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.

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.

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.

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.