headed for Domestic Arrivals, bought a coffee at Starbucks and sat down. I immediately got up to have a look at the arrivals board and Susan's flight was listed as "landed". So I stood and waited. And waited. People came through, but no Susan, must be a different flight, so I kept waiting. And waiting. After about three quarters of an hour I was getting truly worried and started texting her; half way through my text, my phone rang. It was Susan, with a panicked "WHERE ARE YOU!?!?!?!?"  For some reason, her plane had landed at International Arrivals despite having just flown from Manchester, so I warned the troops and headed more rapidly than I have walked for a long time to the other end of the airport. There was my Susan. We hugged. And hugged. And hugged. Susan hugged the three others and they hugged her. I held Susan and she held me. Then we all headed for my sister Karen's car and drove to our flat. My other sister, Lesley, had put a Welcome Home banner across the door, so I handed Susan the keys and she broke that and opened the door. She loved the place, OUR place, and tripped jollily from room to room. After a diplomatic five minutes, Karen left and we were alone in our home. To tell you the truth, it had felt to me like Our Home from the moment I first saw it, and I had made sure the choice of colours and furniture and so on was a joint effort between Susan and me to make it even more so for both of us. But now it was whole. And that's how it has remained.

The wedding was in October, but that's a post all of its own, which I will be writing in the next few days. There is going to be a bit of a rush of posts in the next wee while, and I hope to keep up a more regular flow after that than I have done recently.

Welcome back, me!

Things are getting exciting.

Oh yes they are! Susan is, as previously noted, coming home, and it's getting more real by the day. She has her flight booked for 18th August, arrives here on the nineteenth, and the wedding is booked for 14th October, which will give us a week of married life before the world ends, if Harold Camping's calculations are correct. The reception's booked too, food dude and disco dude are re-engaged and it's all systems go.

We have a new flat to go with our new status; I will have moved in before she gets here but it is OURS, and we are making decisions jointly regarding decor and so on. It's one bus stop from where I am now and is in an ideal location for us, AND it's rented from the local council, so we have a secure tenancy, no problems with repairs etc, and a better flat than we could have got for the same money renting privately, not to mention central heating and laundry facilities including driers in the building. I have been out just today and bought us a suite for the living room, with couch-bed and easy chair. I will make a phone call tomorrow to arrange delivery of that, and also expect to speak to a painter and decorator about our walls. I'm feeling more married every day, and it is absolutely wonderful.

And then, if all that weren't enough, this week came the exciting news from Albany that New York state has passed a marriage equality law: all our gay friends there will now have the same right to marry as we would if we were there. As that includes at least one couple who have been together for over thirty years, this is in truth merely correcting a nonsense that has existed until now, is just putting right a long-standing social wrong, but it is also another sign that we are in the middle of a civil rights revolution that matches the great victories of Martin Luther King and his allies in the US in the fifties and sixties. Of course it also means that Anthony and Bob might now be married before Susan and I are, but hey, you can't have everything, and it would mean they were dancing at our wedding as husbands legally and officially as well as in reality.

Well, anyway, I just felt I had to get that lot off my chest. And besides, it's been a while and I've been neglecting my dodophobiacs.

A post among posts

I was in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago, on 23rd March. In Bothwell Street. Number 215. Stayed at mum's the night before because she was coming with me and it seemed easier than any alternative we could think of. Had to get there for 0945 you see.

215 Bothwell Street is where immigration appeal hearings take place. Susan had taken all the documents, made copies of them, collated them, indexed them, sent them to the appeals bods and the Entry Clearance Officers who have repeatedly turned us down. She did a fantastic job; she's a brilliant organiser, my woman. I/we had spent a lot of time racking our brains to try and work out how it might go, what might be our top points, how to counter what we thought they might say to keep us apart. I was going to be there, Susan naturally enough not, as she has no visa to get into the country to do so. We had no lawyers supporting us. I had mum for company.

We got there on time. Fifteen minutes early actually; well it's not the sort of thing you want to take chances with. There was pretty tight airport style security to get in, which I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by, but it helped to rack up the pressure. Most of the people there seemed to be strangely happy considering where they were and what they were there for: maybe they were all as confident as I was about the rightness and historical inevitability of their cases, or maybe they were past caring. I don't think either of those applied to the wee boy, about three I would guess, who was merrily going around the room high fiving everyone. He was the most popular person there, bar none. There were people wandering around who seemed to be lawyers or officials of the Immigration Bods, as I believe they're correctly known. I was sitting there feeling relaxed but tense (I know, I know, but believe me, it's possible). We had been told we might have to wait all day because they couldn't be sure how long each case would take, so they were doing their best to make us all feel as uptight as possible. But Susan and I had done everything we could and just this one performance was left to accomplish, in defence of a case we thought was unimpeachable and unanswerable, just as we had done the previous times we had been rejected.

As it turned out, it was only eleven when my name was called. I got up, being careful to need my stick, and followed the name caller to a door, which she opened and beckoned me inside. It was a proper little courtroom, with a judge's bench and everything, and up went the pressure again. I hadn't expected that. A few minutes later a white haired, white bearded man came in followed by a courty dude who shouted "RISE". He must have been smart, because he did not shout "ALL RISE", which would have been incongruous as there was only me in the room, but then, why did he think he had to shout rather than just speak?. By the time I got to my feet, the judge was motioning me to sit down, apparently not being one to stand on ridiculous and redundant ceremony.

When he spoke, he had a Northern Irish accent. Susan and I named him "the honourable right honourable Lord Ulster of the kempt hair". His hair and beard really were VERY well-kempt. When she told her friend Anthony about him he immediately said "or His Kemptness for short", so that's what he has since become. Anyway, His Kemptness asked me to explain the history of our case to him, and let slip that he had a bit of a downer on the Home Office for refusing too many immigration applications-- "some of them seem to want to stop all immigration". WE HAD DRAWN A LIBERAL!!! Guess what aspects I concentrated on? "Well they seemed to reject that without even READING the documents I sent...", "we had sent them everything they asked us for but they seemed to ignore that..." accompanied by an irritated shake of His Kemptness's head. At one point he asked why we wanted to live here and not in the States. I answered that with my medical history I'd have to be insane to live in the US. "Yes," he replied, "it says here you had spoken about your medical history but there was no evidence of it". With blank-eyed innocence I told him that was odd and there should be a letter from my doctor among the documents... "is it this one from Abbey Medical Centre?" His Kemptness asked. "That's the one ", I wearily answered. He started to read it out, I helped him pronounce "craniopharyngioma", and he shook his head again and made another note.

Well, at the end of it all, he told me, not that we had won or lost anything, but that he would have to go away, weigh all the evidence, that he sometimes had to literally juggle it ("Not LITERALLY literally...?" I suggested, feeling good by this time and imagining how difficult it would be to juggle pieces of paper). And as he was more or less leaving he said to me "good man". A Northern Irish colloquialism. Hell, I thought, if he's getting colloquial on me it MUST have gone well... Anyway, he also said it would be about two weeks before we heard anything, so it was to be another nailbiting fortnight.

We both felt we had done everything we could and that no reasonable mind could look at us and say we shouldn't be together, that there was no way we could be considered likely to be a burden on the state, or anyway more so because of Susan's presence. As I told the judge in my summing up spiel, by being here and supporting me, she's likely to reduce the need for professional assistance, so if anything she should SAVE the British state some money. I even told him "she will be" (WILL, not would; got to get that positive reinforcement in) "the first immigrant here since about 1793 to be looking forward to the weather". He answered laconically "God help her". Anyway, we knew there was no more we could do except wait to see what His Kemptness would decide.

Well, two weeks and three days later my phone rang. It was a tearful Susan. She garbled and yelled down the line "WE'VE BEEN ACCEPTED!!!" to which my thoughtful response was "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!". Then she hung up. I called her back. She read the entire decision letter to me, and oh it is wonderful. Slams the Entry Clearance Officers for ever rejecting us, points out that you can't get much clearer evidence of employability than an offer of employment (which she has had from my niece and which point I had made at the hearing), and rules that they had disproportionately interfered with our right to family life under the Human Rights Act. I had a grin on my face by now to put the Cheshire cat into retirement. And then she read the bit that said the Home Office had five days to appeal. So we had even more waiting to do.

Five days later I called the number at the top of the letter and gave them our appeal number. I asked what we should do now, what was the timeframe, and so on. The first words I heard were "the Home Office has NOT appealed".

All we have to do is wait for the letter that Susan will receive telling her where to send her passport to get it stamped with her visa. There's no specific timeframe on that but apparently it CAN take up to twelve weeks. Which means if it takes that long something has gone terribly wrong. On past experience, that should mean maybe a couple of weeks.

It's over. The waiting and worrying are over. We have won. Susan's coming home.

Not long now...

It's Friday evening. On Monday morning in the middle of still Sunday night really, I will be off to the airport, where I will board an aeroplane bound for New York. And when I get there, I will see my Susan, hold her, and spend eleven wonderful weeks with her, her family and friends.

She's been writing list after list, of things to do, things to eat, things to see, things to buy, things to cook. She's a list maker, and also a folder user, which will benefit me greatly in the years to come: no more wondering where the hell that electricity bill has disappeared to! No more panicking because I can't find the prescription the doctor gave me just that morning! I will learn to live with her organisationalism (don't care, it's a word NOW), she will learn to live with my scatterism (ditto), we will reach amicable accommodations together. We do so already, mostly without rancour or unpleasantness, although there is on both sides the occasional dropped jaw or raised eyebrow, and sometimes both at once. But most of the time there's only ONE side, called Us; Cameron and Susan; Susan and Cameron.

We're an And now. As in John AND Yoko, Romeo AND Juliet, fish AND chips, bagels AND more bagels. I have never been more certain of anything in my life, and I know, not just feel or think but know, that nor has Susan.

They say that relationships, marriages, take work. They're right. And we're working on this one, out of a shared Love and a shared determination to succeed. Sometimes it takes surprisingly HARD work, and when that's the case, there's a satisfaction of enormous proportions in it when we come out on the other side of it knowing we've done a good job together and put another potential obstacle behind us. We joke and laugh often, talk about films and art and culture, and language, often; discuss serious issues frequently and share always. We don't always agree about everything, but we have a set of shared assumptions that means major conflicts are rare to the point of non-existence.

Sound idyllic? Does it? Well, sorry, but it is. I am hugely happy. It's odd being so happy while still being aware, inside my head, of suffering from depression. Most of the time the depression is fairly distant, more than a memory but less than a spectre. Sometimes it looms larger, when I become aware of still living on a different continent from her or when we have a fight (they're inevitably about really silly little things, all sound and fury but signifying nothing, but they hurt terribly). On occasions like that there are still clouds above my head; but they're little grey ones, not at all the thunderous black devils that used to be there.

Wow. I started this post just because I wanted to write something and wanted to tell you all how exciting it is to be me, here, now. It's taken itself in unexpected directions. Probably not unpredictable ones though. I love it when a piece of writing does that, when I start with a vague idea of what I'm about to write and then the words themselves take over and I end up writing something completely different. Sometimes comedy turns into tragedy or whimsy turns into nostalgia, or nostalgia into feminism. Sometimes even the form changes, and a poem becomes a fairy tale. Once, a poem about a paragraph long got sculpted down to four words, while on another occasion one which felt just not quite right was studied and worried over for two days before I realised that what it needed was to start with a comma. With the comma in place, I felt like baby bear.

I think this post is done now.

It's been a long ole time...

My puter blew up. It has now been buried with full honours, but the new one has four times the memory, twice the disk space and cost less than half the full price of the old one. So, onwards and upwards, dodophobics.

But my, things have been happening! In the United States, Repuglicans have taken control of the House of Representatives because millions of Democrat voters, sick of the timidity of the Obama government, stayed at home rather than voting, and as a result have convinced themselves that everyone loves them. And their plan for power is to do absolutely nothing other than shut down the government of the country they profess to love, purely to try to ensure that Obama is able to get nothing done. They have nothing new to offer, nothing but the old, tried, tested and failed policies of giving as much as possible to the rich while preventing the poor from ever having anything. "Trickledown" has never worked before, but they still promote it as though it were a startling new idea that they've just this minute thought of. Americans will suffer for it. In the end, we all will.

And on the Cameron front, things are also moving on. On the small scale, I am finally rid of TalkTalk, the phone and broadband company which is totally unbeatable if price is the only criterion but which has frighteningly bad customer service. Within a week or so, I will have my broadband with Orange, who also supply my mobile phone service and whose customer service is (almost) beyond reproach; and within a week or two after that, I will also have my landline with them. The phone service will be about three pounds dearer but, as just over a year ago I had got so pissed off with TalkTalk's customer service that I switched my broadband to Sky (at a cost increase of first £10 and more recently £12.50 a month), I will actually save money. I'll also be getting half price Sky TV for the next six months for a total saving of £72. So I'm pretty happy.

Visawise, things have not been as great. I got together all the stuff that had been demanded and sent it off with guaranteed 48 hour delivery. Parcelforce promptly lost the lot. That caused us to miss our deadline and even though they had been told what had happened, the visa bods slapped us with another rejection and told us we will have to go to an appeal hearing in the UK (but no idea exactly where yet). We already have everything they told us we needed to get the visa, so we'll have no problem there, especially when we turn up with a sheaf of letters and affidavits promising support and pointing out that Susan's presence will if anything EARN the British state money. The hearing itself will cost the government quite a few pounds, which they could have saved by waiting a week or so before issuing their hasty decision. And of course, it puts the wedding date in more doubt; we may have to postpone it for a second time. None of this is going to stop us finally being together as husband and wife, but it is very irritating. It has already been almost seven months since we saw one another, and it's hurting.

BUT...

I got a letter from the Inland Revenue recently (if you're American, you won't be remotely surprised to hear that this is the British equivalent of the IRS). It informed me that I had paid the wrong amount of income tax in 2008/09; uh oh. But reading on brings the discovery that in fact I had OVERpaid, because my employer at the time, Hilton International, had put the wrong tax code by my name and taken more than they should have throughout that tax year. In a separate envelope, they therefore also sent me a cheque for £1211.62, which will be put to very good use indeed. Once it clears I will be booking a flight to New York, where for the second year in a row I will be spending Christmas and New Year with Susan, her friends and family. New Year's Eve Susan and I will spend in the Sheraton Hotel at JFK Airport, my birthday celebration will be at an Italian place in Manhattan called Carmine's which I believe is quite famous but in any event sounds wonderful, and who knows WHAT we'll get up to for Valentine's Day, shortly after which I'll fly back to the UK a couple of months older and personally happy and sated. Of course, on 2nd January we will repeat last year's trick (or should that be this year's trick?) of getting up at 6am and taking a cab to The Blue Room to watch the Rangers-Celtic game complete with early morning beer.

We have plans to catch up on some of the things we missed last time. Ground Zero is top of that list, and the Stonewall Inn is not far behind it. We'll also catch the Olympic Diner and the very famous Sylvia's in Harlem, as well as at least one bus tour and at least one Broadway show (suggestions welcome). We'll get to see Susan's sister's new place in upstate New York, at a place called Highland Mills, and most importantly get to spend one hell of a lot of serious quality time together (how's THAT for a euphemism?). And at just over two months, it'll pretty much let us see what married life is going to be like.

Not too shabby, eh?

PS the spellchecker on this thing has just gone mad and highlighted words like "get", "which" and "taking". Most bizarre.

It's been a while.

Well, that's the World Cup over for another four years. Or two years if you count the qualifiers. Spain won, as I had tipped from before the start of the tournament (not fishing for compliments, almost everyone did).

For the last month I have done precious little else. Not only Dodophobia but all my other online activities have been neglected, well other than my online grocery shopping, which has suddenly stopped being neglected and been restored to its previous prominent place in my life, on a temporary basis. I have seen lots of football matches and heard many a vuvuzela, while supporting ABE, or in other words Anyone But England. And ABE in fact won the World Cup a good fortnight ago when Germany took England to the cleaners and left the English moaning about the unfairness of not being given a goal when the ball crossed the line. Well, a little bit of delayed justice there as they were given a goal when the ball didn't cross the line in 1966, which led more or less directly to them lifting the trophy.

SOME other stuff has happened, though, mostly (I'm sure to no one's great surprise) involving Susan. My niece, Karrie, is over in New York City right now visiting Susan for her summer holidays. And today, they went to church (!), along with my other niece, Cheri, to listen to some gospel music. A damn good excuse, I feel. Karrie has had her first reuben sandwich, at the Edison Hotel. The reubens are truly vast in there, so they ordered one and halved it, and Karrie ate her entire half, which as she has the appetite of an unhungry mouse tells its own story.

Susan recently found something online which suggested to her that she could not get a marriage visa if I was receiving benefits. As I am, that would mean we would be unable to get married. So I headed to the local Citizens' Advice Bureau to ask them about it. They cleared things up very quickly: she cannot stay permanently IF she causes any FURTHER reliance on state funds. In other words, we may not claim any benefit for her or because of her. That will mean a couple of phone calls once she is living here, because I have to tell them about any change in my circumstances, such as having a wife live with me, and that would normally lead to an increase in benefits. So I will have to call them to sort that out somehow, so that they know she is here but don't give us any more money. She is not allowed to work for the first six months-- logical and rational they ain't-- but once she is she can get a job and we can stop claiming benefits at all, other than my Disability Living Allowance which is not income related. And as my total benefit amount is just marginally below what I was earning in my last job, there is no doubt that we can live on it for those six months without any difficulty.

My wee nephew Robbie had his seventh birthday today. I was delighted to learn that on their recent holiday in France, he declared himself to be "feeling creative" and worked a bit on the book he is writing, which it turns out is about five cheeky monkeys. He's a bit of a wordsmith, that lad, loves language, bought a French phrasebook before they travelled out there. For the last two Christmases, my present to him has been a thesaurus. When he received the first one, he was astounded and amazed to discover there could be a book about words and it rapidly became his favourite book, which he would take to bed with him and read before going to sleep. Not your average five, six or seven year old, our Robbie. He's a normal wee boy other than his love for and ability with words, his wonderful level of vocabulary; he's not being hothoused or anything. He has the attention span of his age group, for instance, had difficulty staying with it for very long when I played him at Scrabble recently (might well have had something to do with the fact I was ahead of him-- just barely, to stretch him a bit) but his behaviour was totally normal for such a young 'un. He adores his language, though, adores words. And his uncle couldn't be prouder of that.

The Scottish weather

Aye, I know, it's a crap topic: talking about the weather and all that. But the weather here has been very odd in recent times. Usually, as Susan has said, I describe the weather to her in shades of grey. But in the last week or two, it's been consistently... well, sunny and... warm, and... well, I'm not quite sure how to put this, but... blue.

I don't trust it. It's up to something. I've been saying so since it started. There's this big yellow bastard in the sky and it looks evil, it looks dangerous. That's what I've been telling people, anyone who would listen, and none of them would but I've been telling them anyway.

And what's happening now? We've got chunks of ICELAND falling on us! The bloody SKY is falling on us!! Cars are getting covered in black, grey ash, planes can't take off or land, people in the north are talking about the nasty, sulphurous taste of the air... I TOLD them, I bloody WARNED them. But who's got the last laugh now, eh? EH?

Not me.

Because Susan has a flight booked via, yup, Reykjavik. The capital of Iceland. She's due to land here on Saturday afternoon. As it stands, though, things are kind of up in the air. Unlike the planes. We think she'll get in okay, because SURELY the volcanic ash cloud can't hang about not moving for a whole further week. Can it? But, it seems likely that Scottish airspace might be the only airspace in the UK with flights taking off and landing, which will mean lots of flights for other places, in England basically, will land at Glasgow and coaches will be booked by the airlines to take their passengers to their destinations. It's happened already: two flights landed at Glasgow the other day which were actually for London and Manchester. Which means there may well be flights landing here next Saturday, but there will equally likely be lots of delays. So Susan will probably get here, but she might not be in the happiest of moods by the time we see each other. Mind you, once we do any bad mood isn't going to survive. It'll be yet another fantastic visit, and we have a table booked at Raeburn's for the following Friday evening. I might well post about that.

More New York stuff

I've edited the poem I sent in the last post but one.



MANHATTAN
There's a car that isn't yellow.
Hail it anyway; you never know
what might happen.



Quite a dramatic edit by my standards. Anyway, there's more stuff to tell you about from the trip. We'll start with Sunday the third of January.



There was a football match in Glasgow that day, between Rangers and Celtic. The New Year Old Firm game, one of the big events of the year. And I was on the wrong continent. But modern communications are a wonderful thing, and I looked up the North American Rangers Supporters Association on the internet. Sure enough, there was a pub on 2nd Avenue showing the game: The Blue Room. It's a Rangers bar, seems to be owned by a Rangers fan, and it is also the home of the Big Apple Bears, New York's Rangers supporters' association. Now, the game was kicking off at 1230 British time; that's 7.30am New York time. So, we got up at 6.30, went out and hailed a cab after buying coffee and muffins to go. We were there by just after seven. Went in the side door, as advised on the website, took breakfast in with us (the kitchen isn't open at that time in the morning, but they have no problem with people bringing food and hot drinks in with them), paid our $20 a head and sat down. The place was jumping, with a wondrous mix of accents. My favourites were the broad New York accents shouting Scottish football insults with Glaswegian terminology, presumably belonging to Scottish guys who had lived there for decades. Susan and I were both wearing Rangers shirts, it was her first ever game, and we had a great time. At half time we each had a beer with our free meat pies, at around 8am, which tickled Susan no end. She got really into the match, which bodes well for the future of course, and even avoided saying anything daft or embarrassing while joining in heartily. I think she even understood when I explained the offside rule to her, which is one for me to boast about.



After the game we headed to Port Authority and caught a bus to New Jersey to visit the family again, to wish everyone Happy New Year and to have a pretty impromptu engagement party. Not many people showed up-- it was very impromptu and they'd not had any notice to speak of, 24 hours at most-- but we had a lot of fun; it was another deeply pleasant family occasion. Actually we had been out there on New Year's Day too, back to the River Edge Diner for the traditional family New Year lunch. I had a plateful from the salad bar and a turkey leg with veggies and coleslaw. That leg was BIG, man! I couldn't eat it all and took some away with me.



I first visited New York in 1999, for two days on the way back from Pennsylvania. It was my first trip to the US and, as I was nearby, I wanted to verify that New York really existed. Also I wanted to visit the Museum of Modern Art to see Vincent's beautiful Starry Night, but when I got there the museum's workers were having a strike, the cause sounded reasonable and I didn't cross the picket line. So I had waited another ten years to finally have the opportunity to see it in the flesh. It was worth the wait. MOMA is wonderful. We might have spent a lot longer in there, but we were using a wheelchair and it was hard on Susan; still it was a great day. We saw Starry Night, of course, but much else besides. She wanted to see the Jackson Pollock room, and there was a wonderful energy in there; it was a very pleasant surprise for me. Got to see some Andy Warhol, including the famous soup cans and a Marilyn head, some Roy Lichtenstein (not a favourite of mine but always worth seeing) and a lot more, as well as having a pretty decent coffee on the fifth floor. After leaving we bought ourselves some gyros from a street vendor, and it was absolutely delicious and very warming in the cold weather.



But the best middle eastern food we had (well, kind of middle eastern, north African really, but hey, it's a link) was at a Moroccan restaurant on Ninth Avenue, called Tagine. Tagine is also a traditional Moroccan dish, well THE traditional Moroccan dish, and we had one, as well as a sort of vegetable stew, and some Moroccan spring roll like things as a starter. Before even the starter, we were given some very fresh, very warm bread with dips, one of which was a sauce called harissa. This was one of the hottest foods I have ever tasted, truly beautiful, but so hot it would have completely killed the flavour of the rest of the meal had I eaten more than a couple of small spoonsful of it. It was Great food (note the capital G), and Susan had a $25 voucher, so it wasn't as expensive as it might have been.



The only movie we saw, other than on TV, was Crazy Heart, starring Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal. It is an excellent film, grabbed a couple of Golden Globes and will surely have a fistful of Oscar nominations. Jeff's performance is stellar, he is absolutely the centre of the movie and everyone orbits him to great effect. I heard Maggie describe it on The Daily Show as "a tiny movie", which is about right, but in this case tiny doesn't mean small. It is well worth your time and money to see. After it we crossed 42nd Street to a Mexican restaurant called Chevy's, the queue at the Dallas BBQ having been too intimidating in the cold, and it was pretty damn good. Mexican isn't my favourite cuisine, still isn't, but it was well prepared from fresh ingredients and you can't complain about that.



All in all, we had a long succession of wonderful days, some wonderful experiences, and an awful lot of wonderful, wonderful time together. I do believe Eliza, the cat, loved her daddy, which is just as well as she'll be moving over here with Susan come the autumn. Mainly she just thought it was a really cool idea to have TWO humans to pet her instead of just the one, but the one with the hairy face didn't seem to mind petting her more or less constantly, and she was well happy with that.

Finally for this post, and probably for this New York trip, a poem. I wrote it in a cafe on 42nd Street just before we saw Crazy Heart, while waiting for Susan to come back from her apartment with the movie voucher she had. I like this one.

TEA
When I was a boy, I drank cup after cup
of tea, hot and welcoming and satisfying.
Then I had an Earl Grey. It had no milk,
but it smelled of beautiful flowers, heady
and exciting. It was like Times Square on
a good night, bright smiling and fierce, at
once bewildering and innately understood.
A few hundred gallons later, feeling bloated
and streamlined, wise and indescribably
foolish, I found a woman who was in the
same place. We sat down together, put the
kettle on, and watched until it boiled.

New York, New York

What a month. The longest time Susan and I have spent together so far, and we are now wearing engagement rings and have the wedding rings tucked away ready.



One of the first things that happened during the trip was, sadly, that Susan's mother died. It happened during the night just before we went out there to meet the relatives; it wasn't unexpected as she had been very ill for a very long time, but a shock for Susan anyway of course, and I was just glad I was able to be there for her. The upshot was that I met every relative this side of Alaska. I have never felt so warmly welcomed or accepted, and within a few days of arriving in the US I was suddenly a family member at a family funeral. It was quite an experience, for all of us, and quite a burst of humanity. I never met Nancy physically, although we had spoken on the phone and by Skype and were friends, but I felt so much love for her from relatives and from everyone else we met, and it was obvious that she was a very special woman.



We were in New Jersey for over a week, taking in Christmas, which was very beautiful. Again I was surrounded with family love, and I owe a great debt of thanks not only to Susan but to her sister Donna and all her family; I hope they know the thanks are given and the love returned. Christmas dinner was cooked by Susan's nephew John, who is a qualified professional chef, and it was truly magnificent. Rather than turkey we had an amazing roast beef joint and a ham, of which I felt compelled to take photographs. We had started with Italian hors d'oeuvres of cheese and cooked meats and sundried tomatoes. It was incredibly difficult not to eat far too much, but I just about managed it although I had to sit very still for quite a while afterwards. On Boxing Day (or December 26th as it's called over there) we went to some other relatives in Connecticut for White Elephant Day. This is a family tradition in which everyone sits around and regifts something. Everyone takes a number and the somethings are distributed on a more or less random basis, although there is also the possibility to "steal" something that someone else has already taken rather than pick one of the still wrapped objects. It was a lot of fun and another state to add to my collection.



After we got back to the City, there was still my entire list of desired destinations and experiences to go through. And we got through almost all of them, at the same time meeting friends of both Susan and myself (I have friends from Munich who are born New Yorkers and now live there again). We had cheesecake at Junior's, as well as at the River Edge Diner in NJ, and I have to tell you that, good as the famous Junior's version was, the one at the River Edge Diner is the greatest cheesecake on the planet, my niece's vote for a bakery called New York New York notwithstanding. We also ate at the Edison Hotel, where I had an absolutely reubenrific sandwich experience as well as my first ever matzo ball soup; and had a New York diner breakfast experience at the Westway Diner on 8th Avenue by 43rd Street, eggs sunny side up, hash browns, ham, bacon and sausage, pancakes, bottomless coffee and all.



I had my photo taken at the Dakota Building, right by the spot where John Lennon was killed, just before we visited Strawberry Fields and the Imagine memorial circle. The Chrysler Building and Empire State Building were visited on one morning, and the view of Lady Chrysler from a telescope on the observatory on the 86th floor of the ESB was worth the price of the trip all on its own. To see that wondrous art deco architecture so apparently close up was breathtaking to me, AND I got a fine beer at the Heartland Brewery back down on the ground afterwards.



On New Year's Eve, we went up to the roof of Susan's building, but thanks to a new building we couldn't actually see the ball from there and there was no one else up there, so we eventually went back down and watched it on TV like everyone else, despite being in Times Square and able to hear the crowds from her apartment. Still managed to get one of those daft blue Nivea hats you saw everyone wearing on TV though, so I can prove I was there...



All in all, it was a fantastic trip, most memorable, especially for all the time I was able to spend with my Susan, holding hands, watching TV and movies, playing with the cat, seeing and sharing her city, her family and her friends-- now MY family and friends, too. It was magical, and there were many tears from both of us at JFK as I was leaving. A wedding is expected later this year, and you're all invited to Paisley for the festivities. Just tell them Cameron sent you.

Good news and bad news

Well, the good news is that I'm going to spend Christmas and New Year with Susan in New York and New Jersey (where her family lives, in River Edge). The bad news is... well, I suppose I've not been sleeping too well lately.


My flight is happening thanks to a mightily generous Christmas present from my mother. I fly out on 14th December (a week on Monday as I type this) and back on 11th January, so it gives us almost a month together, during which, as I mentioned in a previous post, I can meet her friends and family, not to mention Eliza, Bailey and Stella (her cat and two dogs who live with her relatives). And she will get to meet friends of mine who live over there, too.



We have tickets for Shrek the Musical on the 17th, so that'll be me turning into instant wee boy at least for a few hours. Ground Zero, Strawberry Fields, the Empire State Building and Lady Chrysler are on the agenda, and who knows what else. And the last time I was in New York, for a couple of days in 1999, I got six or seven poems out of it, so I'll have to make sure I have a notebook with me.



The readers of Dodophobia will be the first to know what happens there (well, other than Susan and me obviously, and you won't be getting any gory details either), so stay tuned.

Go Yankees.

Susan is a New York Yankees fan; she was born in the Bronx, where the team plays. And right now they are in the World Series, playing against the reigning champions, the Philadelphia Phillies. As I write this, the Yanks are leading by three games to two in the series, and so need just one more win to win the series, which we hope will come in tomorrow night's game at Yankee Stadium.

I say "we" because, in the spirit of romance and partnership, I decided to take an interest by watching the deciding game in the Yanks' previous series against the Los Angeles Angels. And blow me down if it didn't get me hooked. So hooked, in fact, that I signed up for ESPN so I could watch it live rather than the minute or so behind I was getting with the streamed broadcast. And we've been watching the games together three thousand miles apart, by phoning as the game starts and hanging up shortly after it ends.

Baseball's exciting stuff, not at all like the borefest that is cricket, which many people on this side of the Atlantic imagine it resembles. It is complex and fast-paced-- to the extent that I often am unable to keep up with what has just happened and have to wait for an explanation from the commentators or from Susan, or whoever might happen to be in the room with her as she also falls behind occasionally-- and has one hell of a lot of specific terms which I will have to learn to keep following it. For instance, it's damn hard for me so far deciding just what's a strike and what's a ball, sometimes, although I'm already getting better and was able for instance to laugh right on cue when one poor opposition player started jogging to first base after only three instead of the required four balls, and before Susan had caught on. I have even begun screaming in delight when a Yankees player unexpectedly reaches base or more expectedly scores a run, or when a Phillies player drops the ball or misses a catch. I still fall behind reality a lot though (nothing new there, I suppose, but watching football it rarely happens. And by football I mean football, not gridiron: the clue is in the word "foot"). I've also started being abusively sarcastic about Phillies fans and their silly towel-waving. In short, I'm having a great time and have discovered a new sporting love. Now I just have to decide which player I want on the back of the shirt Susan's going to buy me. At the moment I think Joba Chamberlain is in the lead, because he is closer to my own body shape than any sporting hero I have ever seen. Which is another thing I love about baseball: some of those athletes look decidedly unathletic and could never in a million years cut it in any other sporting discipline.

Of course, Susan's end of the deal is to return the compliment when she moves over here, and watch and try to learn football. I can't wait to teach her the offside rule...

Susan.

These are the first two poems I wrote for her:

NEW

New York. New York. New York.

There. Now it's been named

THREE times.

AIRPORT

There was some tension and some
teariness, some coffee, toast and
bacon. With ketchup. She laughed
and said she had never seen such a
thing in New York, and what with
that and the deep fried pizza we
talked about opening a Scottish
health food store there. Then we
took photos of each other on our
mobile phones and went to her gate,
spoke silently with hands together;
we held and kissed one another, and
parted. I stood and watched her
until she turned a corner, and
dreamed about her coming the
other way on her next visit as tears

thought about it.

She's visited here twice now, we're engaged and wearing betrothal rings, which you can see in the picture there. And now the plan is for me to go over there for Christmas and New Year, spend the festive season with her and meet her family and friends. And buy engagement rings together, of course. It all just depends on finance (not the rings, which needn't cost much, but the flight), which is why a DONATE button has suddenly appeared here. I am scrimping and saving, have a tin (which once contained a bottle of fine malt whisky) for spare change and contributions, but that isn't going to raise the £500 we need to reach. Please don't feel pressured, but any small amount you feel able to give to send me to another continent for a couple of weeks to be with my Woman would be gratefully received.

Sorry to seem so mercenary on Dodophobia, but needs must.