Welsh Alien in New York

Welsh Alien (no longer) in New York.

2011-07-01T03:19:00.003-04:00

31st May 2011

I am at the Heathrow arrivals with The Teenager, excess baggage, actual and emotional at our feet.

In the last day we have said goodbye to New York. I've embraced teary friends, sobbed at JFK over the luggage charges I couldn't pay, then ended up on the floor, open suitcases with knickers and photo frames strewn.

Oh. And Swansea got promoted to the premiership. That's a catastrophic 24 hours by anyone's standards.

I stare at the luggage carousel and memories of my last full day in NYC drift through my head: Memorial Day Sunday with Sara, her husband George and baby Ce Ce at The Frying Pan- a rickety boat bar on the Hudson River, packed with Fleet week sailors flirting with excitable New Jersey women. Crammed in on a tiny table in the direct beat of the blazing sun with a bucket of Coronas and plates piled with burgers and ribs, looking up at the summer skies.

Ce Ce-who I'd known since she was a bud in Sara's belly does her new thing: cocks her head to the side and bats her eyelashes. I melt because I don't even like babies, but I love this one. And she loves her Auntie Em. She doesn't know her Auntie Em won't be here tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. George prepares to take her home to bed and I think how she's not going to recognise me next time I'm back. The tears start.

Sara and I stay on together alone to say our goodbyes. We walk off the boat and sit on a park bench overlooking the river and even though we don't smoke, we smoke a few cigarettes while watching the sienna sun melt into the horizon. New York's giving me the last flash of her stocking, teasing me, reminding me how alluring she can be when she wants. The tears come thick and fast.

“Ugh Gu Gu Ga gaaaaa Gu, Gu. Guuu” I gulp to Sara. She cries back, but in a far less ungainly manner.

“You're the bubbles in the champagne Emma Smith.”

I wail a thank you for that and for making me feel one of her family when the new one I had was crumbling.

The next day at 14^th Street and 8^th Ave I meet Rhiannon-another Welsh woman in New York who opened up a whole new world of friends for me when I was so desperate to meet people. She brings Tiger the dog and her boyfriend Chris to the corner and everyone cries and hugs together. Except the dog, who pisses on the side of a kebab stall instead.

Leaving her is tough because she needs me as much as I've needed her. The hugs are really tight. The crying gets loud enough for New Yorkers to stop and stare. I thank her for showing me such a rare kindness of heart.

Later that day, as we haul our suitcases into the car service for the airport, we say goodbye to Laura and Harriet. They close the doors on a sobbing me and a much less emotional Teenager. Harriet crying her 9 year old heart out and Laura teary too. They helped us so much when we desperately needed it, allowing me to give New York my very best effort. I will always be in debt.

All of these woman and more saved me in New York. Strong, wonderful females who were there for me when It mattered.

Back at Heathrow and bleary from the Red Eye flight, I stand at the carousel waiting for the four bags that hold all our possessions. For the second time in as many years I have packed our lives into several suitcases, giving away or selling furniture and stuff, so we can move back across the Atlantic.

Aside from those bags I have nothing. New York cleaned me out. No money, no job, a broken marriage and my dreams of life there truly over. Probably forever-certainly for now.

I loved NYC but I suspect she never really gave a shit about me. She is used to everyone adoring her, constantly flattered by the attentions of men and women. She took my heart and gave me back the smallest moments-just enough for me to cling onto, without ever committing.

New York mirrors your mood. When you're having a great day she loves you with passion and gives you all she can. When you're having a bad one, she kicks you in the bollocks. Every day you are writing your own New York film, with you as the star and the streets as your location. Your extras are all around you- the crazies preaching their messages, the homeless slumped on the church steps, the rich high above in their homes in the sky and the drunks spilling out of the Happy Hours.

All of life resides in NYC, all kinds of everything-The great American experiment in democracy that began and ended there. Everyone finds their own New York-there's a city for all. I've shared some of mine on this blog over the last two years.

For now though, I have to put my city away for another time. Because it wasn't our time. Not this time. So for now I blow her a kiss and hope she sleeps well.

Then I remember she doesn't sleep at all...

7^th June.

I am in London and starting a new job in TV.

It's hard to take in. It all happened in a week. I am trying to process how everything has fallen into place since I came home to the UK. From the tiniest interaction to the big things that really matter.

If the Universe gives you signs, it told me over and over to leave New York. It threw bad luck after unlucky co-incidence after so-crazy-you-couldn't-make-it-up stuff at me.

Now after two years and one week my slate is clean and the stress behind me. I stand looking at my new start, my blankness, my paper ready to be filled with words and life and experiences and I feel excited, a little scared and more positive than I have been in a long time.

I am now a Welsh Alien In London.

Osamageddon

2011-05-05T00:05:00.005-04:00

Message from: Ann Smith (Mother)
  Subject: No subject
  Date: 1st May

  Hello darling,

Just take extra care Emma because there will surely be reprisals from the killing of Osama bin Laden, mostly directed against America, the sooner you leave that country the better.

Love you both XX

We all know that when the end of the world comes it will start in New York, like it does in the movies.

Your WelshAlien will be stranded on the island of Manhattan, because all the bridges will be blown up and tunnels blocked by the U.S. government in order to contain the disaster area. I won't be rich enough to escape in a helicopter and the seaports will be manned by the Army. I will pause only briefly to be turned on by their big machine guns and then I will really wish I'd make that move to Brooklyn, which is at least on the mainland.

I would be rubbish in a disaster. I have zero survival skills. Aside from running, which I can do for about 15 minutes without stopping providing I have a good sport's bra to hand. I probably couldn't dodge danger at the same time though, I have an inability to multi-task and no sense of direction- I couldn't tell you where North is right now. Even though I live on a grid system. No clue.

How might the end of the world might actually come? On recent events, I think a terrorist attack is a good bet. Personally I would prefer a Zombie apocalypse, as I've watched enough undead movies to figure out how to slaughter them all.

What would you do at the end of the world, with 24 hours to live?

I would dedicate my last day on earth to hedonistic pleasure, involving sex, booze and copious amounts of illegal stuff (including looting Chanel). I would do all this while eating one of those normally prohibited Baskin' Robbins hot fudge sundaes that have 1400 calories in. I wouldn't spend it with my family, 'cos why would I want to spend my last day on earth being told where I'm going wrong with the short amount of life I have left?

As potential apocalypses go, Monday was certainly bizarre enough. It started at 5.30 a.m. with a call from the BBC in the UK about doing an interview into their phone-in show at 7.30 a.m. Despite the pre breakfast hour I think I managed to fake reasonable intelligence on the American reax to the Osama death. I said words and phrases like 'rhetoric', 'intrinsic', 'psyche' and 'homeland security' all of which tip anyone in the direction of sounding like they know what they're talking about.

Annoyed that Osama has stolen the thunder of one of Cardiff City's biggest ever games, I head to Nevada Smiths in the East Village. For possibly the second time this season, we have sound on the tele. This turns out to be a bad omen as we watch and listen to mid-table Middlesborough take us down 3-nil on home turf. The sole Barry contingent of the N.Y. Bluebirds make us drink tequila slammers afterwards. More than a few of them. Enough that I wince.

We then sit with some Norwich fans behind and watch as their team win 1-nil and take the second promotion spot. They whoop and jump and there are sporting handshakes from some of the N.Y. Bluebirds. I stomp off to the toilet in a huff. The loo inside flushes automatically and I feel a little Stella soaked tear welling up. Anything automatic is just upsetting now.

However, we are all Championship fans in a sea of Premiership supporters in NYC, so the Canaries and the Bluebirds fly together for celebration and commiseration drinks at Mcsorley's Ale House in the East Village. I drink Dark Ale, which has not happened since I was pregnant. It's an old bruiser of a pub with sawdust on the floor and makes me miss home a little bit. The Canaries offer us beer, we accept. When the bill comes though they make us split it, so I gob a bit on their cheese plate and vow never to go to Norwich, not matter how good the M&S might be.

We are down to three and we are now in a bar in Nolita. Cardiff City have thrown away automatic promotion. It's the end of the world. Osama is dead and the Muslim world will seek revenge. I am staring at a Gin and Tonic. It's time to go home. Really home. Oh Waayyyaaales. No one will ever bomb Wales.

Outside I met this man, who is wearing what is possibly the world's coolest t-shirt.

We talk about Osama and Obama and I tell him about Cardiff City. He tells me he is from 'Glamorganshire'. I tell him everyone wants to be Welsh, then I fall into a taxi with Claire from Newport and Paul from Blackwood.

As we whizz back uptown I close my eyes and think about Wales. The place where the daffodils are the true colour God intended. And Clark's pies rule. And terror threats are low. And Cardiff fans are many.

Nos Da New York.

*

Skiing in Manhattan

2011-04-18T10:54:00.008-04:00

Mother arrived in New York at the start of this month, under the guise of being here for The Teenager's 17th birthday.

It's as if she has a press officer who spun this official reason.

As it turns out, the real agenda was to tell me (repeatedly) where I am going wrong in my life and to do vast amounts of skiing.

Not skiing on slopes. No, 'skiing' is a hilarious new acronym that Mother has picked up somewhere in the plethora of immigrant hating newspapers she reads. It means 'Spending the Kids Inheritance'. Isn't that fucking funny? Seriously. And I'll tell you when it's really, really amusing: when you're an only child and you watch helplessly as more of your money goes into the tills of New York's retailers and out of your future. That is sooooo hilarious!

Although being a Veteran Captainess of retail has it's advantages. It means Mother arrives with a ton of magazines and British chocolate, some perfectly picked Primark presents for The Teen and a few things for me. Nice to see she's remembered this is my big day too. Celebrating 17 whole years of single parenting in which I have not only managed to keep my offspring alive, but only moderately screwed her up.

I was imagining some kind of bravery medal fashioned from Dairy Milk for my pressie, but instead she brings me a top from Mango and some M&S knickers. A size bigger than I need. Always.

After the brief honeymoon ends (some point while we are still in the taxi from Newark) Mother releases her verbal stealth missiles. I need to slam a door in regressive reaction. The only one available is the taxi door though, which might not be advisable at 70 MPH through the Lincoln tunnel.

"Darling. I have to play bad cop with you darling, because no one else will."
"What?"
"It's true Sweetheart. It's just 'cos I love you."

Mother and I are very different. She pours realism over Emmaworld and I don't like it one bit.

The Teenager's 17th birthday comes and it's such success she is spawning superlatives by lunchtime. It is a pretty cool day. We go up in a helicopter for a Manhattan tour and she gets mistaken for Kim Kardashian. It's hard to tell which she is more excited by.

Like the good and bad fairy from Wizard of Oz rolled into one, it seems as soon as Mum appears, she's gone- in a puff of something pricey she picked up at Sephora. It was a week, but it felt quick. Even though painful things are supposed to go slowly?

After crying that she was here, I am now crying that she is leaving. Her and The Teenager had even tired of picking on me. We have a lovely sushi meal on her last night and she doesn't even complain about the 20% tip.

When we are in the cab coming home she asks me if I ever had an imaginary friend when I was a child.

"Of course Mother, I was an only child. I had to hang out with someone."
"What was she called?"
"It was a he...and he was a cameraman...and he would film me being a TV reporter wherever I went."
"Oh you freak. Most people have a child imaginary friend. Now mine was called Rose."
"Right."
"Yes and my Aunt insisted I lay her place one day at the table and I said no. I said: She's under the table, she's called Rose Munder and she doesn't like thunder. I thought that was rather clever!"

I always thought I was my Dad's daughter. Loud, opinionated, a people person and a bit leftfield.

Now I'm not so sure that Mum didn't have an awful lot to do with it.

I am Dragon...hear me whimper

2011-03-28T16:20:00.002-04:00

Being a Welsh football fan in New York is a pretty exclusive club.

It's even more exclusive than being a NY Bluebird (current membership: six). On Saturday there are just four of us in Nevada Smiths at 11a.m. We might be small, but we've got passion, heart and all those Taffy cliches so we have a bash at the anthem:

"Eggy wogian or vreeeeeeeeee?"

The England fans are silent. I don't blame them, who wants to Save The Queen? So they've got 3 lions, but we've got a Dragon. Y Ddraig. It's a mythical creature that doesn't exist but if it did it would be harder than 3 lions, yeah?

Actually who would win a fight between a Dragon and 3 Lions? As I'm pondering this the game kicks off. "Would the Lions use their obvious advantage of numbers to overpower the Dragon?" Bellamy is having a scrap with Rooney one minute in. "Or would the Dragon pull out it's trump card of Fire breath?" Hmmm. England score. 6 mins in. My Stella is empty.

If the rest of the day was a film, this would be the bit where they do a sped up montage with screaming Indie music to imply the hedonistic abandonment. There would be pints spilling, bar tricks, shirt swapping, fags smoked, an onslaught of Nordics and me having a tantrum when the bar runs out of Salt & Vinegar Walkers. The montage would end up with me and Laura on the pavement at 6 p.m and me remembering I have to be in a cocktail dress and at The Comedy Awards in an hour.

Then as the music is fading I would arrive home pissed to a pissed off Teenger, who isn't any less pissed off when I tell her she's being a Saffy and then Facebook and Tweet as such.

I manage to turn myself around with the help of some Red bull, a stern talking to myself in the mirror and light reflecting primer. Then we are in a cab on our way to The Hammerstein Ballroom.

Cue another montage with blurry celeb faces: Alec Bladwin, Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy, Will Farrell, the blokes from Hot Tub Time Machine.

After The Awards I inhale pizza from a place over the road and the cabs all appear to have fallen into a rabbit hole. It is cold. Really cold. I am not having fun anymore.

Sometime past midnight... it is rumoured that I fall over into a pothole outside Penn Station while hailing a cab.

No. That absolutely didn't happen. What also did not happen was that I cut my knee open through my tights and impaled a piece of gravel in my hand and that The Teenager had to pick me up and push me and my bleeding knee into a taxi.

Never. Happened.

Considering the fact these things never happened it is most strange that The Teenager is still barely speaking to me today.

*

Springasm, Brooklyn

2011-03-21T16:41:00.001-04:00

Last Thursday four separate strangers smiled at me in the street.

The only time this happens in New York is on the first day of spring. When it's suddenly pushing 70 degrees in mid March everyone leaves their cynicism at home and hits the streets with those smiles. Mother nature sprinkling a taste of sweet spring sugar into our open and ready mouths.

It came just in time-after an endless winter where I believed I may actually be living in Russia. I was spiralling head long into a chronic and debilitating case of S.A.D. the main symptom of which was watching illegally downloaded award season movies with a fleece blanket over my head while wearing pajamas with polar bears on.

On the day when spring prematurely sprung I was in Brooklyn, so it's hard to tell if I would have got less stranger smiles if I had been in Manhattan. I was there to meet The Teenager, who's doing a once weekly internship at an independent jewelery maker in Williamsburg. It's an area I hadn't made it to until now and when I arrive I am kicking myself for not coming sooner. I get off the L train at Bedford Avenue and step out of the station. It's instant: I'm in love. Love, love, love. At first sight.

"Well hello there." I say.
The streets smile back too and we're flirt with each other straight off the bat.

I know. Williamsburg. It sounds like a bit of a New York cliche. I'm years late with this one. Does that matter? I don't think so. Don't we find people and places at the exact time we're supposed to?

I meet The Teen for lunch and we eat in the garden of Aurora. The sun comes through the trees and throws a dappled light on the courtyard. It's a bit blissful say what.

Afterwards I stroll around, get lost, people watch for a while on a stoop, get even more lost and then sit on a bench watch some locals playing basketball in the park and coo over loads of cute doggies.

I feel the sun on my cheeks, warm. This is a place I could call home. I can see myself slotting into life there and being happy. It's likely no co-incidence that the day I come here the place is bathed in it's most flattering light.

I get up to take some more pictures and have a massive Springasm.

Let them eat cake

2011-03-13T22:42:00.001-04:00

You might imagine that living in New York you could escape the frenzied, vomit inducing, Daily Mail sponsored build up to the Royal wedding.

Will Kate be donning a British made Wonderbra for her wedding night? What will Diana be wearing on her cloud in heaven? Will the cake be fashioned from Charles' Dutchy Organics biscuits?

I was forgetting the fact The Americans-even jaded New Yorkers-really love the Royal Family. They are shocked when you express your hatred of them. It's like saying you want to incinerate puppies and kittens and babies and eat their charred remains.

My favourite NY pooch Tiger. I shan't be eating him.

When you're a Welsh Alien in New York it means you are constantly being asked about Diana, "The Princess of Wales". Questions like: Did I know her?/Was she a relative?/Where was she from in Wales?

To which I reply: "She was a posh London Sloane. She had nothing to do with Wales."
American: "But she was married to the Prince of Wales!"
Me: "He has nothing to do with Wales either."
American: *bemused face*
Me: "What do want me to tell you? That the pair of them like a pie and a pint at Ninian Park?"
American: *utterly lost face*

Probably not.

And we're back to The Daily Mail. Only ever a guilty click away. The internet version of Crystal Meth: you know it's bad for you, will make you ugly and knarled, but it's easy to get hold of and highly addictive.

Today they had an article about Kate Middleton buying Haribo Sweets, specifically Tangfastic and Starmix. "...which contain 906 calories per 275g bag." (makes me think twice about hoofing 2 packets when I'm hormonal). Shopkeeper Hash Shingadia told the paper that groom William loves a mint Vienetta. "...and Doritos crisps and Tropicana orange juice."

(Miraculously The Daily Fail just managed to write about an Asian without connecting them to a terrorist bombing or immigration quotas.)

Kate's big day is only weeks away and at least being in the U.S. I will escape the patronising indignity of being given the day off work. The Royal aides with their assumption that the entire country thinks of this as their big day too and wants to line the streets and wave our pauper rags in deference.

However, if you are a Royal loving expat, then two NY Brit organisations here in New York have just announced their big whopping Royal wedding celebrations. Big Apple Brits, my blogging partners are teaming up with the event at the Brooklyn Bridge where the day's kicking off at 5a.m. Then the newly formed George are holding a fundraising ball near Times Square.

I love a good bash, so I will be throwing my own: a principle party for all of the expats who hate The Windsors too. It will cost you nothing, unlike your tax paying non optional support of The Royals.

I may even throw in some Haribo.

*

Taxi for Smith

2011-03-08T13:10:00.000-05:00

I'm in a cab heading for new British bff's birthday meal.

On the seat next to me is a beautifully boxed but crap present. I am going for the theory that when cash is low, creativity or humour should prevail. Being as my latest job sucked all the energy and creativity out of me- I went for the laughs and bought her a plastic cow that shits sweets. And Moos.

The cabbie is belting down 23rd street like he's in Grand Theft Auto.

"Moooooooooo." says the cow from inside the box.

The driver looks at me suspiciously in the rear view mirror.

"Moooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo." says the cow.
"It's a present!" I say.
"Excuse me?"
"A present, the moo. It's a cow."
"What?"
"It's coming from the box. It's a plastic cow. It's moo-ing a lot. It wasn't supposed to start moo-ing until I took the tab out, but is it."

He narrows his eyes at me in the rear view mirror.

"It's PreMOOture ejaculation."

The joke falls flat on the floor, along with the rest of my oft misunderstood humour here. Is it any wonder I keep making friends with my own people?

I launch into a huge explanation. About lack of cash. About it being a joke. About it shitting sweets. Except I say "Poops Candy" so he at least gets that bit.

"I don't understand?" he says "Why a lady like you would buy such a present?"
"It's a joke."
"I still don't understand." he says
"I know you don't. It's o.k."

The taxi jerks violently as it dodges another, accelerating past the Flatiron building and swerving a kamikaze left onto 5th Avenue.

"Mooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo." says the cow.

I couldn't agree more.

*

You're not in New York now...

2011-02-09T14:04:00.004-05:00

I spend a lot of my time in New York drawing imaginary maps of the UK in the air in order to explain where Wales is.

After ten minutes of my hand flailing the usual response is "So what part of London is that in?"

Geography is not a strong suit of the average American and is it any wonder when new stats show that despite a huge rise, only 30% of citizens hold a U.S. passport?

In their defence, there is a lot going on in their homeland. If you're a Californian you don't don't even need to leave the state to ski powdery slopes, sunbathe golden beaches or see breathtaking mountains.

And if you live in NYC it's like residing in a vacuum. It's not like the rest of America, if it wasn't for George Washington in your wallet, you might forget you're even living in the U.S. There are many reasons never to leave. Stay here for too long and you become confused when people in other cities tell you they don't have 24 hour food delivery and Drag Queen bingo.

I rarely leave New York myself. Not out of choice, more out of a lack of Benjamins in my wallet (Oh freelance!). So you can only imagine my squeely joy recently when I was invited on a press trip to the Florida Keys. I threw my Hunters in the cupboard, dragged my summer clothes from under the bed and spent much time debating whether my main hot weather look should be "Out of Africa" or "Nautical meets Chanel cruise wear".

Then in the depths of the January sleet I left my apartment in NYC at 6 a.m. in five layers. I flew South for less than 3 hours and shed clothes on the plane as I went. By the time we reached Miami airport I had changed into flip flops, sunnies and a floaty dress. I was still in the same country but now it was 82 degrees and men were wearing Hawaiian shirts.

You know that line "You're not in New York now."? The one that always gets churned out in Rom Coms where the Louboutined heroine is forced to move to Hicksville and is astonished to discover there's no Prada and the restaurants shut at 9p.m? Well that was what was in my head. Although it barely mattered by dinnertime when I was eating fresh seafood under a palm tree.

6 days, a lot more seafood and a minor sunburn later and I came back to NYC and one of the worst snowstorms in 300 million years. 20 inches of the stuff. So thick it made the trees look like they were growing cotton.

Florida feels like it never happened. Florida didn't. It couldn't have. Except there are 182 pictures on my digital camera that say it did.

So to remind me- and extend the very last dregs of my bragging rights- here are just a few of them...

My food travelogue piece on the Florida Keys will be published in the NY Metro newspaper.

Rubbish return

2011-01-24T20:26:00.006-05:00

I left NYC for a month and by the looks of things on my return, she couldn't care less.

As our yellow cab whizzes down fifth, I notice that the city looks decidedly shittier than normal. She's made no effort for my return, quite the opposite in fact.

I turn to the Teenager:

"Is it me, or is there a lot more trash than normal everywhere?"
"For god's sake Mother, it's rubbish."
"Yes, alright. But am I imagining it?"
"It's always dirty here."
"Yes, but there's piles of garbage everywhere."
"RUBBISH!"

Piles of snow too. Drifts that have been pushed to the side by ploughs and have now frozen, mini mush mountains on the side of the pavements. Long since white, now stained with the footprints of thousands of New Yorkers, yellow dog piss and discarded coffee.

I chose the coldest December on record to go back, so snow had already dominated my trip back home to Britain. It was all over the UK, but the majority of it was in South Wales. The weather meant nothing worked, or rather- nothing worked even worse than normal-which is worse than I remembered.

Public transport, which I was forced to take a lot-was hit hardest and there was more of it during my trip home than any one person should have to endure. After my flight from NY to London I bused it to Cardiff on a National express coach that took 4 hours to go 150 miles down the M4 but It felt more like 150 hours to go 4 miles, due to the selfish pensioners in front of me who put their seats back for the entire journey and pretended to be asleep. This halved my leg room and I prepared to be the world's first coach DVT victim.

While in Cardiff I was forced onto buses after my Mother insured her car with Age Concern, therefore excluding anyone under 50 being added as a driver. When I complained she said "Don't worry darling, just 14 years to go." Then she waxed lyrical about the joys of Cardiff bus' Day To Go where you get unlimited travel for just £3 a day.

After a week of trying to see friends and run errands on the blue rinse bus I headed off to London, where at least public transport runs more than twice an hour. This meant a train journey back in the same direction as I had come, which clearly messed with the universe, because the buffet car's coffee machine broke and Pam of Great Western suggested instant instead, causing me to shudder all the way back to my seat.

While in London there was a lot of tubes to take while carrying lots of bags. I developed an ingrowing toenail, a condition that is so painful it rules out me seeing the funny side, either then or now. It also pretty much rules out walking more than 20 yards. And dancing. And the heels I had packed for dancing. And walking in snow. And wearing wellies that would help me walk in the snow. So of course then it snowed and nothing worked again. Not my feet or London transport. Except the black cabs, but efficiency costs-£50 for two rides to be exact.

After month in the UK, I was ready to come back to NYC, any longer and I would have started to get used to it all. To accept terrible service. I would have switched coffee for tea. I would have started to understand what was going on in Corrie again. Another week of Cadbury's on tap and my arse would have been 10 pounds fatter.

A few weeks into January and I read that the reason for all the rubbish is that the city was too busy ploughing the snow to take the bin bags away. I'm not sure what they've been doing since though. Now the pavements have even bigger snow mountains, created where it's fallen again onto the uncollected rubbish. Atop them lie discarded Christmas trees, making giant mounds of discarded festivities.

It's nice to know that New York city is not always that efficient either. It's nice when this overachieving city shows some vulnerability. Miss Perfect screwing up makes us all feel better.

The difference between America and the UK is that Blighty just doesn't care. It's unapologetically inefficient. Take it or leave it. It's a rebel country without a cause. It's lion's roar is broken and it's no idea when it will be fixed.

Oh how I love you, beautifully broken Britain.

And that is why sometimes my heart is not always where my home is.

Hometown story

2010-12-05T16:41:00.004-05:00

Tomorrow I return to Wales for the first time since I arrived in New York.

Today I walk along 5th Avenue with the sun shining so bright it's like the second coming of Christ. A perfect NYC winter's day, everyone bundled up against woollen things and over sized sunglasses.

I think about the last 16 months. Where I am now, where I was when I arrived in September 2009. Am I a different me now? Adele's Hometown Glory comes on my ipod, like it always seems to lately "...I ain't lost, just wandering...'round my hometown."

A giraffe-like woman stalks past me in a fake fur, alien looking, make-up free, legs that threaten to break from their skinniness. Model spot. I pass a line of food trucks, Manhattanites lining up to make their weekend hangovers betters with carbs and coffee. On my right a homeless couple have made their own pied-de-terre on the sidewalk from boxes they have broken up underneath some elegant Christmas lights. A temporary house of cardboard with their own Christmas star above.

I feel it. A little pull at the thought of leaving New York. A city of flawed beauty-broken, ugly, imperfect, yet unmatchable. I love NYC the right way now. Not the romance I had when I first started visiting in 2006, where I only saw the good in her, but the way I feel now. Based on accepting her for all she is and all she is not.

New York is a tough one to love. She gives only when you do. She mirrors your state of mind. When you bounce onto the streets, they are energised and pulse with life. When you walk shoulders hunched the city is depressing and dank and lonely.

I board a plane tomorrow at 8 a.m. and I have butterflies of excitement at the thought of going back to Cardiff. Not because it means escaping what is not perfect about my life in NYC, but because of the people I have there. People I have loved, some of them for my whole life.

And just at this time I realise I have found my feet in New York. I was always told it would take time. Everyone forgot to mention it also takes friends. Just like Cardiff, I found my corner of this city and I am not alone in it.

If home is where people I love are, then I guess have two now.

And for that I feel blessed.

When is it time to drop your Mother on Facebook?

2010-11-26T15:20:00.002-05:00

This week something happens that causes a departure from my usual blog subject of being a sometimes lost, sometimes found, Welsh Alien in New York.

My mother changes her Facebook profile picture to one of her drinking a pint.

I show it to The Teenager (who I always defer to on booze related matters) and she tells me it's actually Sangria.

"But in a pint glass?" I say.
"Now you know how I feel." she says.

Hardly. My daughter refuses to be my friend on Facebook on the basis that she wants to be able to slag me off to her 565 friends. She briefly changed this rule in the summer when she went home for 6 weeks, after much begging from me. Her only communication for the entire time was to post "Your a massive Twat" on a Black and white 'arty' photo of me pissed in a L.E.S. bar. I posted back about her grammatical error and that she should remember her apostrophe 're. She dropped me soon after.

She will however, be friends with my Mother. Her 66 year old Grandmother. And she is unapologetic about her rejection of me. Whereas I personally felt it's a bit rude not to accept my Mum's FB friendship-what with the small matter of her baring me life.

Now I wonder if my own Mother is 'doing a me' and embarrassing her offspring on Facebook. Is it time for me to cut the virtual apron strings? But before I click 'remove from friends' I ponder that my Mother's very existence on a social networking site is miraculous to the point of being an evolutionary shift. 18 months ago she couldn't even write an email. Now she can post pictures online, send attachments and nag me via several new mediums. There is likely a whole new section of her brain that has developed to process this new technology and her fingertips have grown little webbed pads to protect from RSI.

She has now taken to writing me emails that quote my Twitter/Facebook/Blog. In them, she will complain about information she is hearing second hand from any given social media platform:

Subject: Rubbish daughter

Hello Darling, I see from your Twitter that you have recently *insert small, insignificant piece of news* this is nice to hear at the same time as the rest of the world. You also Facebooked that there was *insert small, insignificant piece of news*. Your Mother would like to know these things. And I read your blog, it was funny, except you didn't tell me that *insert small, insignificant piece of news*. As The Teenager would say- WTF?

Love Mum xxx

This roughly translates as:

Hello Darling. You are a bad daughter and I will make sure to spend all of your only-child inheritance on a series of luxury cruises and overpriced M&S food.

Recently, when I complained on Facebook of my Blackberry breaking my Mother wrote the following "Did you throw it against the wall, like you did with that other phone?" I deleted this comment, as it was not only defamatory, but unfortunately true. I can assure though, that my phone hurling incidents were purely restricted to cheap nokias. I would never do such a thing now. Now I have a Blackberry that I take to bed at night. And I'm 35, of course.

Facebook has become a communicative shorthand for us all. This is what my Mother's generation might fail to get. If I emailed everyone individually to tell that what was going on in my oft' bad soap opera of a life I would never leave my computer, or sleep, or eat.

I ask The Teenager's advice. I say that getting ticked off by my Mother on Facebook in front of my 200 'friends' is a bit irritating.

"It could be a lot worse", she says "At least she's not blogging or tweeting every detail of your life for everyone to see. Hmmm? MOTHER?"

And she fixes me with that cold stare she does so well.

"Oh right...yes."
"You really are such a twat Mother."
"Thanks."
"Now get out of my room."
"Love you."
"Yeah whatever, shut the door behind you."

*

Lost time, found again...

2010-11-10T13:05:00.004-05:00

In order to find yourself in New York, you gotta get lost first.

Which is good, as I have absolutely no idea where I am and it's been this way for the last two hours. My blackberry keeps telling me I am where I want to be, which is not helpful, as clearly I wouldn't be attempting to get there if I already was.

The beauty though, is that I'm having such a great time being lost I've forgotton my original endeavour of trying to find an antique jewelers in the Lower East Side. Two of the diamonds fell out of my Victorian engagement ring. It survives a century intact and after just one year on my big, clumsy hands, it's screwed.

In the time that has passed I have walked past The Cooper Union and mused how it looks a little of the Armadillo exterior of the Wales Millennium centre:

I then realise I'm not even in the LES anymore finding Fonda Lolita with it's actual VW camper van parked inside at Tacombi.

I sit down with a rib and chicken taco and ended up talking with the owner who tells me tales of setting up the same restaurant in Mexico. He'd had two successful places until bird flu killed the tourist trade. Then he started making beer and got the funding to move to the U.S. and open here. In New York everyone has a movie script-worthy back story.

I leave when it's just getting dark and the blinking neon of the 99 cents store glows large. The promise of cheap tat lures me, until I realise it's a $99 store and just sells leather jackets.

Down the block is American Apparel. The very same one that used to be deluged by hipsters on the benches outside. Today there are four hobos drinking from brown paper bags on the seats that remain and AA is hawking leotards on a rack outside for cheap. Oh the economy!

I walk around to East Houston and find an Army and Navy store being run by possibly the nicest bloke in NYC. I buy combat boots and some studded leather gloves from him and his Chinese Mum who doesn't speak any English, while he tells me he doesn't have a computer, but that customers tell him "Everyone write nice things 'bout me on internet".

I find the jewelers eventually, not by means of google maps on the Crackberry but by asking human folk the way. The woman in the store chastises me for having such a dirty ring. I avoid the obvious entendre and instead thank her and express how much of a pleasure it will be to pay hundreds of dollars to get it fixed.

I take the F train home and when waiting for it close my eyes to appreciate the Jazz trumpet player busking on the platform next to me. It's the perfect soundtrack to the day. Close my eyes, breath in the last few hours, smiling, smiling...

"WHAT THA' FUCKING FUCK MAN?" the girl sat next to me is suddenly going bonkers and flailing around. I realise it's because she was listening to her ipod and the jazz trumpeter is drowning out her music.

"'Dat's some fucking buuuuulllshit right there! Shut up man! SHUT UP! No one wanna here your fucking jaaaazz ass music."

The Trumpeter doesn't even blink. She screams, he plays Miles Davis. She screams some more, he's riffing some high notes. A guy in a suit gives him $20. The girl's still screaming. Together they sound like a hybrid alternative Jazz fusion you would hear at a downtown club.

New York makes it's own music.

Today I love the sound.

*

Head in the clouds

2010-10-27T15:12:00.005-04:00

Aside from Cardiff and New York, I have been a permanent resident of another place: Emmaworld.

In Emmaworld, everything is sunshiny happy and unicorns frolic on rainbows made of marshmallow. There are no rules, aside from permanent positivity. Emmaworld-population: 1

In Emmaworld the move to the New York was going to be a film script. Not a sachharin rom com, but an upbeat Indie with a few minor challenges for the characters to overcome. In the end everything is cool. Turns out in the real world everything is not cool, which is good I guess, because it's must mean it's not the end.

I have recently taken forced leave of absence from Emmaworld in order to reside in the real world. In Emmaworld I have a super super spanky job and strut around in perfect buttery beige vintage boots grabbing Manhattan by the bollocks and yelling Sancerre orders at waiters after a long day conquering at large.

In Realworld I am in tracksuit bottoms on the sofa of my pricey Manhattan Storage unit-come-apartment, eating Cheerios from the box while jabbing refresh on my emails like a woman possessed. I tune into the painful sound of no phones ringing. Me and several other million Americans in the great job hunt.

Oh and I'm networking.

Oh yeah... Feel my pain. Networking. I am a Brit and more than that a down to earth Cardiff girl. I have to talk bullshit to people I don't know for work? It makes me feel a little dirty. They don't even call it bullshit here. They call it "B.S." America is so busy with the actual bullshit they don't even have time to say the word.

And then there's people not always laughing at my jokes. The reaction after I said something seemingly witty and spontaneous at a recent event went like this:

Networky person: *Silence, quizzical look*

Me: *Silence, refusing to qualify joke*

Networky person: *Silence, while working out if I'm serious or not*

Tumbleweed blows through the room.

Me: *Pause*

Networky person: *Longer pause* "Oh my god you're like... soooo funny!

Which (as my Brit friend pointed out) roughly translated means:

"Oh my god, you're like... soooo inappropriate!"

Ticket back to Emmaworld please? Or at least Cardiff...

Divasgusting

2010-10-19T01:20:00.003-04:00

Style is so omnipresent in New York that even the water bottles are intimidatingly fashionable.

Turns out this Missoni/Pelligrino collaboration was the most stylish thing I would see on the day when I take a 'diva' shopping tour of the garment district with my fellow expat blogger Notes by a Stylist. Immediate alarm bells were ringing due to the use of the word diva in the title, being as I am neither a 6 year old girl who shops at Claire's Accessories or living in 1996.

Whenever alarm bells ring they never cease, they just get louder. When we met the tour guide on a Midtown corner, the bells are shaking my very core. She is wearing a waistcoat that was surely fashioned from my bathroom rug, with an iluminous pink nylon handbag. It wasn't like I expected her head to toe in Rodarte, but she looked like she was dressed in the dark by a four year old with A.D.D.

We are told of the excitement and bargains ahead and are quickly herded to an anonymous looking office building around the corner where we all squeeze into a lift and arrive on the 10th floor. When we pile out, I spot the showroom for a cool department store brand and realise I have judged the whole thing too hastily. But no. We're not going there. No. We're going to the showroom of a coat designer, who I've never heard of who. But not to worry, because she has a crumpled copy of an old Oprah magazine, proving firstly that someone at a magazine once liked one of her coats and secondly that they normally retail at $1000. That's $1000! The showroom assistant shouts this as if she's talking to a group of Primary school children learning basic addition. "That's O-pa-raah! That's one thousand bucks! But for you today, most pieces retail at around... $300. That's a saving of...(nods her head excitably) SEVEN...HUNDRED...BUCKS!"

I have no interest in a new coat costing $300 so I mooch around sulking until I am pounced on by the actual designer. Why is she hawking her own stuff? Doesn't she have better things to do? Like...design something?

"You have to try this on!" she says.
"No thank you" I say looking at a purple boucle wool coat so old fashioned my dead Nanna would have hesitated to wear it to bingo.
"No. You have to try it on!" she persists.
"No thank you."
"I insist."
"Uh...no."
"I'm not taking no for an answer!"
"Sorry, no."
"You know honey? This coat would be great for your with your big boobs, it's really flattering with the shawl collar..."

Yes she did. She really did. She went there. Ok, so it's no secret to the world that I have large breasts, they are right there every day, for all to see- distracting men from what I'm saying and making me look like a hooker in every blouse I wear. They ruin fashion choices, I need a second mortgage every time I buy a bra and I will never stand up entirely straight. So guess what? What I do not need, is this to be shouted out by a woman I just met in front of a group of strangers. I pause. Fix her with a menacing stare, the smile and say:

"I. DON'T LIKE IT. I DON'T LIKE YOUR COAT."

That sort of set the tone from there on in and Sara and I are like bored schoolgirls being dragged around an automotive museum. The depressing cycle of overpriced tat continues for hours, broken up only by the odd bit of cheap tat. At one point we're not allowed in a showroom because a buyer is there and the tour guide whispers.

"The buyers don't know we have these tours..."

Oh reeeeeeally? So the people who work in the industry don't know this goes on? I assume they are not only idiots, but also don't have Internet connections to google 'garment district showroom shopping tours'?

When we are at the point of no more we are taken into another showroom and the designer introduces herself by telling us she's hilarious. That's hilarious with lots of exclamation marks!!! I walk out and Sara follows. We skulk around outside for 15 minutes wondering before Sara has a genius plan. We're going to let everyone know what we think about this, in the most British way possible: We're going to run away.

No complaining, no honesty, no embarrassment. We prod the lift hastily, bolt out of the building and hail a cab on 7th Avenue and head for lunch where we drink to forget our Post Traumatic Dress Disorder.

Stormy weather, just can't get myself together

2010-10-13T00:03:00.004-04:00

I spent Columbus day in bed hungover, discovering only that I cannot drink like I'm 25 anymore.

This is not a new revelation, which is apt because it turns Columbus didn't really discover much on this day in history either.

He was actually more of a PR man for The Americas, which was probably found years before by the Chinese in 1421 or even by my Welsh forefathers way back in the 6th century. Christopher did all the promotional work though and then reveled in the glory, making the new world really popular via his genius marketing plan of slavery, which it turns out, really caught on. When he first set foot in the Bahamas he noted in his log how the ignorant locals would make fine servants and that "...with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we wanted."

So with Columbus being something of a power hungry Italian Dom it is perplexing why he is celebrated at all.

But when you're a Cardiff girl, there is little excuse needed for a party, so I start the festivities the night before at a West Village bar serving half price bottles of wine. I come home in the early hours to the local crazy who has threatened to kill me several times passed out in front of my building. Shame he was more zonked than me, so we couldn't exchange our usual pleasantries where he screams "You're going to die, you fucking bitch" and I cry "What have I ever done to you?"

My recollections of the next few hours are shaky, but after I step over my hobo nemesis and retire to the safety of my apartment I remember drunken arguing with the (sober) American, drunken IMing anyone in the UK who was awake and drunken oven pizza burning.

By the following evening I have done nothing with my day but sleep, rot my brain watching E and suffered the black dog that accompanies every hangover. I wait for the big storm to hit. I know it is coming, not because I am a witch as The American claims, but because NY1 had been getting a hard-on about it all day.

New York does storms like it does everything else-completely over the top. First comes the rain, not drops, but lashes from the sky in huge sheets. Then the hail, as if every barman in the city has emptied their ice buckets at the same time. The stones hammering down on the back of the air conditioning unit like a drummer having an epileptic fit. Then the thunder so loud I feel the vibrations in my heart, quickly followed by lightning illuminating the inky sky.

The American and I open the bedroom windows and stick our heads out by the fire escape. We drink it the drama, turn off our phones, switch off the TV and shut our laptops. No technology can compete with the free show from nature tonight.

New York photographer Jay Fine's stunning picture of Lady Liberty in the lightning storm

"The lightning is like a giant Paparazzo bulb over Manhattan." says The American "Like the city is one big celebrity getting papped."
Cute. Clever even. He doesn't always say dumb stuff, despite his obvious disadvantage of being descendant of those who fell for Columbus New World marketing ploy.
"I like that." I say.
"You should put that in your blog." he says.
"Hmmm...maybe." I say.

Homesick and Hiraeth

2010-10-04T15:46:00.006-04:00

The Welsh language has it's very own word for homesickness.

It's a word that has no literal translation into English, but the best way to try to describe it as a grief and longing for the homeland. The word is Hiraeth. And I have it bad.

I am pining for my mates, Sainsburys, shitty weather, Primark, Coronation Street, Roath Park near my house and irony. For some inexplicable reason my Hiraeth has also manifested itself in a deep desire to once again see the concrete monolith that is the Gabalfa roundabout in Cardiff

I haven't added my Mother to the list because she has a special way of making me feel like she's in the same room as me when she nags me transatlantically. It's quite the unique talent. It has nothing what so ever to do with the fact she didn't buy me a flight home this summer when I was skint. That would make me spoiled and entitled. But can I just point out that Bank of Mum is only supposed refuse withdrawals if the child works in a stable industry, which clearly doesn't include the media. Instead of a flight, she sent me an IlovestheDiff t-shirt.

I loves the 'Diff t-shirt posing by classic NY fire escape. It's raining, so it feels at home.

In my Mother's defence she'd already stumped up a load of cash up for The Teenager to go home in July. For a few months of the summer return flights were starting at $1000. I have never seen prices that high. Was there a fuel crisis that had passed me buy as I no longer own a car?

I know there are worse places to be stranded than NYC, so I tried to see the positives of being in sweltering, rubbish stenched 100 degree heat for the summer.

I mostly focused on the Teenager going home and the resulting break from Motherhood-having been hard at it for 16 years without parole. I was really looking forward to being an adult life free of responsibilities- ready to go out banging pills of Meow Meow and sleeping with hot hipsters in nightclub toilets. Then I remembered I am not only 35, but married. Seems there is always someone to spoil the fun.

I was determined not to remain in NY. for the whole summer. So there was Plan B to have our long awaited honeymoon to California. Until The American's new job put an end to that.

"Hooonnneeeeee. What can I do?" says the American.
"Nothing. I just hate New York right now. I just want to home and reset."
"I feeeeeel bad." he says.
"It's not your fault." I say and look up at him with an expression that says: Really it is your fault cos you're American and the collective you is responsible for most of the crap in the word, especially the stuff that involves fuel prices.

It gets me a little depressed. For at least a few days. Which is a lot for me, as usually the only things that make me moody are hormones and The American eating my stash of British chocolate.

I begin to wonder will I always feel like this this? Sort of...displaced? Will being away from what I still call home forever feel like I'm escaping something? Even though there is nothing I want to run from in Cardiff? Quite the opposite in fact, I would quite like to put on my trainers and do a Forest Gump and sprint all the way back to Arran Street.

Like other expats, I've started to create my own little Welsh Alien corner of home in New York. Brit friends coupled with an inability to make any American mates, two Brit shops and a Chip shop within walking distance, an ongoing mission to hack the BBC iplayer and my small but perfectly formed NYC Bluebirds supporters club. New York home is still not home though.

After days of wallowing in my Hiraeth I stagger out onto my street and into the late afternoon sunshine to head for the coffee shop around the corner.

I buy a large iced caffeine boost and sit on the bench outside next to a strange looking, slightly Albino woman.

Turns out she is just Scandinavian, I can't be more specific as I wasn't really listening at first, after initially judging her to be a nutter. After 10 minutes the conversation turns to the subject of freckles, of which she had a lot, as do I. Except hers are red and pretty much blend into one big splodge.

"Frickles arrre so pre-tea!" she says
"I think so too!" I say
"Ven I vos lidl girl in school, a boy say to me sumting lovely bout de frickles"
"What did he say?"
"He say dat a girl vivout frickles is like a sky vivout da stars."

The weird albino nordic woman smiles at me and I smile back.

New York always does this. Just when I am feeling like I don't want to be here anymore, like I love her less-she throws me a scrap. Just something small like this, a moment. And she knows that I am fickle, just like the city. She knows that this moment, this one moment will mean that I will love her again.

I say goodbye and walk down 7th Avenue, sip my coffee and check my Hiraeth.

It's still there, but not so much...

Fashionably late fashion week blog

2010-09-20T17:42:00.004-04:00

Chris Benz S/S 2011

I said I wasn't going to any shows this season.

I was planning on rejecting the frippery of fashion in favour of knuckling down to some proper work- rather than hanging around the tents in the vague hope some oafish celebrity might do or say something ungainly that I could sell to the tabloids.

That was the plan anyway, until my writing partner from last season started waving tickets at me and the allure of glamour and goody bags began to keep me awake at night.

Of course there were not many actual tickets to wave, since the PRs started emailing them to save money under the ruse of environmental concerns. Shame, as that thick, glossy cardboard doubles up as a handy fan while waiting in line with your fellow sweaty fashion nobodies.

Chris Benz S/S 2011

There was also the whole issue of NYFW having moved from Bryant park to it's new uptown home for the first time. I convinced myself I should be there for historic reasons, so I could tell my grandchildren, as if it was akin to the Berlin wall coming down. Although this looming entrance at the suitably monolithic Lincoln Centre is not unlike something from East Germany.

After 20 odd shows last season, my tally this year ended up being markedly less impressive. I missed one as I couldn't decide what to wear (Monique LHullier) and made three presentations- which are gradually taking over from the shows.

There was massive celeb whoring at Chris Benz:

Cheapskate mannequins (in place of models) and weak Martinis at Alice Temperley:

and Garden party retro at newcomer Rebecca Moses:

Which left one actual show. One of the best if you're a celebrity whore like me. Gwen Stefani's L.A.M.B. I was pretty shocked to get a ticket. Then I shocked myself further in an rare act of maternal selflessness and gave it to The Teenager on the condition she get me good pictures. She ends up with this snap of Gwen.

Hmm. She explained to me she was right at the back. I told her she will never make it in fashion, as there are no excuses in fashion.

On the last night in the tents I reflected on how dipping my foot in this way felt wrong somehow. Without putting in all the legwork, I felt like a bit of a fraud.

But then fashion week- like fashion itself -repeats. There is always one accessory that becomes a must have (this time-floppy hats), a colour palate (neutral) and a take on from a current trend (harems blow wider into balloon pants). There are always the same security staff who let you strut past without a ticket if you have an air of Anna about you. And there are always the crazy characters, blaggers and Jersey girls who sneak in.

At least the celebs were back this season. In February there was slim pickings, with some nonsense about an austere and sombre feel to match the nation's empty wallets. It was probably less complex than that. It was likely more to do with the fact King M.J. banned them.

Six months later, America can't really decide if it's out of the recession, but it seems that famous folk are perpetually en vogue whether the dollar is down or not.

Whatever hemlines might be doing, stardust is always in Fashion.


Susan Sarandon. Hot for 63. Hot for half that age

Carmen Electra. What does she do exactly?

Kelly Osbourne. She lost weight. The Daily Mail might have mentioned it. Just a few times.

Hip Hop mogul Russell Simmons who winked at The Teenager when she took this picture. He is worth $330 million. I told her she should have winked back

My route to 66...

2010-09-01T12:53:00.003-04:00

Much like Joaquin Phoenix I've had a strange and surreal 12 months.

It's exactly a year since I packed up my life in Cardiff and arrived at JFK with a sobbing Teenager. She shedding tears for the boyfriend she left in Wales, me still in shock at my Dad's death a month previously. At my feet some seriously bulging excess baggage.

The American picked us up in a rented SUV and we drove into Manhattan. I was all broad smiles and endless chat, but with a belly groaning with nerves. This is home now. Excited and scared for what lay ahead. Bye bye Cardiff. A fresh start packed to the brim with hope and blindness to any troubles that may lay ahead.

There was no time to ponder on my grief. No pontificating on the enormity of what I had done-giving up a great job at the BBC, renting out my beloved house to strangers, leaving my recently widowed Mum. I was the project manager of this whole new family life and there was a lot of gluing to do, or things would fall apart.

The work started pretty quickly with enrolling The Teenager in school, which was swiftly followed by finding another school, as she hated the first one. Next, the blistering footwork to find an apartment, followed by ploughing all our savings into securing the right one-which then had to be decorated and furnished. We moved from our temporary digs in Queens to our permanent bijoux box in the West Village and wondered how we were all going to live in harmony in such a tiny space.

There was then the small matter of getting married in Central Park by a naval captain in the freakish hot Autumn sunshine and then a rodent infestation in our perfect apartment in place of a honeymoon. Then began immigration and all the ridiculous, comedy bureaucracy that accompanies it. Have you ever been engaged in vice? Are you planning a coup against the U.S. government? Were you a member of the Nazi party between 1939-1945?

When the excitement wore off and it no longer felt like we were here on a long holiday- the missing came. Missing my Mum, missing my friends, really missing my Dad, missing working, missing Corrie and Cadburys, missing the NHS and missing someone knowing what a wanker is.

I had to find my way around New York and my new family life and there was maps for the first but not for the second, but in both I got lost frequently. Some real personal stuff happened, that even I as a chronic oversharer didn't want to blog about. Winter days got shorter and darker and colder and then snowy. Then there came some even bigger problems which I couldn't blog about and then there was some money problems due to the stuff I couldn't blog about.

Throughout it all I missed not having girl mates to talk the extra 15 thousand words a day that women need to say. Finding them became my mission and I was horribly desperate at first, a girl's girl starved of female company. But by the time there was spring blossom outside our window the friends came. Then the friendships had to be fostered through NY girl activities like toxic cocktail drinking and $20 manicures from women who bitch about you in Korean. But mostly it was about the drinking. There is little that cannot be forged over a Manhattan mixed Martini.

Summer, the last season in the cycle. (More) Tears (than usual) for my Dad on the anniversary of his death, temperatures of 100 degrees giving birth to an obsession with air cons. Our green cards arriving in the mailbox and the U.S. immigration service using the worse photos I have ever seen of The Teenager and I. A deliberate ploy I believe, so immigrants will not commit crime and end up with an unflattering picture of them on the news.

I blogged about most of what happened over the year here on Welsh Alien. In fact, I wrote so much I didn't actually write my book, but then I have not been writing my book for at least a decade, so at least that's one comfortable consistency to keep me warm at night. I can safely say I penned at least a book's worth of blogs, except none of you paid 12.99 for my hard work on Amazon. Although I'd like to think you would, given the chance.

I have written 66 blogs so far. This one makes 67.

66 would have been nice. An even, rounded number that evokes World Cup wins and famous American roads. But then that's not my number.

My life here is far more of a 67. A lovely, odd imperfection.

She works hard for the money

2010-08-25T14:22:00.006-04:00

Since moving to New York I haven't done much of what could be constituted as a hard day's work.

I appreciate this is unlikely to endear me to anyone reading, so I'll come straight in with the defence that I only recently got my U.S. work permit. Well fairly recently. Two months ago to be exact. I had planned to hide it down the back of the sofa but The American got to it first.

"Honnnneee you can get a proper job now!" he trills, waving the card excitedly around like it's the Wonka Golden ticket .
"I have a job! I am a Journalist."
"Honnnneee. I know you are a journalist, but you kind of have to work as one, not just, like, be one."
"Fuck off and make your own pasta."

To further my defence it's not like I've sat on my arse watching Maury and General Hospital for the last year, instead life has been it's own real life soap opera to which I've become the reluctant producer. I've been pretty busy with a whole lot of something and a fair bit of nothing.

There have been paid jobs here and there, some radio, some writing, a few small TV jobs, but nothing that would pay the rent- and when you live in a bijoux box in the West Village, ain't nutin' going on the but the rent.

I had been trying to avoid going back into tele, for the reasons that I am rather fond of having a life and not so fond of cultivating new deep set frown lines.

But the TV demons want what the TV demons want, so when I get my called by a former colleague and offered a month's work as a New York 'fixer' for a high end Natural history programme I am back in the game again. I have to admit it feels good to be ~~a whore for the money~~ get hired again.

I take the job even though 'fixer' sounds like a someone who goes in and cleans up after a grisly murder in a Tarantino film. As it turns out, it means everything from location and casting manager to producer, NYC restaurant expert and coffee runner.

Before the crew arrive for 8 days of filming I spend the several weeks beforehand researching and finding people and places to film. Turns out I am pretty good at scouting locations, seems my year of doing a whole lot of something and nothing has given me a finely honed sense of this Island.

*

The crew arrive on a dull, humid Tuesday night. Within 20 minutes of meeting them at their hotel there's a TV crisis, some sandbags are missing for an essential piece of kit. For the majority of you fortunate enough to not work in the industry, let me explain a TV crisis; It is the very worse kind of crisis. It starts as quickly as it is over, but for it's lifetime it's all pervading, encompassing and really, reeeeeally serious. This particular one find us all in a sport's shop at 8p.m. buying 200 lb of weights and then working how we get them out of the shop and back to the crew's hotel.

That's just the entrée. Over the following 8 days there are many more real-life TV dramas and surreal moments.

There is extortion from the locals in Chinatown, there are rats and their catchers, there are angry honeybees on a show stopping rooftops in Queens. There are 6 a.m starts, midnight finishes, a soundman with suspected martini poisoning and a night out that ends with a cameraman riding a mechanical bull in a Lower East side bar.

There is a fight in another bar that has hundreds of women's bras hanging from the ceiling (not involving any of us crew I would like to point out), there is the panic stricken 5 minutes when we think we've locked some contributors on a 7th floor balcony and there is getting chased down by some graffiti artists in Long Island City.

Then there is the weather. After a glorious NYC summer, it is stubbornly grey when all we need to film is golden sunshine.

The American is patient while I work day and night, although really I suspect he just enjoys playing a lot of x box unhindered. While I am gone our apartment goes to shit: laundry sits in the basket, nothing gets picked up from where it was dropped and a cure for cancer grows in the sink. The American does not do any of these household chores because he has a penis and is busy killing Nazis.

I don't have time to write or see my friends or do anything else I love. I am out every night having dinner with the crew and this means booze becomes my major food group.

I also don't go to the gym which means I get grumpier by the day, although I do lug lots of camera equipment around up endless flights of stairs and carry a lot of waters and coffees. Me and the driver find ourselves doing a lot of drinks runs actually- on one of them we work out we have a combined age of 65 and three degrees and a postgrad between us-which we think might make us the most well educated pair of coffee runners in town. We laugh about a lot about that. No really, we're in total stitches.

On the last day, with the words "it's a wrap" ringing joyfully in my ear I wave goodbye to the director as she heads off for Newark.

I bounce down 27th street, feeling the satisfaction of a hard month's work. Just that old fashioned buzz of a job well done and bringing home the bacon. Feels good. I had forgotten how good. I want to go crazy, pay some bills! Do a food shop! Mail a rent cheque!

The euphoria lasts until the next morning when I get sick. A raging sore throat, a thumping headache I can't shift and a lethargy. Tele hangover. I swear I will not do another TV job again, even though I know I will, especially when I add up what I've earned. This causes my fingers to disconnect from my brain and make their own way to my laptop to buy some new stuff for the apartment and an ipod and that perfect pair of summer wedges without the ankle straps that make your legs look fat.

Then I take to my bed in dramatic Victorian fashion and dispatch The American to Duane Reade to buy me Theraflu and tissues that don't make your nose go red. I tell him I think that maybe TV work does not agree with me. He says I should rest and not worry about another job until I'm better.

I tell him I suspect it will be a long recovery.

You can ring my Liberty bell

2010-07-29T15:48:00.002-04:00

New York and I need a break.

My Welsh alien ship has been stranded for too long in Manhattan. The wheels are rusty. Just like any relationship, I know my love will be renewed after some time apart.

This is what finds me on the Bolt Bus bound for a postcard pretty suburb of Philadelphia. My plan is enforced solitude so I can work. I need to escape the city's whoreish pull on me, it's murky and delicious temptations that lurk on every corner. To achieve calm in the countryside. To see butterflies. To not have my groceries thrown at me. To remember what manners sound like.

I am going to house and pet sit in Bala Cynwydd, a former Welsh colony. I wasn't aware my forefathers were at it either. No longer can us Welsh claim a moral superiority over our English cousins and their voracious appetites for stealing lands that didn't belong to them. We likely did it with less panache though-brandishing daffodils and shouting "Alright' butt' I'll take this land now. Ta."

When I arrive I can see what the appeal was-the place even looks like Wales with lots of greenery and trees. I meet my charge-an 80 pound 14 month old golden retriever- who's described as '"Frisky". He's apparently partial to toilet roll and kitchens, having already eaten his way through an entire one. 80 pounds is a lot of a dog, almost as big as some humans. It's roughly the same size as Nicole Richie in her partying with Paris days.

From the start, Montana-who shall be known as Slobadan on account of his highly productive dribble producing jaws- follows me everywhere, only leaving my side occasionally to try and destroy something. When I shower he sits outside the cubicle, when I am on the loo he opens the bathroom door with his paws and sits next to me. When I eat, he thinks it's dinner for two. When I try and work he soaks the keyboard with drool. When I turn my back on him he tries to mount me.

By the end of the first day the items I have retrieved from his mouth include (but are not limited to); my pen, two notepads, several books, something unidentifiable from the bathroom, my vintage scarf, most of my lunch and two toilet rolls.

Everytime he does something bad he looks up at me panting, his pink tongue lolling like a giant slice of deli ham, his soft golden face framed by long sandy eyelashes. Yes, he has doggy eyelashes. I am putty in his paws.

That night I sit drinking wine on the porch, looking out at the trees and flowers and listening to the sweet sound of nothing but crickets and and birds saying 'coup coup' in the trees. Fireflies are darting in and out of the hedges. Slobadan wants to play ball. It is nearly 10 p.m.

On day two I discover that-as warned- nothing here is in walking distance aside from lots more trees. I will need to use the car. I have slight qualms about this due to the fact that I haven't driven in a year/have limited experience on the wrong right side of the road/have always thus far refused to operate an automatic. So, that's actually quite a few qualms, but I have never been one to let logic lead me off my destined path.

I set off to buy my groceries for the week, arriving in one piece at the retail park, happy there is little to distract me in sleepy Bala Cynwydd.

That's when I discover the local Lord and Taylor sitting right next to the supermarket. I have never even set foot in The New York branch, imagining it to be one of the less exciting, more old lady department stores. In this setting though, it gleams like Tutankhamun's tomb. It is consumer Atlantis.

Inside, my retail radar leads me to the clearance section. The rails aren't anywhere near as plundered like they would be in New York, even though a sign informs me there is another 40% off all the lowest marked prices. When I get to the till the assistant tells me there is further 20% discount. Game changing, some dribble escapes from the side of my mouth. I go skittering back off into the rails and find a classic navy Ralph Lauren cardigan for $20 and a floral BCBG Max Azria dress for $50. I feel a little faint with excitement, but I put them both down and force myself to leave, exercising my If-you-are-still-thinking-about-them-tomorrow-you-should-buy-them-policy.

The next day I pull back the curtains to hear birds tweeting and see a butterfly float past the window... I can think about nothing but the Lord and Taylor clearance racks. I take the dog for a long walk to distract myself, through the 19th century graveyard nearby, where I see the grandoise resting places of the area's former brewery owners.

My crypt's-bigger-than-your-crypt was apparently a popular game in Philadelphia at the turn of the century-some of them are more spacious than my Manhattan apartment.

I breathe in the air, it's clean and there is absolute quiet and austerity...Then a little voice says "I wonder if that BCBG dress is still there?"

It's no good, I have to go back. Montana asks if he can come, but I tell him bargain hunting is a dog-eat-dog game and he may not be safe in the crush. Of course, he knows there will be no crush and cocks his head to the side and demands an extra cheese string as guilt payment.

I return and regretably discover a whole other floor with lingerie and sports wear on and some more clearance racks, including the shoes. I leave with a bag almost as heavy as the feeling of disappointment in myself for being so easily distracted.

The next few days drift by- I write while sitting on the porch in the sunshine, read a book called The Sex Lives of Cannibals, watch movies, work, sunbathe, work some more. I take lengthy morning dog walks in the abundance of local cemeteries and take pictures of the Welshies' headstones.

I wrestle my bra, more toilet rolls, People magazine and a punnet of Blueberries from the Jaws of Slobby. I get covered in giant mosquito bites, I try to figure out how to get a train into town, but they only seem to run every 5 hours. I clean dog slobber off everything I own. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the Lord and Taylor clearance rack.

*

On the last day, after a week of perfect weather, I am trying to even up my tan in the garden when the skies darken and I hear a rumble in the near distance. Within minutes it's like a monsoon hit. I run inside with Montana, who growls every time the thunder does. We sit inside and I tell him not to be scared, that it'll pass. He just pants at me, which seems to be his standard response to everything.

I go out on to the porch for a few minutes to drink in the drama. Rain batters the trees and the brook outside races furiously. The prettiness is destroyed, everything is imperfect, mud sloshes on the lawn. Nature is a bit pissed off. It's a truly entertaining, real kind of beauty.

And just like that, I am ready to go back to New York.

Look who's celebrity stalking...

2010-07-19T14:50:00.005-04:00

As if I needed further evidence never to leave the house without a camera in New York, I recently bumped into Helena Christensen in Rite Aid.

This is no euphemism, we actually ran into each other at the end of an aisle. She smiled-as technically it was her fault-she was coming around the corner and not paying attention. When we clashed there was skin touching, the brushing of arms as I recall. Which means I have-by association- touched skin with Linda, Christy and Claudia et al. It also means I am just one degree of separation from rolling around on a beach with Chris Isaak:

This sighting of a legendary supermodel-turned photographer and humanitarian- is surprising for several reasons:

1) Rite Aid is the most ghetto pharmacy ever. Even though I spotted her in the West Village branch, it doesn't stop them selling two packs of cakes for 99c and having the deodorants under alarmed casing. There is only ever one person serving and there's always a line. Which leads me to point number 2.

2) Helena was actually queuing. After our clash of skin, I spazzed out a bit and ran round and around the shop, shameful of the 99c 'Freeze at home!' ice lollies I was carrying around, that Helena may or may not have seen. Then I went to the till to find myself behind her in line. This gave me adequate time to memorise her outfit; (black boho cotton dress with white tree pattern, black flip flops and a neutral straw bag), the tattoo on the back of her neck (black, small, some kind of symbol) and her hair (twisty up, messy chic up-do) as well as wondering how many pounds I would have to shed to look even vaguely Helena like (rather a lot).

3) She was buying Vitamins. I would imagine a former supermodel turned photographer and humanitarian would have a specific 'Vitamin doc' for such purposes. Actually, they could have been painkillers, I can't be sure, but either way you would imagine a specialist for any matters pertaining to a supermodel body? Her purchase total came to $14.85. A mere $14.85 people, how attainable is that? You or I could have the same total if we were to go into a Rite Aid and buy the same things.

4) I had already seen Helena just days previously at the Bonsignour cafe in the West Village. I was outside on a bench watching the football on their specially erected T.V. and I nearly choked on my lemonade. She was with her son Mingus, who is like the successful result of an Arian superace experiment. Helena eats at the same place as me. Unfortunately our weight is not in the same place, not even the same zip code. Maybe she just drinks the coffee and doesn't hoof the cakes?

Two sightings of the same supermodel in close proximity can only mean thus: she lives in my hood. This is enough to send my fickle sensibilities crashing into reasoning overdrive that we should no longer move to Brooklyn for more space and sanity, but stay in our overpriced bijoux box in the West Village. How can I now move from my Manhattan knowing that a supermodel and childhood idol lives a mere amble away?

Oh Helena, what a wicked game you play, to make me feel this way.

Fireworks on my first 4th

2010-07-07T19:30:00.007-04:00

I am stood on the rooftop of the W hotel in Union Square on the night of 4th July dressed in the colours of the USA.

It's 90 degrees at 9.20 p.m. and I have broken out into a full body sweat after racing back from a BBQ in Brooklyn. I have dashed through the Brownstone lined streets of Park Slope, battled a packed 2 train, followed by an ambling L. I have sprinted across the square from the subway exit to hear the crackles and rumbles of the Fireworks starting up in the distance. I have stopped in dry mouthed panic at a street vendor to buy water, scrambled for a dollar, but didn't have any cash. The man looked at me and told me not to worry about paying. This never happens. I can only guess I am that adorable shade of beetroot again.

Now I stand 25 stories up, with my Scouse Welsh mate and The Aussie. Another friend who works at the hotel has snuck us in among a small group of staff members to get an enviable vantage of the Macy's Fireworks.

Unspecified $$$ worth of Pyrotechnics are lighting up the inky sky, shooting off 6 barges on the Hudson River. Somewhere nearby NBC are broadcasting live off a cruise liner with Canadian and exercise in medocrity Justin Beiber leading the proceedings.

To my left is the back of the giant 'W' that sits atop the hotel. From here I can see the tangle of wires that light it up. Tonight the 'W' stands for a string of superlatives. Wow. Wonderment. Wicked.

To my right- there is the phallic greatness of the Manhattan skyline. The usual stalwarts like the Chrysler and the Empire State standing proud, like concrete cocks.

I don't have my camera and I'm anxious about what a perfect photoblog this would have made. My brain scrambles to write the scene in my head but despite the breathtaking allure, all I'm thinking about is how Fireworks are really quite sad. A lot of beauty that poofs and piffs and goes as quickly as it arrives. Tremendous but transient.

There is an almost eerie silence atop the roof. No "Owwws" and "Ahhs", just everyone watching and thinking their own thoughts. As the gold, greens, reds and blues color the sky I wonder what those thoughts are. Maybe some are simply craving the drink they're gonna get when they get off work? Or as giant exploding firework Chrysanthmums burst into the horizon, how they want to go home and fuck their wife? Is anyone else feeling mournful? Hot and sticky and sorrowful?

My thoughts have fallen inevitably to my Dad.

I wonder if I will always feel sad to see something spectacular, because he won't. My eyes feel wet and I realise I may sob right there on the roof, in front of everyone and they will think I am crying with joy at the Fireworks and that will make me look like a massive twat.

So I bite into the inside of my lip and breathe in hard and steel myself.

A little tear has escaped and is blobbing down my cheek. If anyone could see it up close they would catch the last burst of colour from the fireworks reflected in it.

It is really hot. I breathe.

Tonight I am red, white and a little bit blue.

Sunnyday Roast

2010-06-29T17:32:00.013-04:00

Summer in New York City is something of a climatical groundhog day.

You wake up in an air conditioned bedroom that feels like a giant freezer. You go outside into a sauna. Walk any distance and you are perspiring like a human hog roast. Eyeball sweat blinds you before you have reached the end of your block. You escape back inside again and you're back in the freezer. Outside Sauna...inside freezer. Sauna. Freezer. Sauna. Freezer.

Right now I cannot walk out of my house without raising my hand to my head and saying "Owww!", while puffing like a Grandma in pain. Sometimes I even start singing Billy Idol's Hot in the City to myself like a social retard or I yell "Scorchio!" like Caroline Aherne's weathergirl on the Fast Show.

Today it was 90 degrees with no sun. Cloudy with a chance of heat rash. Disgusting. As disgusting as the sweat that is running down my back and into my arse. Butt crack sweat, what could be erotic than that? Good thing I'm married already.

From that image, I segway neatly into our bedrooms, where we have relief in the form our air conditioning units. The rest of the apartment has to make do with a freestanding fan that just circulates the hot air. The bathroom and kitchen have become go-only-when-necessary zones. It's so hot in those rooms, I am considering renting them out for Ashtanga Yoga classes. I have all but given up cooking- summer in the city is no time to turn on an oven, just the exertion of chopping means perspiration is the main seasoning in my homemade coleslaw.

Leaving the house is no better. It's for the foolhardy and employed only. As well as facing the roasting rubbish scented Eau de New York streets, you also have to pack a survival kit: Copious amounts of water, dollar bills to buy more water and a scarf in your bag to cover your arms when you go back into buildings with over zealous air cons. Take my office for example-better known to most as 'The New York Library'-it's the worst culprit. Never mind the petitions to stop closures, try making it a little less igloo and you'd save enough taxpayers money to solve the budget deficit.

The stifling heat is all to do with the humidity apparently. Am I alone in not knowing what that really means? Everyone is always banging on about it, but I don't really think anyone truly understands it. All I am certain of is that humidity is a city problem and my Mother would describe it as 'close', which is as nonsensical as the rest of what she says.

The American is a bit obsessed with humidity, mainly because it's another factor in his growing weather related arsenal against New York and in favour of his California homeland.

"Whiney whine whine New York weather whine whine whineyyyyyy." he says
"Uh huh." I say
"Blah blah blah terrible humidity."
"I know!"
"Na na noo na, not like this in California."
"Yeah?"
"La de da da lovely L.A. blah blah bad New York, la de da da DRY HEAT."

I didn't think it was possible to become more weather obsessed than when I lived in Cardiff, but since the start of Welsh Alien I have blogged about all the seasons and have now come full circle with Summer, or 'Satan's armpit' as I heard it referred to recently.

There are a few days of perfection in September and April. Precious Manhattan times when it's in the early 70's and the wind blows gently and no one needs clinical strength deodorant and everyone's in a good mood. I don't really remember them, I must have been inside blogging about the weather and missed them.

So what is the ultimate way to keep cool in the city? Aside from frolicking in a virus infected public pool like this foolish child?

I just stick my head in the freezer. Right in there. Ahhhhh. I have the perfect spot, between the ice lollies and the frozen prawns.

It is the only corner of Manhattan where true solace from the heat lies.

*

There's a price on my head in Brooklyn

2010-06-21T14:12:00.004-04:00

The last piece of advice I had before going to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, was "Don't upset the locals."

"Viiiiie you take my peecture vivout permission?" snarls an old Russian lady, after cursing me in her native tongue. The only Russian I know is 'Glasnost', 'Perestroika' and 'Double Vod-ka' and by her tone I guess she doesn't want to discuss any of those.

I also am pretty sure she won't appreciate a diatribe on how photojournalism relies on catching your subject unaware, so I lie and say I was taking a picture of the building behind her. She stares are me so intently I feel a piece of my soul breaking off and crumbling into dust.

From there on, it is not just my imagination that every other old lady on the beach is giving me stinking looks-The Teenager notices too. There is a price on my head with the elderly women of Brighton beach and I'm scared as they all have big umbrellas.

I continue to document our day at Little Odessa with my camera though. Hey, I've been chased out of town before, it's no big deal, especially when you've done the dreaded death knocks as a reporter. Sometimes then, there was Alsatians involved and I was on The Gurnos estate in Merthyr, so I am pretty robust.

After what seems like about three minutes tanning on the beach, The Teenager announces she is bored. I thought at 16, we had moved on from this hyper attention deficit problem, yet we enter into a bartering phrase about what time we can leave.

"Can we go at 3 p.m. Mum?"
"No."
"Can we leave at 3.30?
"No."
"3.15?"
"Huh?"
"I would go sooner that later if I was you."
"And why is that?"
"Cos there is another old Russian lady coming towards us and she's giving you like, proper evil stares."

So we pack up swiftly and make our way down to Coney Island by walking down the shoreline.

On the way a man is practising Yoga and he's doing the crab. On the beach. I am fighting to find the pun.

A mile down the coast and we arrive at Coney. The Russians are replaced by a motely crew of ghetto unfabulous, freaks, schoolkids, tourists and Manhattanites enjoying the 'irony'.

The Teenager and I wander up the boardwalk in the searing sunshine, burgers and doughnuts smoke in the air. We stop and stare at attractions like 'Shoot the freak' with it's real human target. I buy a cowboy hat and get the feeling I should be drunk or on hallucinagenics to fully appreciate the place. Everyone else apparently is-all sipping on what looks like giant plastic bongs full of Margarita. Maybe If I got wrecked I would wear a g-string in public?

We sit down by a seafood stall and watch the colour and craziness go by. I snap away with the camera and The Teenager threatens to get the train home on her own if I don't stop.

"Mother. For god's sake! Why won't you put the camera down?"
I pause thoughtfully and look wistfully at the sky and say: "I guess...it's because...you know, I want to document life wherever I go."
She says "Ugghhh. Because you are a *rolls eyes* bloody journalist?
And I say "Nah. Just because I'm a nosey cow."

And we both laugh until snowcone comes out of our noses.

And because nice moments are rare when your children are Teenagers, I take another picture, but this time in my head.

It's the best one of the day.

*

Sgorio in the City

2010-06-15T18:10:00.012-04:00

My mother says I have an answer for everything.

I like to call this 'being a journalist'. The American would say I use my profession as an excuse for most of my personality pitfalls.

But one question flummoxed me recently: "When it comes to England v USA in the World Cup who will you be supporting?"

That one, I had no answer for.

The Welsh among you will be frothing dragon scented spittle that I could even think of supporting England. "As long as we beat the English we don't care." Ok, so that's stolen from the game with the funny shaped ball, but it applies to football too.

The English will be thinking it's a no-brainer. We're all Brits after all yeah? Innit? Whatevs? Ribena? Marmite? Crumpet? And Wales never qualify for any major footie tournaments, so obviously cheering on the neighbours is the next best option.

The Americans reading are probably just confused. You're thinking "What's the problem, you are English aren't you?" and then you'll ask "Where's Wales?" and I will do my frantic arm flapping demonstration of the UK map where I draw in the air with my fingers and point out the four countries that make up The United Kingdom. You will then remain confused, yet entertained when I speak some Cymraeg and you laugh heartily and say it sounds like Lord of the Rings language.

When the world cup rolled around every 4 years in the UK, I would always end up cheering for England. I was brainwashed by The Sun and their clever low rent headlines and reminiscences of '66 and all those Page 'free stunnas' wearing hotpants with The St George's cross on their arse.

Here there was little to no build up. Although now it's got going, there seem to be flags and tournament schedules outside most bars. I think it's seen as another excuse to drink here. Not that New Yorkers need much of a reason to imbibe. The rising of the sun is enough to perpetuate the institutionalised alcholism of this city.

So, last Saturday I go to a bar in Hell's Kitchen to meet with English and American friends. I am asked who I'm supporting and I explain my dilemma of being British but living here and being married to an American, albeit one who has no interest in soccerball.

I make a crack about possibly cheering for The USA, being as I now have American DNA in me. Unfortunately I forget The Teenager is right behind me and old enough to get such inappropriate jokes. She is horrified and I throw another wad of virtual notes in the virtual therapy pot. That pot, however imaginary, overfloweth.

I declare myself neutral in summary. That makes everyone calls me Switzerland. I'm not crazy keen on that, I was nearly arrested there once over an argument about using Euros. Despite their neutrality they are very insistent about their Swiss Francs.

Then I head to the bar, and before I can even be misunderstood with my drinks order it happens... England score. I pause. The small but vocal fans go crazy in the bar... I feel nothing.

Flatline. Passionless emptiness.

We watch the rest of the game and I enjoy not feeling attached to either team, it's zero stress. I clap when there's a clearance or decent shot at goal. The Teenager shouts at me when I do it for USA. but I ignore her-she is infected by an English boyfriend and has grown up under the influence of a united Europe. Jingoism escapes her.

Then the USA equalise and I laugh. Really hard. America has got it's cock out again, only this time it's like it's pissing on the overinflated egos of the England team.

Soccerball is one of the few sports The USA play where they are the underdog. We all agree it's nice to laugh at Yanks doing something badly. However, this time, they are 1-all with England in a World Cup. Unexpected doesn't begin to cover it. Is there an evolution happening where by the USA get less of a joke every 4 years? Maybe Becks has been secretly coaching them in a hidden tunnel underneath The Home Depot Centre?

When the whistle blows not much past 90 minutes the bar goes gaga, chanting "U.S.A." I laugh some more. England played better, but it feels like the right result, even if it's just for England fans to step into a Welsh supporters shoes for one game.

*

The next day the strangest thing happens: a phonecall with my Mother makes everything clear. Really, that never happens.

I tell her of my supporting dilemma and she reminds me of what my late, beloved football crazy Dad Big D would have said:

"I support Wales and whoever England are playing."

In this topsy turvy world where the Yanks beat the English in the World Cup and The NY Post can run this genius headline, it seems like a perfect philosophy for a Welsh Alien in New York.

Burn before reading

2010-06-08T19:00:00.018-04:00

Last Monday I spent the day with my new Welsh friend, who is actually just Taffy on a technicality. She's really a Liverpudlian, but if she were a boy she could play football for Wales and that's good enough for me.

We decide on a trip as it's what Brits would call May Day bank holiday. In the U.S. it's called Memorial Day, which is when soldiers who have died are remembered. I deduce they'd appreciate women getting bikinis on in their honour, so the beach it is.

When you ~~don't have a proper job~~, are freelance-every day can seem like a holiday, but when it's an official holiday there is the contagious stench of getaway in the air.

We head to Penn station where we buy two tickets to Long Beach. Welsh friend says there is some kind of package you can buy that admits you onto the beach as well.

"Admits me? What do they do? Charge to get on the sand?"

As it turns out, that's exactly what they do. As much as this annoys me, I don't stress. How much can it be? It'll be like the car park at Porthcawl-just a nominal fee that funds the picking up of crisp packets and seagull poo.

Turns out it costs 12 bucks to get onto Long Beach and it isn't the paradise you might imagine considering. It's certainly no Fire Island, although it's not quite Barry Island either. However, there's sand and water and enough Jersey Shore Guido-a-likes to keep me entertained.

Long Beach is true to it's name, it's just really long. A straight strip of beach next to a seemingly endless line of grey Monolithic apartment buildings that look like they were built by depressed Russians in the 60's and are now being touted as 'Luxury Rentals'.

I am just glad The American didn't come along, being as he's from California and therefore ranks East Coast beaches somewhere between sewers and the bins at the back of our local Chinese takeaway.

After a few hours of tanning in the breezy sunshine, Welsh friend's Australian mate comes to meet us. She is covered from head to toe in clothes to avoid the sun and donning a floppy straw hat and sunglasses. Pah! Aussies and their sun overreaction. It's not Melbourne here ya' know. I continue spraying my factor 10 with a flourish and slowly cook my pale skin. At one point Oz girl warns me my side boob is burning, my response to which is to tuck it back into my bikini top and turn over.

At 4.30 p.m. we head back to the station and when we're on the train Welsh friend says:

"Woaaaah girl, you got some sun!"

I check out my face in a hand mirror and it looks a bit pink, but nothing too bad. There are some worryingly white large circular areas on my upper arm though. Maybe I should have actually rubbed the suncream in rather than just spraying it?

When we get back to Manhattan it is dull and overcast and my skin suddenly seems a lot pinker in contrast. I say goodbye to Welsh friend and pop into the local supermarket. I am trying to find Feta when I catch the man on the cheese counter staring at me.

"Hey!" He shouts across the shop, "Someone went to the beach today!"
"Yes. I did."
I try to slink away into the bread aisle.
"Listen, I'm the same as you," he says, while slicing into a giant wheel of Gouda, "Always gotta go through the Lobster stage before I go brown."

I hurry to the checkout where a Mexican girl looks at my face and then sniggers at me.

When I get home the reaction is no better:

"FUCK-IN-HELL" says The American
"Hey I'm back!"
"Or...badger is back?" he says and starts laughing.

I look in the mirror and there are two white rings where my sunglasses have been. My arms are also pink and covered in pale patches. My legs are the same too. I strip off in front of the mirror and see I look like a giant marbled strawberry cheesecake. Angry pink splodges of sunburn pepper my whole body.

"FUCK-IN-HELL" says The American again, but he's not laughing this time and goes into full on panic mode and there is mention of 'hospital' and 'sunstroke' and '1st degree burns'. He orders me into a cold shower and does an emergency run to Duane Reade. He actually runs, which he never does, so I get that he thinks this is quite serious.

After I get out of the shower he insists on slathering half a bottle of Aloe Vera gel over me that also has Menthol and Litacaine in it. I go into a crazy shivering state. Who the hell puts menthol in aftersun? That's just sadistic.

"I have never seen sunburn this bad." he says.
"Oh I have. I'm Welsh."
"Well I have never seem you burn this bad."
"That's cos you have never been on a beach holiday with me."
"You need to use sunscreen."
"I used sunscreen! Factor 10!"
"Factor 10? Factor 10? That might be enough in you Wales, that is not enough here. This is American sun Emma."

So even the sun here is different apparently.

I'll add that to the list.

*

I got to thinking...

2010-05-27T23:40:00.007-04:00

I can pinpoint the moment that falling out of love turned to total hated.

It was a few months ago while walking The Highline. Flowers stretching their newborn heads into the glare of the sun, springtime smiles from New Yorkers, views across the Hudson to New Jersey on my left, Manhattan's straight lines to my right. A buddhist monk strolls past in bright orange robes, while in a photo studio overlooking the park, a man is modeling swimwear at a fashion shoot.

Straight ahead of me on the wall of a building is a 50 foot high poster. A huge silver sparkly number '2' and in smaller writing underneath Sex and the City 2- sponsored by Moet and Chandon. I stop. I shudder. I can't decide which offends me most- the drag queen diamante or the movie being bankrolled by the world's most ghetto chavulous champagne. SATC lost it's cool when the first film came out, now it's conceding to becoming a full on franchise? Aimed at who? Teenage girls and rappers?

SATC- the HBO series was great at getting the zeitgeist before it even happened. SATC- the movies have become a designer Disneyland for not very grown-ups, a reliable studio moneyspinner that trades in fake fantasies and forced fabulosity.

The world has changed a lot since 2004 when the series ended. Hell, I even smoked back then. Inside too! In restaurants and everything! Imagine? I liked to curl up on my sofa in Cardiff and work my way through a packet of Malboro Lights while watching Carrie smoke hers.

There was always excess back then, but while the movies want to choke on it, the series kept it more palatable and made sure the characters kept one Choo in reality. I loved the TV version, I really did. Go ahead and be snarky. I was a loud and proud a fan. It was witty, relevant, pitch perfect and of it's time. Everything the movies are not.

If watching SATC the movie 1 was like pouring sugar in your mouth until you vomited, then I fancy SATC 2 will be akin to catching a once hip older sister buying incontinence pads at Duane Reade. I won't be finding out. I am not paying $15 to give this gravy train any more credence.

If the HBO series Carrie actually existed she would not watch movie Carrie. She probably wouldn't be living in New York anymore. She would spend her nights posting comments on Gawker about how Manhattan is over and too sanitised and it was better when you could walk down the streets and be mugged for your Manolos, except Carrie wouldn't even be wearing Manolos anymore, she'd be wearing Toms.

And she would type: "I got to thinking...could it be the show that was so much about fashion, simply fell out of it?"

*

footnote

Regular readers of this blog will know that this is the first time I have even written the words 'Sex and the City' on Welsh Alien. If it ever needed referring to it was named as The show that we never dare speak it's name since it sold out and made that appallingly saccharin big screen version. Just so that it's clear I'm not jumping on the SATC bashing bandwagon and that I can always be relied on to stay ahead of the hater trends.

Shhhhhh...

2010-05-19T19:55:00.003-04:00

New York, like myself and The American has one volume setting...loud.

However, I think I can safely say the city and the husband trump me on both. When The American gets animated the walls actually shake a little. While on the phone I ask why he bothers actually using one-he could just as easily employ two tins cans and some string. His shout could not only wake the dead, it could catapult them from their graves and have them dancing a Mambo on 5th Avenue. Despite all this, he hears only my roar, as if the tiny hairs in his ear canal are tuned solely into my resonance:

"Honneeee. You're soooo loud." he often says to me.
"What? ME? How can YOU say that to ME?"
"Why are you getting angry? he laughs, as if he himself whispers his way through life.
"'Cos that is a fucking joke. You telling ME I'm too loud!"
"Well, you're being loud right now!"
"Yes. 'Cos you're making me angry telling me I am too loud!"

With a loud husband and the loud city and the sound of my own (moderately loud) voice, I frequently crave quiet. I fantasise about leaving my family and living on a mountain- as long as the mountain had wifi- I want quiet, not boredom.

Our apartment would be an obvious choice as my haven of peace. It's at the back of the building of a fairly serene street, the peace is peppered only by the hum of air-con units, an occasional plane overhead or a distant siren on 7th Avenue. But it has a major flaw-my family live in it. The bellowing American and The Teenager. While the latter is not loud, she does have a portable phone permanently glued to her ear in order to maintain constant connection to love of her life back in Cardiff. Her hair covers the handset, so I often think the constant chatter is aimed at me. This creates a lot of confusion, especially when I think she is calling me 'babes' and saying goodnight at 7 pm. Yes, havens of peace are hard to find in big cities. When there's three of you jammed in a pricey shoebox in the West Village, havens are hard to find in your own apartment too.

Today though, after 8 months and 19 days I found my peace. My quiet in the middle of NYC.

Today I found the New York public library and I now sit in this room:

What can I hear right now? Pretty much...Nothing. Not even the sound of breathing. There is just the occasional scraping of the elegant oak chairs against the tiled floor. Unlike this pic above (stolen from the internet) there must be 500 people here right now. It's like a giant exam room. Or a gathering of the civilised in a post apocalyptic movie, if they all decided to read and write with the end of humanity looming.

My surroundings are fantastically grand-from the long tables decked with reading lamps and leather bound reference books on the walls to the art deco chandeliers and neo classical ceiling. It's like a 1930's Gentleman's club, except it's a public space and there's free wifi. It's so unathomable for a girl that grew up going to a village library housed in a pre-fab.

For such public elegance though, you have to pay with compliance. There is no eating, drinking, mobile phones, photography or talking here. It's a room of zero tolerance and I will take it, as the pay off is jaw dropping.

Still, after a while the temptation to do something naughty is growing. I have already eaten half a Lara bar and have been getting a bit brazen with my water sipping. I have also tried taking pictures of the grand ceiling with the photo booth on my macbook-the results of which are not very good. Teach me for being so rebellious.

But such environmental perfection cannot last indefinitely. I wait for the catch...

Then the catch is wheeled in, in a stroller. Pushed by some liberal Yummy Mummy who thinks it's perfectly fine to risk everyone's calm by bringing a two year old into a quiet room. The toddler says:

"Gwaaa raa raa reee!"
"Shhhh" the Mother says.
"Gwaa raa raa reee" he repeats
"Shhhh" she says again, but then she laughs, which annoys me quite a lot.
"Din ba boo beee dem" he replies-which I understand is toddler speak for "Why I am in here? I can't even read yet."

Haven of quiet destroyed for now. I am packing up my laptop and leaving.

I will be back, though. This is still the best quiet that NYC has to offer. This is what I needed to find and the city gave it to me. It doesn't always kick sand in your face when you're down. Sometimes it gives you something back, a reward, a little gift.

Today it gave me this beautiful, breathtaking public place that only has one fault... it's open to the public.

*

Big walk home

2010-05-14T17:30:00.004-04:00

(part 3 of 3)

I am at 80th Street and 5th. I do the calculations in my head- 2 Avenues and 67 blocks.

I can walk it.

I've spent the afternoon lazing around in Central Park on the Great Lawn after the fight with The American. I've read my book, listened to my ipod and gazed skyward at the sun through scrunched up eyes. A hot breezy day that brought all forms of life out- school kids, Upper East Side Mummies, buskers, the unemployed, runners, cyclists, even a man playing the bagpipes. Unlike 95% of New Yorkers, I bet he'd know where Wales was. I didn't get a chance to ask him though, as he was surrounded by tourists asking him to play some Rod Stewart.

For a while it was a kind of nirvarna, my spot in the middle of the park. I wondered how long I could stay there, being left alone to just stare at the sky? Until 5.30 p.m. was the answer, when all these baseball teams arrived and I realised I was smack bang in the middle of everyone's outfield. Two guys came up to me and politely told me if I stayed I risked being hit by the ball.

"Shouldn't you all still be in work feeding the corporate beast?" I yell at no one in particular.

So with my peaceful escape cut short I decide I'm going to walk it, all the way home. I need to get my head straight, decide if I should apologise. I want to listen to my thoughts, soak in the changing landscape as I head downtown, so I leave the ipod off.

The Upper East Side never feels quite like New York to me. It's so...serene. Where I am on 5th, the park is on my right, walled off by 4 foot high stone. There are benches on my side of the wall, with wet paint signs on, which people are sat on anyway. I wonder who was the first to put their hands on and declare "S'ok people-it's dry now!"

Over the road are generic apartment buildings with grand awnings and doormen. Thin, tanned women pass me, wearing preppy clothes and walking tiny, rat-like dogs. It's so quiet as if people are scared to interrupt the monied hush. There are hardly any black people. There are hardly any brown people. There are no visible homeless.

When I hit 60th, the restraint of the U.E.S. gives way to an explosion of people and traffic and noise. The Mac shop, it's glass cube, like an alien ship that landed in the middle of the city.

Opposite it, the gilded and newly renovated Plaza, with it's $20 million condos and tourists waiting outside for the movie bus tours. As I pause to cross the street on one side I am flanked by some French businessmen, on the other- a man in a rickshaw.

I take a right at 58th to cross over to 7th Avenue and grab an iced coffee from a food truck to fuel me up. I head South again, hitting luggage and camera shops and remembering what is coming up ahead: Times Square, the frenetic beast. The centre of the world, yet the middle of nothing. Neon winks at me seductively in the distance.

Then I am in it: total sensory overload, lights, noise, the smell of pollution mixed with caramalised nuts and hot dogs, people everywhere, their necks crained at the man-made beautiful ugly in the sky. Everyone's selling something: "Do you like Comedy?" "Hey Miss, you wanna bus tour?" "Sunglasses 5 bucks!" Teenage girls in too tight dresses and too high heels, out of towners lining up to go into an open fronted bar and drink watered down well drinks. The TKTS see-thru stair case that's in the Jay Z and Alicia video, around that the highest signs, clamouring up the side of skyscrapers.

It flirts with me, entices me, begs to be photographed. No. I am not a tourist anymore. I can't get my camera out in bloody Times Square....

I take out my camera and snap. Just one. Naughty neon clad whore.

I seek solace, escape into Sephora, but in this branch they are playing Abba's greatest hits. I go around and rub $160 face cream on my hands and play with all the sparkly make up. I put some bronzer over my newly freckled face and then I leave. The make-up makes me want to make-up. I'm going to say sorry to The American.

Another 10 blocks and I am at 34th st, dominated by Macy's- busy people everywhere, criss crossing my pathway, racing like worker ants to their destination. I go the wrong way at the spot where Broadway crosses diagonally. Then a whole block filled with people dressed in Mexican costumes for Cinco de Mayo.

The sun is setting and cars are turning their lights on. What time is out? I don't have a phone. How long have I been walking for? I see a sign opposite Penn station asking me to ''Feel the Love' for crocs. I scoff loudly to myself. No more than I will feel the love for a child molesting Tory, thanks.

Midtown makes way for Chelsea. The outfits are more interesting, people are younger, hardly any suits and plenty of gays. I pass the road where The Teenager's first school was. The Jamba juice where I would met her after school and she would tell me how much she hated it here and wanted to go home. And I would say "We are home. This is where we live now."

Then I'm into familiar territory, lower Chelsea, past all the shops and cafes I frequent and and I am nearly there. I pop into the rip-off Gourmet market where your groceries still get thrown at you despite the high prices. I buy a chicken to make me and The American some dinner. I cross over 7th and take the right onto W13th Street and I am in Greenwich village, the trees, now lush and leafy with Spring, sweep aside to welcome me back.

I climb the three flights of steep stairs to my apartment that always leave me breathless, no matter how much I go to the gym. My apartment is called a 4th floor walk-up, but it's on the 3rd floor. There is no ground floor here you see. Ground is first. Another thing lost in translation.

The American is lying on the bed watching TV.

"I'm sorry!" he says pleadingly as soon as I walk into the bedroom.
"No. I'm sorry!" I say.

And that is how it goes, we both say sorry at the same time, like we are in a cheesy Rom Com. Now I am pissed off I apologised at all, but then I remember what Dr Phil says above love not being about 'winning' and 'scoring points'. Hurumph.

For two people who rarely admit they are wrong, this is quite a moment. I lie down on the bed next to him and I can feel the muscles in my legs starting to ache.

Walking is easy in Manhattan. It's all straight lines. If only relationships were the same.

Big Drama

2010-05-11T11:14:00.006-04:00

(part 2 of 3)

The afternoon was going well, too well really.

After the powder blue skies and 360 degree Manhattan views from Big Bambu atop The Met roof, the rest of the day was always going to be a climbdown-both literally and metaphorically.

However, it starts positively, I am really enjoying the Medieval furniture hall and The American and I are pretending we're in The Tudors-the one with Jonathan Rhys Myers on Showtime.

"Ye privy council informs me you are a lady of ill repute!" The American bellows
"'Tis true, to my regret fine Sir!" I reply, head bowed in mock shame.

But it all starts to go tits-up when I get caught stroking a 15th Century tomb. A guard tells me off and The American joins in:

"Stop trying to touch stuff Emma."
"I can't!"
"Just stop!"
"It's too tempting, these things are like, 500 years old!" and I run my fingers along the side of a Belgian tapestry while his back is turned.

Next, we're in a hall that resembles a Stately home, with grand room reconstructions from the last 400 years. It's so... opulent...decadent.

Oh god. I need to stroke things. Sit on the chair, sweep though the room in a Crinoline gown. Be ravished atop the Chippendale table. Instead I just get my camera out of my suddenly horribly modern looking bag. It's dark, I turn on the flash, take the picture.

"MISS! NO FLASH ALLOWED!" yells a scary Museum guard of indeterminable sex.

For the love of Henry VIII! There is no sign about not using a flash. PUT A FUCKING SIGN UP. And what's with the rules anyway? I'm snapping a chamber pot, not the Turin Shroud.

I take the flash off my camera anyway. Or rather, that's what I think I'm doing. Technology is not my friend. Technology just laughs in my face. I take another picture and the flash goes off and it's so bright against the dim lighting, it's like an atom bomb exploded and I'm getting yelled out... again.

As my finale, a mere 5 minutes later, I accidentally lean on a 17th century marble fireplace. It was absentmindedly-I didn't even realise I was doing it. I am told off once more.

This is my tipping point. I am mad and out comes my inner Verruca Salt. The last 3 misdemeanors weren't my fault and really, if it's that delicate, I say put a cover on it? Or rope it off? These are the unspoken museum conventions we all adhere too. If it is touchable, I want to touch it. I will to touch it. I go stropping off and it would have ended there, had The American not have defended the Museum Nazis.

"Honnneeeeee. You just can't touch stuff."
'What?"
"They're like, totally right, why are you getting mad? You just can't touch shit in here!"
"I know that. I am not a frig-ging child."
"Well, you're acting like one."
'No...you're treating me like one."
"'Uh, cos you're acting like one!"
"Oh for fuck's sake!" I shout.

Then it kicks off. He tells me not to shout, I say I'm not shouting, just raising my voice, which was always the differentiating factor in my house as a kid. He storms off, muttering about just wanting to see the Roman statues. I go after him, we fight again in the grand Gothic lobby. He walks off, going outside to chain smoke. I go after him, we argue once more on the steps and he walks off for a third time and leaves me with all bags for our planned Central Park trip. Before I know it I am hurling a picnic blanket at him down the street. It misses, but by this point, several people have stopped to watch the free entertainment.

I march off in the other direction. I pass the crowd that had gathered, who now look really disappointed the fight is over. I want to ask them if us arguing is the best show they can get in this city? I want to tell them they should come to my place, opposite the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender community centre-then then they'd see some real entertainment.

I walk up Fifth Avenue. Two blocks ahead, an entrance to Central Park. The great, grand green goddess I viewed from above while on the roof. The calm amongst the insanity of New York.

I head straight for it. I imagine grass under my feet. I haven't felt grass for months. Grass feels like home. Grass and space. I need space.

Space to breath.

Big Bambu, Big Drama and a Big walk home

2010-05-10T13:05:00.010-04:00

(Part 1 of 3)

I am not a woman of few words as anyone who knows me will testify. I am a woman of too many words, both in the written and oral form.

However, sometimes, something happens so strikingly visual that words alone will not do enough justice. Big Bambu -the new rooftop exhibition at The Met museum-is just that, a creation lending itself more to telling the tale in pictures.

So as means of introduction to the visuals, here's as minimal a written introduction as I can muster:
Big Bambu is the brainchild of identical twins Doug and Mike Stern, who, with the help of a team of rock climbers have built a free standing structure made of fresh grown bamboo and tied together with just climbing rope.

It stands on top of rooftop garden on The Met Museum in uptown Manhattan. Work started in March and continues daily, to take it from the current 25 foot high to more than 50 ft by the end of the summer. The best thing about it is you can take a guided walk through it on a pathway for no more than the suggested cost of admission. The worst thing about it is that you can't take a camera on the tour and you have to sign forms promising not to sue should you fall off and lose your limbs. Waivers aside, in this litigious world we live in, I am amazed and heartened that such a thing exists at all. Apparently we should be thanking Mayor Bloomberg for 'making it possible' -it even says so on the tickets.

On a sunny May day last week our small group of ten gasped our way through the 30 minute tour, throwing out superlatives in awe: the baby blue skies tipping into the sea of trees, framing a 360 view of the Manhattan skyline. At one point a Saxophonist began to play down below in Central Park and I had to catch my breath through sheer pleasure. Even the guide getting slightly wanky about juxtaposition and dichotomy couldn't spoil it for me. The American said she was young and enthusiastic, so we shouldn't really judge.

Too many words already. When I got down from the jungle in the urban sky, I took pictures. Here they are:

If you're still with me after all those pics, then you should know that from such a high, only a low can follow. Tomorrow, read what happened next in part 2- Big Drama...

A taste of American medicine

2010-05-03T21:12:00.006-04:00

On the list of things I thought I'd never say when I moved to America: I miss the NHS.

I yearn for it's simplicity. At home, one GP does it all and you only get a hospital referral if you're near to death. If not, the wait is so long that the problem will likely clear up before your appointment date. Specialists are a figment of the imagination, they don't actually exist, except for at Bupa. It's a simple system designed by simpletons, but it works. Compared to what I've experienced in New York, it's beauty in fundamentalism.

Here, you've got to find a 'Primary Healthcare provider' which I think is like a G.P. except The American refuses to confirm that, as British acronyms are banned in our house. So this 'PHP' farms you out to various sub contracters, who then cost you more money and time to see. We've been to ten different medical practitioners since we arrived. Each one comes with reams of paperwork and a distinct lack of lustre.

What I imagined in America, land of the free but with paid healthcare- was gleaming surgeries and glossy surfaces adorned with fresh flowers. I thought of immaculate doctors with luminous skin, who speak in hushed tones of preventative medical care. I dreamed a dream of receptionists who don't resent my very existence. Let me tell you what I call this kind of thinking: Optimism. Let me tell you what The American calls it: Emma world.

Let me paint the reality: Shoving 15 page forms in your face as soon as you walk in, receptionists who are not just vile, they teach the class in vile. Grotty worn out surgeries with grey plastic fixtures and fittings and more than a few dirty floors. Doctors who have just as little time to see you as the ones in the UK. Getting refferals for pretty much every problem, then discovering the referrals don't take your health insurance, so calling endless places to ask if they will accept you.

Then there is the taking of blood. They do it every time and they call it 'bloodwork'. Like blood is something that needs work. Every time. Blood, blood, blood. It's like a secret society of vampirical doctors obsessed with Medieval blood letting.

And the Teenager is terrified of needles-as Phobic as I am about the rodents. While this indicates she is unlikely to ever become a smack addict, it also means doctor's visits are fraught. I reassure her that this needle won't be as bad as the last, but they always fail to find a vein and she starts to cry and give me pleading eyes. It's then I can see the actual sweat appearing on the brow of the nurse.

So this is what you get for your (insurance companies') money. What you get when you don't pay is much worse. Like the Chelsea health clinic where we went to get The Teenager one of the 750 inoculations required by New York law. She needed them fast before she got suspended from school for being a 'public health risk'. I had found her a doctor only to be told that she had to have a pediatrician, because she's under 18. What? I didn't have time to find one, especially as I have a tendency to accidentally call them peadophiles. So I figured- How bad can this place be? It's in Chelsea. Unfortunately, so is one of the biggest housing projects in lower Manhattan. Ghetto doesn't even cut it. There was security guards. The teenager was too scared to go to the toilet.

The American had no sympathy.

"Honneee, why did you go to a *screws face up*...public health clinic? We have great health insurance, you don't have to suffer with the... *deep breath*...uninsured."

"Uh, 'cos she only needed a shot and she needed it fast and I didn't think it would be that bad."

"You didn't think a public health clinic in the projects would be that bad?"

"Well, I didn't know it was in the fucking projects did I?"

"Well now you do. We have health insurance, you don't need to do this to yourself!"

"Ugggh. Aneurin Bevan would be turning in his grave!"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"ANEURIN BEVAN. He was a man, a great man!"

"Yeah. You just sound like you're speaking in that Lord of Rings language again."

"He was Welsh yes! He was the architect of the NHS!"

"Yeah, well just look where your socialised healthcare bullshit has got you!"

"It's got me doctors that don't make me fill in loads of paperwork and check I can afford them before I'm through the door."

"Exactly!" and he walks off satisfied, and I have further proof I married a Republican in Democrat's clothing.

For all of the doctors, my dentist is the only one worthy of any praise. He's on 5th Avenue and the building has an tasteful green awning with gold writing. There is a doorman. This I likey. My dentist patched up my cavity with a white filing. That's a white filing as standard. This I love. They haven't done amalgam in the U.S. since the early nineties apparently. This is civilised.

My dentist also shared his wisdom about relationships while drilling my tooth.

"You see Barbara, my wife, she's a lawyer. Well Barbara always wants me to change, to improve and I say Barbara, I'm a man, but really I'm a boy ya know? Now she's a woman, so she's better than me and she can continue to grow. Men, we don't do any maturing past 21. That's it! You're stuck with me, I say to Barbara. So ya married Emma?

To which I say "Ewwchhhafunafewmons." and a lot of dribble comes out.

To which he translates and says "You've been married for a couple of months huh? Early days! But your husband won't change you know? Just don't expect him to."

At which point I felt a bit depressed and wished he'd given me some more Novocaine.

*

So, I have come to summise that even though things are so different here in that the insurance companies fund medical care, rather than the taxpayer, things are not really that different at all. There is clearly not enough money or time to go around in either system.

Maybe the medical grass is greener. By which pun- I should move to California where pharmaceutical pot is legal and apparently fairly easy to get.

Maybe after smoking a few prescriptions I might have a different view on the American system.

*

Forever Friends

2010-04-26T10:37:00.000-04:00

So I have a confession to make: on this side of the pond I am a bit of a Billy-no-mates.

I say 'bit' because I have some friends, but not many and the ones I do have are all British, which sort of feels like cheating, as if I brought them with me in my suitcase. I haven't made one American friend since I got here-unless you count the man that runs the fruit stall on 7th Avenue and gives me free bananas and a wink.

I would like to point out that I have tons of friends back home though. I want that noted in case you don't know me and you are judging me. Fine to be a Billy, but not on a international scale.

As it is, I get to live in this amazing city with my ~~demanding and difficult~~ wonderful husband and my daughter who's a ~~pain in the arse~~ great companion, but I don't get to share it with many friends.

There has been some Yank potential, but they have all come to nothing. My American says all Americans are flaky, but I think he's either just being nice or simply judging his countrymen by his own low standards.

Most notable so far is my hairdresser, who I would like to be my number one GBF. He makes my endlessly disappointing hair look like a Loreal ad, so I loved him at first blow dry. He said he would show me around Harlem, but then he didn't ask for my mobile number to make the arrangements. He is quite shy, so I didn't want to be pushy (apparently I can be pushy? persistent I prefer) but then I found out he does Tyra Bank's hair and I became a bit frantic. I knew I would have to pay- in the form of many $100 a time haircuts- in order to foster this friendship. But that will take time, as both my hair and my wallet can only afford to see him every couple of months. Not ideal, as I am an impatient cow.

When I first arrived in New York I was so keen you could smell the desperation oozing out of my pores. I tried to pick up friends in cafes, shops, parks. I look back and I cringe. "I'm so 'ronery!" said my face "Love me! Love me! I am usually so popular!" It was like being single again, except I was way less fussy. Anyone who's knew me before I met The American will understand that means my expectations were really in the toilet.

Then I realised that you can't force something that should be organic. All my mates in the UK I have met through school, uni or work, these were friendships that grew over the months and years. I never needed any more mates at home, because I'd been lucky enough to have plenty of them. Friendship came easy to me, fallen into my lap all my life. I love people and people have loved me right back.

But in my infinite wisdom I moved to another country and decided writing should be my full time occupation. A job where you work alone. This is the worse possible scenario for a social buzzy bee me. I am not good with solitude. 100 seconds of it is too much for me. Some days I go to Duane Reade just to be bitched out by someone and inhale the milk of human unkindness.

I blame my expectations on endless TV shows about how much fun it is to have friends in New York. And how they'll be there for you when the rain starts to come.

I especially blame (again) the show that we never dare speak it's name since it sold out and made an appalling saccharin big screen version. It was always like ''Blah, blah men uggh but girfriends are sugar sprinkles on the cupcake of loveliness la la la." Well guess what bitches? Your show was a croc. I said Ta Ta to heels (mostly) cos you can't wear them all the time in New York like you made out and I have hardly any mates, so what I am suppose to do? Drink Manhattan dry on my own? Or with my Teenager? Let's be honest, she doesn't want to go out with her Mother and I would rather party with someone I don't have bat pervy men off all night.

So what can I do?

I could go to a million meet up groups. I could but I likely won't. I could get a proper job, except the US immigration service are using a snail they shipped in from India to process my work visa. Meeting people at the gym is not an option, I go to the YMCA, where many patrons are over 70 and wear jeans on the treadmill.

I could blame the problem on the big city, I could blame in on my age, I could blame it on boogie.

So what am I to do in this city where there is much closeness? You share tables with strangers, you squeeze next to them on trains, you cram in long lines with them. You are so close, but so far. There are a million me's as I was back home: people with enough friends, busy lives, no room for anyone else in the hearts or on their blackberries. So what am I to do?

What I am to do, I have decided- is to realise I cannot replicate 34 years of friendships in 8 months. I am to relax and be patient. I am to know that New York friends will come. I am also to be glad my mates back home still give me their time and love through emails, phone calls and SKYPE. Hell, for now I am to be my own best friend, at least I know I'm not flaky.

Or I could just follow the advice of New Yorkers when I've asked "How do you make friends in this town?" They all say the same thing.

"Drink."

Diamond geezer

2010-04-23T13:13:00.006-04:00

So I may have to reconsider my frustratingly one sided relationship with supermodel Naomi Campbell

Last night she turned up at my apartment again muttering something about a diamond.

I figured she was in trouble once more, as that's the only time she ever wants to see me. I put the kettle on and got my secret supply of Hob Nob biscuits out, knowing that Noami always wants to stress eat in times of media persecution. I tried to breach the issue of our friendship, but she didn't listen and just wanted to talk about her problems. She's very 'Me, me, me' if I'm honest.

Apparently this time, the newspapers are accusing her of accepting a blood diamond off the former president of Libya Charles Taylor. Worse than that, it's being said she is refusing to testify at the Hague, where prosecutors have claimed he used uncut diamonds to fuel a campaign of terror in Sierra Leone.

As the story goes in the media, Noami was staying at her pal Nelson Mandela's house in 1997 and there was a knock on her bedroom door in the middle of the night and a mahoosive diamond gift was given to her. She is supposed to have gone down to breakfast in the morning and told all the other guests about it. This is all according to someone who was there called 'Mia Farrow'. As Naomi says "Who is this Mia Farrow anyway?"

Naomi says she does have a large uncut diamond, but Adam Clayton from U2 gave it her when they were dating. I asked her if she was sure, as that band are known for being a bit tight and also are quite into the whole human rights thing. Naomi just made a face and said that Adam went into H. Samuel's in Dublin and asked for the biggest diamond they had.

She says the whole thing is worse now, because she is being accused of losing her temper again-this time with a TV reporter. She says she definitely didn't do that, as she has been doing really well with her anger management program. She says she is innocent and no one can prove otherwise. I asked her if the interview was recorded on camera, at which point she furrowed her brow and there was a really long pause.

Then she yelled "FUUUUUCK!", threw the rest of my Hob Nobs against the kitchen wall and stormed out.

Minding my P's and Q's

2010-04-20T12:33:00.004-04:00

Of all the traits that will help you navigate your way through the urban jungle of New York-manners are pretty low on the list.

But being British means always saying you're sorry-usually in the form of two words "Excuse me?"

"Excuse me, can you help me?" "Excuse me can I just squeeze past?" "Excuse me, do you mind? "Excuse me do you know the way to Union Square/5th Avenue/ San Jose?""Excuse my breathing, excuse me living, excuse my excuses?" The only time New Yorkers say Excuse me is when you're in their way. Which I seem to be quite a lot. No matter where I stand. There's is not a genuine Excuse me though, it's a snippy forced one, spat out with vitriol and without a question mark. There is no time for punctuation. What they really mean is ''Get the hell out of my way you waste of skin."

Excuse me is the worst way you can start a conversation with an American. It confuses them, they think you're apologising for something, but they don't know what you're supposed to have done.

My own American goes so far as to say manners are annoying, frivolous and not necessary for a New Yorker. He theorises where population is dense, courtesies are squeezed out. I am reminded once more I am a Welsh Alien and how manners run gleefully back home-through the hills and towns- where we have plenty of space, enough for there to be more sheep than people.

Bring the Welsh to New York and they get caught out all the time.

"Excuse me?" says my Mother to a Mexican market stall holder in Boston train station, "Do you happen to know where the Bolt Bus for New York goes from?"

Excuse me is even worse when the person doesn't speak American as their first language. They just stare, blank faced. It's an expression I've seen many times before so I barge in.

"HEY! BOLT BUS? BACK TO NEW YORK?" I shout.
"Oh! Just over there. Gate 9!" he smiles back.

"You just have to shout and say less words." I tell Mum.
"Oww. Really? It just seems so...rude."
"I know, but it's the only way."
"But it's so...not...you know?...British."
"Yes, but you will spend too much time repeating yourself otherwise."

Mother looks bemused by this, but I suspect that it's because she has spent a lifetime repeating herself out of choice in the form of nagging.

I explain to her that Please and Thank Yous are something of an antiquated custom here. Akin to laying your coat across a puddle Sir Walter Raleigh style. Lay out your manners in the same way and it is you, not your coat that gets stepped on. You and your P's and Q's are a novelty.

I tell her how the common courtesy of holding a door open is greeted with...nothing...not even eye contact of gratitude. How I have taken to yelling "YOU'RE WELCOME!" at the top of voice to anyone who doesn't thank me. Which is everyone.

I say I have concluded that you have to pick and choose what British affectations to keep and which ones to lose.

She looks happy when I declare Please and Thank Yous will stay. I tell her am taking a nod from Beyonce when she says ''My Momma taught me better 'dan 'dat."

She looks bemused again. She doesn't get it, she is fluent in manners but she doesn't speak much American.

She doesn't speak New York.

Season most likely to succeed

2010-04-13T15:10:00.005-04:00

A friend said to me recently that Spring is New York's late Valentine to you after the harsh winter.

I couldn't have put it better myself. In fact I haven't-that's why I've stolen her quote.

My many trips here since 2007 were only hinting at the true climate. To live here all year around is to be plunged fully into the schizophrenic weather that is as changeable and dramatic as the city itself. In the winter there is not just snow, but blizzards, the city closes down and 10 foot piles crowd the pavements. The summer not merely sun, but 90 degrees of oppressive heat and humidity that require one of those Clinical strength deoderants. When it rains it doesn't pitter patter. It's like God emptied his entire water tank on the island of Manhattan. When they say 'inclement weather' they mean 'monsoon'.

It's the seasons in between that offer less drama, resulting in New York at it's most perfect. Autumn with it's golden oranges and crunchy leaves underfoot, each still hot day an unexpected gift. And now- new warmth and breezy days when cherry blossoms fall on your shoulder as you walk, whispering...

"Hello, I'm Spring. Look how pretty I am! Do you love me?"

Spring is the prom queen of seasons. Young and bouncy with all the good stuff still to come. She's a bit of a tease and allows you a glimpse of her panties. Within the last week I read my book among the daffodils in Abingdon Square on a Saturday morning. I climb over the fenced off lawn at Union Square in order to lie on the grass and feel the vibrations of the subway trains underneath. I sit in a French cafe and play fashion critic, watching how other women tackle the sudden change of weather.

I secure a coveted spot on one of the sunlougers at The Highline, listening to my ipod while watching planes criss cross the baby blue sky with one eye open.

On reflection I seem like I lounge around a lot. It's not really my fault, the U.S. immigration service can take the blame. Should the green card arrive anytime this summer I will stuff it down the back of the sofa and tell everyone I'm still waiting.

*

Yesterday when having a cigarette on the fire escape at the back of our apartment The American spots this teeny red bird in the trees.

He is really small isn't he? Probably took you a good 30 seconds or so to even spot him (he's at the top of the picture if you're still looking) and it's true that one swallow does not make a spring, nor does a few fine days. As quickly as those moments happened, they are gone. Today as I write the city is cold, grey and lifeless again. That is the thing about the Prom Queen-she teases but she never puts out fully.

Which just makes you want her more.

*

Happy Birthday (not so sweet) Sixteen

2010-04-09T12:31:00.002-04:00

On April 2nd 1994 I was 19 years old, holding a brand new baby aloft in my arms. She smelled like Johnsons talc and had caramel coloured skin with a soft, dark, downy covering. She didn't cry, she just cooed. Like a little pidgeon. "Coo Coo".

The early hours of April 2nd 2010- I am at a downtown New York club in a pit of sweat, fist pumping 2 feet away from Calvin Harris. And I have lost my baby.

Panic begins to rise from my stomach but then she reappears in the crowd, smiling, beautiful, clad in tight black lycra dress, skin glistening from sweat and holding a $15 vodka tonic in the air. She mouths something to me. I don't understand. She waves her hand and shakes her head and smiles-our universal language for "...it doesn't matter." She closes her eyes, stretches her arms into the air and says ''Woo Woo."

Thank god. She is safe. And I am too old to be in a sweat pit, but more importantly I am too old to be in a sweat pit alone. She dances up to me, pushing her way through the crowd, eyes alive, sparkling, wide with wonderment at Calvin.

"I can't receive it's a ghost!" she bellows in my ear
"WHAT?"
"I CAN'T BELIEVE HE'S SO CLOSE."
"OH RIGHT! YEAH. I KNOW!"
"THANK YOU! THIS IS AMAZING!"
"THAT'S OK HONEY!

The next morning I wake up at 7a.m. with my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth and my bladder fit to burst. No false dawn today, the hangover just kicks straight in. I wait a few hours and then Mum and I burst into The Teenager's room playing Neil Sedaka's 'Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen' on the stereo. We sing loudly and Mum does this crazy kooky dance. The Teen pulls the duvet back, opens one eye and grimaces:

"What the fuck?"

The next few days whizz by like a fast forwarded film... We have the customary Smith birthday family argument which kicks in before midday. Then I am on 7th Avenue with a giant sweet sixteen balloon and a bag filled with garish pink banners and balloons. Next, I send The American off in seach of ready to roll icing, which you can't buy anywhere. I make 16 pink roses to put on top of the Victoria Sponge I baked.

That night we go to Employees Only in the Village and drink cocktails and have Oysters. The American puts away a few double Jacks, which somehow make him funnier than me. J.D. becomes known as 'Thunder Stealing Elixir'.

When we leave I suggest The Teenager gets her fortune told by the woman that sits in the window of the restaurant. We give her 20 bucks and she gives the birthday girl some food for thought; be patient, don't be so hard on yourself, breathe, embrace womanhood.

We spill out onto the street and the American has found an abandoned locked vintage chest which he brings home in the cab and insists on powerdrilling open. At 1 a.m. Our neighbours probably hate us, but in New York no one complains about noise. I go to bed and leave Mum and The Teenager laughing at him climbing in and attempting to shut it, like some Whiskey sodden Houdini.

Just a few hours later and my alarm clock jerks me awake like a lumphammer on my sore brain. It's 5.30 a.m and time to put my Mother in a car to Newark Airport. She seems fine despite the wine she put away and she's still sanctimoniously claiming she ''doesn't do hangovers'. Neither does The Teenager and I wonder if she and a pensioner are fine-how many decades I am going to suffer the black dog after a drinking session?

That night I am half dead and nigh on suicidal thorough lack of sleep and booze consumption, but I have to make it out to the Easter burlesque show we have tickets for. 'The Burning Bush versus The Second Coming' gives us five pairs of tits, two willies and several hours of open mouthed astonishment and horror from The Teenager.

I want to warn her not to leave her mouth open for too long in a place like this.

On the cab home I ask if if her if she enjoyed the last few days. She pauses, wrinkles her lips a little.

''Yeah...but..."
"I know..."
"I just... miss my Boy. And my mates you know?"
"I know honey. I know. Hanging out with your Mum isn't the way you would have chosen to spend your sixteenth birthday."
"I had a great time though. Thank you."
"You're welcome sweetheart."

Is it my imagination or is she that much older now? I look at her and it seems that way. A lamb, unsteady on her feet, finding her legs but getting ready to run. Time to let go of my baby and get to know her all over again as an adult.

I look out of the cab window as we whizz down 6th Avenue. We stop in traffic outside St Joseph's church. The white romanesque pillars are lit up and people gather on the steps for the start of midnight mass. I can see inside, candlelight beats invitingly. I want to go in, not for God, but for something.

Easter tomorrow. Spring.

New beginnings and rebirth.

*

Blogging on a bus

2010-03-30T12:25:00.006-04:00

Last time I was on a coach the only excitement was a family pack of Chewits and the opportunity to make eyes at the boy in 5th form I fancied.

How times have changed in the last ~~twenty~~ ~~fifteen~~ ten years.

I am currently on the Bolt Bus on the way to Washington with my Mother writing this blog using wi-fi. That just blows my teeny tiny girl mind. Where is it even coming from? Heaven?

Unfortunately we are sat right at the front like a pair of Nannas. I tell Mother that everyone knows the cool people always sit at the back of the bus, but she says I don't really want to be next to the loo and smell wee for four and a half hours just to look good. Beside, she reminds me-I am at the age now where I should be more concerned with under eye wrinkles and pension plans than still trying to pretend I'm 25. And then she makes me put my seatbelt on.

I am ignoring her and going into Facebook and Twitter overload, as if I can inhale youth through the screen via the online updates of others decades younger than me.

The Bolt bus is not being entirely true to it's moniker. The North East United States is being lashed by a monsoon so we're driving pretty slowly, rather than bolting. At this rate we'll be lucky to get there while Obama is still in The Oval Office.

Still, props to the Bolt, which gains more points for legroom that it loses for being bright orange. It's much as I imagine the Megabus could be, if they took that fat twat in a hat off the side of the coach and employed drivers who weren't alcoholic ex cons.

When it comes to the wi-fi, Time Warner could take a lesson from The Bolt Bus. If they can get the internet right on a bus travelling 50 MPH North on the motorway, could you please try harder in my apartment, which stays in the same place?

*

Murder, death, Kiehls

2010-03-28T17:39:00.011-04:00

The American comes home earlier this week and tells me he spent an entire subway ride staring at a girl's arse. Before I clip him over the head, he explains it's not because it was peachy and desirable, but because she was wearing the wrong style of jeans for her figure.

My husband is now a raging metrosexual and it's all my fault.

When we met back in 2006 he used Axe underarm deodorant, the American equivalent of Lynx-(under International Law chav body sprays require single syllable names with an 'x' in them). He wore nylon sportswear, some days head to toe, until I pointed out this wasn't the most suitable fabric for someone of such manly build living in the heat of L.A. So I got him some linen shirts. He had never used moisturiser, or eye cream, so I got him some of those too. I was just in time, there were fine lines appearing.

Three years later and he's dropped 40 pounds, insists on using the entire Kiehls Facial Fuel range and won't step out without 'product' in his hair. He has rejected all but natural fabrics and he even plans his wardrobes ahead of time.

"What are these?" I enquire picking up a pink trainer from a pile of new purchases.
"They're my new spring sneakers honnneeee"
"You don't need trainers."
"No, I do, cos they are spring sneakers."
"What is wrong with your winter ones, or the summer ones you have in storage?"
"I needed some in lighter colours to take me into Spring!"

Need. The man says 'need'. The fashion obsessive's classic get out of jail card. I didn't want it. I needed it. The pupil learns fast. And the talk of seasons, not just summer and winter, but Spring and Autumn too. This is how far down the rabbit hole we've gone.

Living in the West Village has likely aided his transformation from hairy Alpha male to groomed gay. Saturdays on Greenwich Avenue are like an Armani catwalk. If I owned any, I could polish my silverware in the glow from the local men's skin.

When I complain that he has taken things too far he says "You made me honneee." like he's some kind of reverse Frankenstein creation who has manlicures.

I guess none of this matters, as long as he doesn't start looking better than me?

But then the passport photos happen:

I am in a scruffy camera shop on W14th street staring open mouthed at the third attempt at my portrait. That cannot be me. The camera must be on a setting that makes everyone look like a 250 pound moustached convict who's just had a stroke.

The American looks good. Like, really good. Great even. If I was to be mean, I'd say at worst he looked like an applicant for the new series of Jersey Shore, but I would still say he was chanelling Mike 'The Situation' which is the one all the girls all fancy. At best though, and to give him dues, he looks...really good looking... kind of... smoldering even... like an actor.

"Honnneee, look at me! Look how good I look!"
''Fuck off" I snap at him
"Seriously, I'm hot."
*Silence*
"Let me see yours honneee?"
"No."
There is hysterical laughter as he snaps it away from me "You don't look that bad."
"I look like a 250 pound escaped mental patient."
"Aww, well I love you baby."
"Piss off. How the fuck do you look that good in yours?"
"I did a look."
"What?"
"A look!"
"What kind of look? Like Blue Steel or something?" I mock.
"Smirking drugs bust actually." he says, without a trace of irony.
"Jesus Christ."
"I can show you how to do it if you like?"

Stop. Right. There. Show me? SHOW ME? I invented the pout. The pose is mine. I was an amateur teen model for god's sake! In Cardiff! If I had been able to lay off the cakes I could have gone far. Me and Campbell and Crawford would have been besties.

I pay the bemused photo man $18 for photos that will never be used and stomp off in search of a British style photo booth that let's you do multiple attempts for a fiver.

Show me how to look good?

When the pupil thinks they can teach the master things have gone too far.

*

Paging Dr Love...

2010-03-23T08:24:00.008-04:00

On the issue of finding hot, eligible men- I am not quite sure what was up with those four women from the long running New York based HBO TV show. The one that we... never dare speak it's name... since it sold out with the saccharin big screen version.

Anyway, they should have just hung out on 7th Avenue between W13th and 12th. There are more hot male doctors on that block than you can shake a tongue depression stick at and it's only a stone's throw away from The Pleasure Chest. It's just good planning to have your future love and a great sex shop within walking distance.

Specifically the places to frequent are Subway Sandwiches and Duane Reade. Always docs in there from St Vincents, wearing scrubs, no doubt fresh from saving the lives of babies and dealing with multiple G.S.W's.

It's too late for me girls and boys. I married a man who works in media accounting. The only thing he saves is budget costs on a PDF.

I suggest you get yourself a $5 footlong and a pack of Advil and go meet your future husband.

*
April 20th UPDATE.

As an addendum to this post St Vincent's closed shortly after I wrote this. Now I cannot walk by for fear I placed some hot doctor arse curse on it. Aside from the sadness for NY's singles, the hospital has been a major part of the community in the West Village for 160 years. Efforts are now underway to try and save it.

It would also make The American happy, his general paranoia was eased by having a hospital on our doorstep.

Say a little prayer for St Vincents and all it's doctors, whether they are hot or not.

Shitshine day

2010-03-19T01:10:00.004-04:00

On Thursday New York basked in a freakish 70 degree March heatwave and out came the inevitable display of flesh. Stoops burst to life with lovers and smokers and The American and I strolled leisurely down to Union Square and felt the first heat of the year on our faces.

Then I saw a man trying to do a poo on the street.

I didn't spot it at first, at least I didn't catch what he was trying to do. I saw him from the other end of W16th street because he looked as if he was trying sit down on an invisible chair. Some kind of performance art I wondered? He was wobbling around a lot, so sitting on his make believe chair was quite hard.

It's not until I'm next to him that I see it's not so much a chair, than a throne the guy needs. Or a potty even. He is fiddling with his jeans zip when it hits me.

"Jesus Christ." I say under my breath to The American ''That man is trying to do a poo on the pavement."
"Gross." he says and walks on dismissively without looking back.
"Honey, look!" and I point back down the street.
"Emma, I don't want to look."
"No, you have to! Check him out, he can't even get his pants down."
"I am not looking!"
"Well I am."
"You are going to stand here and watch a man shit on the street?"
"Yes."
"You're grosser than he is"
"Just look! There's no poo yet, he hasn't even got his jeans off."
"He probably went already in his pants."
"Oh. I feel bad for him now."
"Why are you still watching him then?
"Because... It is morbidly fascinating."
"Watch away, I'm going to get cigarettes."

He dives into the nearest deli and I stay outside to watch poo man. He is still trying to sit on his imaginary toilet. I wonder what you have to be drinking to think there's a loo right in the middle of the pavement.

I raise my head up to the sun, push my glasses back onto my head and breathe in the sun. I hear a loud rattle and look right to see a lady coming up 5th avenue dragging a giant sack with hundreds of empty soda cans in. She stops right in front of me.

"Hey honey! I love your top!" she enthuses to me.
''Umm...Thanks"
"Where'd ya get it sweetie?"
"Oh, in the UK."
"Pretty!"

And then she clatters off down fifth with her bag of cans, each one worth a few cents rebate.

The American comes out of the deli, Malboro already in his mouth.

"A bag lady just told me she liked my top." I say.
"Cool!" he mutters, clearly not listening.
"Hello? A bag lady just complimented me on my top!"
"And that's bothered you more than that guy taking a shit on the street?"
I nod.
"You're a real New Yorker now honey."

*

For obvious reasons this blog has been somewhat difficult to pictorilise. So here is a picture of my new beloved Liberty London for Target lamp, to take your minds off poo.

Overexcite at the museum

2010-03-17T10:49:00.004-04:00

Under the category of 'Spontaneous Sunday activity' The American and I are at The Natural History Museum.

We are in the queue arguing over the admission fee. He wants to pay the 'suggested' donation of $16, I want to pay a dollar.

''But why pay more when you don't have to?" I protest.
"This is not the way I want to budget Emma, ripping of the Natural History Museum."
"It's not ripping them off, it's a suggested entry! They they are suggesting that we don't have to pay loads of money. You can pay what you like!"
"No. They are suggesting we pay sixteen bucks each."
"Why spend money we don't have to?"
"Well, we'll have to spend more anyway, as I want to do an exhibition. If we just do a suggested donation we don't get to go into any exhibitions."
"I'm fine with that. I just want to see the Gorillas and stuff."'
"We're paying the full rate Emma."
"I'm freelance! There should be a special rate."

Turns out there's a dizzying array of entry options, when you factor the exhibitions in. Suddenly it's gone up from $16 to $24 and we have to make a quick decision on which one we want to see. I grumpily vote for Journey to the Stars (because it looks like the least boring option). He votes for The Silk Road.

"The Silk Road? Seriously?" I protest
"Yeah, that is like totally interesting."
"How? What is there to say? Men in The East travel on camels through the desert, it's really hot, they trade silk-The End!"
"Fine! Stars it is then." he concedes, probably to distract me from the fact he is handing over 50 bucks to the guy at the desk.
''Next time why don't you tip him 20 percent too!" I shout as I stomp off.

*

20 minutes later and I am standing in the Hall of Biodiversity in front of the guard who's next to the roped off entrance to The Hall of Ocean Life.

"Hi, when do the fishies re-open?" I ask cheerfully

Silence, accompanied by a menacing stare. God, I need to get in there. There is a giant whale hanging temptingly from the ceiling in the distance and I want to stroke it.

''Excuse me, I say, with authority this time "When do the fish re-open?"
He looks up.
"I dunno."
"You don't know?"
"Nope." he shrugs
'Right, well is there someone who does know?
"Listen, they're like...doin' some stuff in there right? So I can't call it."
"Great, so you just don't even want to guess?"
Another shrug is all I get in response.

*

We are in The Hall of Biodiversity. I admit that I don't really know what Biodiversity is. The American claims he does, so I ask him and he says:

"It's like...lots of different life and...like... lives and stuff"

Hmmm. I try and read this more in depth description but he talks and it interrupts the voice in my head:

This becomes a feature of our trip, The American imparts his knowledge without it being requested while I try and read the information on the brass plates. Then I try reading out loud to indicate that his talking means I can't concentrate. He doesn't get the hint and becomes especially feverish when we are in the North American Mammals hall and there are lots of native Alaskan animals. He lived there for 3 years and takes great pride in telling me how he once woke up to see an Alaskan moose grazing outside his window.

I don't know much about Alaska, aside from the fact that Sarah Palin lives there and online shops are always at pains to stress they will not deliver there (or Puerto Rico) but now I can add another fact to my arsenal: They have a lot of animals there with really big antlers. There are lots of antler animals in the museum generally. To be honest, I think they totally overdid it on the antlers.

We head off for the Asian and African animals halls via the dinosaur bones in the regal main entrance. The American explains how the tall one with a long neck and a small head was a vegetarian. He tells me that the ladder-like neck allowed him to munch the leaves out of the trees.

"Like a giraffe!" I say.

I tell him that I reckon that this particular dinosaur must have evolved into the giraffe, which I think is quite an intelligent comment, but The American cracks up and says "You don't know shit."

Asian and African Mammals are a bit 'seen one you seen them all' so it turns out. Predictably there's elephants in both. I insist on leaning over the velvet rope to stroke some hide and The American tells me off.

Then it's time for the stars thing and I am worrying it's going to be really boring and long and a bit like Techniquest in Cardiff. You know, one of those teachy preachy experiences ''Oww yeah, science is fun boys and girls! Now watch my bow tie light up powered by these 16 Hamsters in a cage!"

Hundreds of us stand in line for a giant white dome, that looks like the Epcot centre in Florida.

We file into a humongous circular cinema with a domed ceiling at least a 100 ft high. Whoopi Goldberg's voice booms out as a giant panorama of Central park in the summer sunshine spans 360 degrees around the screen. The American and I look at each other and mouth "WOW".

The arena goes dark and planet Earth appears at the top of the dome and then drops down from the sky. Comets and other planets pop up and move across the dome and flashes of light come right at you. Hundreds of stars rain down from the ceiling and Whoopi talks about supernovas and auroras as they dance around in front of us. I can't stop oww-ing and arr-ing and am squeezing The American's hand in wonderment.

I begin to have all these unexpected existential thoughts about who or what I am in this vast existence. This is the Universe and I am a teeny tiny me in comparison. Whoopi asks us all to concentrate on a star and stare at it and watch what happens. I fix intently on the brightest one I can find. I stare and stare and tears start to prick at my eyes. It makes me remember how Dad and I used to do the same thing when I was a kid. How we would gaze up, necks crained at the inky black sky and look for the brightest star. Then he would say that star was mine.

Two fat tears roll down each cheek because I miss him but I try and hold it in, like you do in the cinema at a sad film. When the lights come up I feel silly, like people will think I've been crying about the stars. I hurry outside the dome and find a bench to compose myself on. The American follows and comes and gives me big bear hugs.

"Wanna go to the giftshop honey?" he asks gently
*Sniff, sob* "Oh...yes please." *sniff sniff sob* "Can we go see the Gorillas too?'
"Sure honey."
*Sniff sniff* "Will you let me take a picture of you beating your chest next to them?"
"Of course honey."
*Sniff, sniff sob* "Thanks. Love you."
"Love you too honey."

The Golden Arches of 6th Avenue

2010-03-05T00:05:00.003-05:00

My local Mcdonalds is the scariest place on the block.

There's always lots of men in front of it wearing baggy jeans and walking around in circles. They swing one arm down in front of them, really low, like monkies. I don't know what they're all doing-hanging out there, but it looks dodgy. I don't pay $RIDCULOUS a month to deal with that nonsense in my hood, so I just scurry faster when walking past.

However, motherhood will make you take risks you never thought possible. So when The Teenager wants a Mcdonalds hot fudge ice cream sundae to distract her from the abject misery of missing The Boy-I have to brave it. Rather me than her.

Outside The Golden Arches is scary…inside it's Baghdad. I run in and order six sundaes on the basis that the rest can go in the freezer and I won't have to come back again. I wrestle considerably with the fact this means the fudge sauce won't be hot anymore.

Next to me at the counter is a skinny homeless guy with no teeth questioning the Mcdonald's girl

"How much a Quarterpounder?"
"How much a Quarterpounder with tax?"
"How much... fries?"
"How much fries with tax?"
"How much a…hamburger?"
"How much a hamburger…with tax?"
"Hmm…" he says ponderously, in response to her robotic answers and eye rolling. He scrambles in his pocket for change and starts counting through it. I can see a palm full of brown coins. I think I notice him because he is neither scary or aggressive, he seems quite...happy.

He smiles at the Mcdonalds lady and then mooches over to some girls next to me. They dive straight in:
"Maaaaan, don't you come near me, don't you be asking me for no money. Back up Mr. Back up!"
"Hey, I don't want your money" he says calmy "I'm just trying to buy some food."

Oh God. Here I am watching my six ice cream sundaes get made, looking like a greedy cow and this man just wants some dinner. OK-I'm going to buy him a meal, I'll even supersize it. I go into my purse and there is no more cash in there and I've left my cards at home. Shit. Shit. Ok, I could just give him an ice cream sundae? It's not the most nutritious of dinners, but it's better that eating out of a bin? And he has no teeth, so ice cream might be a good choice?

But by this point the manager, who looks about 15, has begun the process of throwing him out. I'm not quite sure on what basis and clearly neither does he as he laughs protesting:

''I'm a daaaamn customer!"

To be fair, he was only getting the prices. The exact prices. New York sales tax is a bastard.

Oh crap. Do I still offer him the sundae now? Is that even more humiliating than being thrown out of a Mcdonalds? What I really want to do is offer him the ice cream and flee, cos I don't want to converse with him.

I turn around and he is half way out of the door and the woman serving me is only just bagging up my sundaes. I grab them and run out onto the street to find him. He's talking to himself and staggering down the block lighting a cigarette.

"Money for fags but no money for food! " I can hear my Mother say.

I ignore her imaginary nag and follow him down the block holding a single hot fudge sundae aloft.

"Come back!" I shout, but I realise I am still having an internal dialogue, so the words don't come out.

He is moving pretty fast for a man who unlikely has anywhere to be. I break into a run. And then I stop myself. I am running after a homeless man with a hot fudge sundae.

I come to a stop on the street and people whizz by me on the pavement. Standing still is the worse thing you can do in Manhattan. You get pushed and shoved and tutted at loudly. The Empire state blinks green like a gremlin in the distance-which strikes me as a funny colour. The man disappears into the crowd and my moment is gone.

My ice cream is starting to melt.

Where's Naomi?

2010-03-02T22:34:00.005-05:00

Is it 20 years of constant hunger that's made Naomi Campbell so bloody angry?

As I write, the supermodel is 'on the run' in Manhattan after supposedly socking her limo driver in the head. New Yorkers will empathise. I want to smack cabbies in the head most days, especially when they insist on getting the cross street before you've even sat your arse down in the back seat.

So where is Naomi right now? Where do you go when you're the world's first Supermodel fugitive? I suggest the following:

1) In a branch of Foot Locker-finding some more suitable shoes for being on the run. She can't leg it from the cops in Prada platforms.
2) TopShop in SoHo-Every good fugitive needs a new outfit. Naomi could get a little slice of home and some leggings from the Tall section of the British high street favourite.
3) Natural History Museum-at the cavemen exhibit asking them why displays of anger were acceptable in their day, but so frowned upon now.
4)A branch of Crumbs Bakery-They have the biggest and best cupcakes in NYC. Even supermodels need to comfort eat in times of stress.
5)On a train to Queens. No one will look for her in the boroughs surely?

Oh poor Naomi. We shouldn't judge her, she's just a down to earth Laaandan gal who got pulled into all this glitz and glam craziness from an early age innit? She don't know no betta'. All she really wants to do is help the people in Haiti and Chile too. I don't want them to suffer anymore than they already have, so if you're reading this Naomi, you can come and hide out in my apartment-I have Rescue Remedy.

Just don't even think about losing your shit with me-I'm a Cardiff girl-we fight back.

*

A letter to UPS

2010-03-01T10:12:00.004-05:00

Dear UPS,

I accept *adopts ominous voice* EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS' CONTROL meant you were unable to deliver my parcel of sale goodies from Urban Outfitters in the depths of Friday's Snowmageddon.

I even understood the use of the seemingly over dramatic EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS' CONTROL after The Teenager explained that lots of your delivery drivers are volunteer firemen when there is a raging blizzard. She watches a lot of NY1.

I even admired the EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS' CONTROL message on your parcel tracker- as there was correct use of the apostrophe, which is as rare as it is admirable these days, especially when an 's' is involved.

What I cannot accept however is that your parcel tracker still says EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS' CONTROL 3 days later. What is your excuse now UPS? And why isn't it on your website? The snow has melted and the sun is now shining. New York has moved on, why haven't you?

Just send a bloke in a brown shirt and a electronic signing device with my stuff yeah? Please do it today before it rains or snows or some other heinous act of god/EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS' CONTROL occurs.

Many thanks,

Frustrated of the West Village

*

Snowmageddon-The Sequel

2010-02-27T01:20:00.004-05:00

Yesterday morning I wake up at 7.30 a.m. with a raging hangover to see Snowmageddon part 2 happening outside my window. Except this time it's being called a Snowicaine, which just sounds like a drug euphemism. It's also being referred to as a Snowpocalypse, which has a nice ring to it-but I'm sticking with Snowmageddon, a phrase actually endorsed by Obama. And the most dramatic.

7.45 a.m. and Teenager is still asleep, despite her alarm going off half an hour ago, so I shake her awake and do the "Woo hoo snow!" and she says her usual "For fuck's sake." It occurs to me that Mayor Bloominbonkersberg may have done an overnight U turn on his decision to keep schools open, so I tell her to turn on NY1 and I go off to make tea.

I come back 5 minutes later and she is staring at the TV in a trance, managing to miss the red BREAKING NEWS ticker that announces all public schools have been closed. When I point this out she does a fist pump in celebration and announces she's going back to bed. I do the same.

By lunchtime I am still under the duvet popping prescription painkillers to make the hangover horrrors go away and watching HBO while watching my fire escape, which seemed to be the best indicator of snow depth. It's growing inch by inch on the steps.

2p.m. It is still chucking it down, alternating fat flakes with delicate flurries and I am wondering how many new words to describe the weather drama. I come up with Snowsaster, Snowastrophe and Snowmergency.

A journalist friend emails me to tell me this is already the snowiest month in New York history and there is now 20.8 inches in Central Park, making this the fourth heaviest snowfall ever.

Fortunately the plucky vendors on delivery.com are still operating despite the record breaking snowflakes. It takes more than a blizzard to take down Valentino's Gourmet Market in Union Square and it's entirely civil $10 minimum order. One chicken chipolte sandwhich and two diet Dr Pepper's later the world is feeling like a better place-or maybe it's the Tramadols? I'm flicking through movies on demand when the Teenager comes in to my bedroom making some unreasonable demands-like we actually stick to the plans we had this afternoon, including her appointment at the hairdressers.

The most I had planned for the rest of the day was staying in bed and waiting the arrival of my parcel of sale goodies from Urban Outfitters which UPS are optimistically claiming on their online parcel tracker, is still due for delivery. The Teenager seems pretty determined too, so I stagger to the shower and try and wash off the stench of two bottles of Rioja seeping from my pores.

We head outside and her ''For Fuck's sake'' attitude disappears when she sees a 2 foot high snowdrift and jumps straight into it gleefully.

We spend the next few hours sloshing through the dirty grey slush puddles that line the streets around Greenwich Village between the hairdressers, getting coffee, going shopping and taking pictures of broken brollies in the snow. All is well and The Teenager and I seem to actually be having some kind of bonding moment. She even allows me to links arms with her. I think the physical affection is sanctioned because she is unlikely to see anyone she knows on 5th avenue. Nevertheless, we are shiny, happy people until we head to Sephora and see this sign in the window.

I expected better of my beloved Sephora. At least there is my Urban Outfitters parcel to look forward to?

But when I get back to the apartment there is no delivery. I check the website and there is an ominous message in big dramatic caps explaining why my parcel hasn't come.

EMERGENCY CONDITIONS BEYOND UPS' CONTROL

Emergency? What the fuck? You haven't delivered my parcel because of the fourth biggest storm in NYC history? The fourth. Not the first. People still need clothes in the snow! When the snow starts messing with the shopping things are getting serious. It's not fun anymore.

Snow fun.

Joss Stoned

2010-02-25T14:49:00.003-05:00

So this has nothing to do with New York or fashion or any of my usual topics-I just wanted to put it out there-Is Joss Stone just officially mental now?

It began in 2007 with that Brits appearance when the girl from postcard pretty Devon-land of clotted cream fudge-swaggered around the stage enunciating like a Ghetto pimp from the Bronx.

Fast forward a few years and it doesn't look like she found any of her marbles. Now's there's even stronger evidence that the 'soul sensation' is singing from a different hymn sheet to the rest of us.

Joss allowed her brother to direct this never released film for her Baby, Baby, Baby single which Marie Claire magazine thinks could the worst music video ever made.

Nepotism is rarely a good idea and never trust the mental sanity of anyone who doesn't wear shoes. I think those are the lessons we can take from this.

Style matters

2010-02-23T11:01:00.001-05:00

This is it.

The last blog about New York Fashion Week-I don't want to seem like I'm clinging on desperately or anything. After all, NYFW is already so last week, all eyes are now on LFW and soon it will be MFW, then PFW and then we'll have run out of fash weeks and acronyms. Meanwhile I'm left here thinking about the swirly whirlwind of it all and wearing my Fashion loves Haiti T-shirt like a sad twat. The party is officially over at Bryant Park- permanently. Next season it moves uptown to Columbus circle-where there will be proper toilets. No more watching ladies in Lanvin heels hobble out of the tents to use the portaloos.

So I guess I should be writing one of those summary pieces, that pulls everything together neatly and summarises the trends for Fall 2010? I should, but I don't want to get bogged down in the detailing of the what to wear-for reasons I will expand on later. If you're interested though- there was tons of high waisted peg legs pants, winter florals, classic American sportswear in the veil of loose blazer jackets and slouchy suits. There was also a (disturbing) dominance of real fur in the collections.

None more so than at J. Mendel, where even the Louboutins had a mink trim. I was just worried for this lady in the audience, for fear her pooch might get turned into a handbag

I could focus this last fash blog on the lack of celebs, which was a big talking point. It started with Marc Jacobs banning stars from his front row and then undoubtedly the economy also played a factor. The few famous faces that did rock up were at the biggest shows- where I was not. The only spot I got really excited about was 'noted fashion photographer' Nigel Barker from America's Next Top Model front row at Carlos Miele. Am happy to report he is just as shaggable in the flesh. So this is why I am picturing a celeb stylist like Philip Bloc to illustrate this, rather than an actual celeb.

Plenty happened during the week, including the realisation that NYFW is more than a week, it's actually 8 days. I covered the Bloggers v editors debate and terrified teen blogger Tavi's mum by bombarding her with questions when she sat next to me at a conference. I told you about all the other kids at the tents. I rambled on incessantly about getting a seat at a show. I networked, met some lovely people and also some right tossers. I shopped inbetween shows and experienced some super charged style serendipity, grabbing the best vintage finds of my life. I got turned away from Christian Siriano I had a superlative attack at Elisa Palomino. I got fashion flu, met some lovely female paparazzi and a Welsh intern. I failed to get snapped by any street style photographers and concluded only thin people make it onto The Satorialist.

I wrote every day and treated my blog like my own little fashion magazine. It's pretty exclusive, you're probably one of only a few hundred readers. Lucky you (this won't get me a book deal though, so please keep spreading the word).

The most important lesson that NYFW has left me with is thus: What you wear is less important than you think. The best looks were always in the audience rather than the catwalk, confirming for me that street style leads where designers follow. I noticed the outfits I envied weren't the matchy matchy, but more eclectic, considered, yet with that air of thrown together. There's an anything goes attitude among true fashion lovers that's refreshingly lacking in elitism. There are a few exceptions though and they mostly centre around neon on pensioners:

How you wear it is the key as ever. And that has nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with style. Fashion week left me thinking less about this season's pants or heel and more about being creative and caring less.

So for Fall 2010 I say fuck fashion.

And embrace style for every season

Fashion by numbers

2010-02-20T20:46:00.006-05:00

Shows applied for....83
Shows invited to.... 30

Shows actually attended...18

Seating assignments...1

Seats blagged...13

Famous people seen...7

Famous people worth seeing...2

Fashion party invites...4

Free bars...7

Models spotted running between shows...11

Models captured on camera hailing cabs...1

Fashion blogging conferences held during Fashion week...3

Blogs written in 8 days...16

...

Tavi's old hat

2010-02-19T12:50:00.005-05:00

Playing the age card in fashion is a losing game-especially in this world of extremes.

Tween blogger Tavi better watch her Rodarte clad back-kids were everywhere at New York fashion week-including the catwalk. At the end of his show Eric Kim brought out his baby, in braces and skull print beanie to a chorus of coos (at least from the women still ovulating).

Then my fash partner spotted this tiny tot at the tents today, who she was told by her Mum is ''...in her second season." At not yet 2 years of age.

On the last day of fashion week I too noticed several tiny trendspotters, including a six year old wearing a burlesque mini topper. I didn't photograph her, I felt she should not be encouraged.

However, check out these three gorgeous girlies lining up for the J. Mendel show and busting some casual and age appropriate downtown chic.

They'll have to knock those pretty smiles off their faces if they want to get ahead in fashion though. Start practising your pouts ladies.

It's child's play.

Blooming lovely

2010-02-18T18:05:00.002-05:00

When I was 17 I took half my first pay cheque into a boutique in Cardiff and spent £375 on a Moschino Cheap & Chic suit. The jacket had sewing thimbles for buttons. It was the most unusual, beautiful and expensive thing I had ever owned. It spoke to me, it spoke to others:

"Are those...thimbles?" people would ask.

16 years later and that jacket hangs in my wardrobe in New York. It's lasted longer than any man in my life and I can still just about fit into it. That in itself is testament to the miracle of Moschino.

With this sentimental connection proceeding, you can imagine my anticipation at an invite to Elisa Palomino's debut collection-this is the woman who started Cheap & Chic.

After that Palomino went to work at John Galliano, Dior, Roberto Cavalli and Diane Von Furstenbeg. Not to mention that she started in the fashion world by attending Central St Martins with Hussein Chalayn, Antonio Berardi and the late, great Alexander McQueen.

This all adds up to the fashion equivalent of a thorough bred racehorse. With all that pedigree, you know you're in for something special.

Excited, I persuade The Teenager to come along as my 'intern'. That I have to persuade her at all says a lot about the apathy of youth. She is even less keen when I tell her she will actually have to do something, like take notes or pictures. But after a hissy fit about what to wear, she tags along, in her BCBG heeled boots and we cab it uptown.

The General Society of Mechanics on W44th Street strikes me as as odd location on paper. In reality It's like walking back into the 1920's- an elegant old library, stuffed to the gills with hardbound dusty books and oak chests. Oriental lanterns have been strung all over the ceiling and the room is lit with a warm, amber hued glow.

The show begins. Three singers who stride balletically to their mics and begin to sing something operatic and enchanting.

The first model emerges from a backroom and teeters precariously down a small set of stairs looking like a geisha turned Oriental party princesses. The girls come out one by one with the same huge messy birdnest hair topped with giant flowers or bows. They balance on sky high heels and the music turns flapper to match the drop hem dresses.

Modern mixes with vintage as satin puffas are teamed with Japanese floral print bias cut dresses. There's an abundance of chunky knits with giant gardenias. Fur stoles come with floral embroidery and there's tons of ruffles and ruching. A gold sequin dress shimmies by and I notice it is embellised with yet more flowers.

The palate is rich orange, bright fuschia pink, creams and shades of gold.

There's lots of black too, but rather than severe in contrast to the colour, it's silky, seductive and surrounded by yet more flowers.

As in love as I am, I still want to be objective. I don't go looking for flaws but it strikes me that a few pieces in the collection are just a tad Per Una at M&S- the black knit with flowers and the orange silk skirt and matching cardie (below) in particular looks pretty middle aged Surrey housewife.

My Mum would like it, but that's no disparaging comment- my Mum is a pretty stylish sixtysomething and actually owns a few Moschino pieces herself.

The real litmus test is in the mouths of babes:

"What did you think?" I ask The Teenager
"It was amazing. I loved the clothes, they were soooo beautiful. "

I can see three generations of women wearing something by Elisa Palomino, unlikely her intention, but certainly the result. That has to translate as something that will become infinitely sellable.

More importantly is The Teen's reaction.

She never uses superlatives.

*

Death by fashion

2010-02-18T00:09:00.002-05:00

I have fashion week flu.

Symptoms include a sore throat, cough and general lethargy along with an obsession for getting seated as shows and the growing belief that vintage fur doesn't count.

This is my excuse for no post yesterday. However, I did manage to fit in Elisa Palomino on a hunch her debut collection would something special.

I am very glad I did. With hindsight I would have been wheeled there on my death bed. So tomorrow a full report.

For now, just the pic above that I took and I am quite proud of.

Blog off

2010-02-16T14:14:00.009-05:00

A freelance journalist at the tents in Bryant Park is telling me he's writing a piece about the influx of bloggers in fashion. When he says the words 'influx' and 'bloggers' he flinches as if he's being force fed a Big Mac.

I know what's coming: Bloggers are ruining the industry/There's always someone in the front row with a digital camera nowadays/ They're doing the 'proper journalists and photographers' out of a job. Blah Blah Blah. Blog Blog Blog.

Cut to six hours later and I am at a fashion blogging seminar in Chelsea. It's filled with lots of twentysomething girls hammering away on their laptops, tweeting on their blackberries or being horribly Luddite and exchanging actual business cards. There is some great outfit spotting, just like at the tents, except here it's more vintage than DVF.

Bryant Park bitchiness has been replaced by bloggers bonding. There's camaraderie instead of competitiveness. Of course- there is room for everyone on the internet; good, bad and mediocre.

We all await the arrival of a group of supperbloggers, including Bryan Boy and regular irritant of the traditional fashion press Tavi. She recently rubbed Grazia editors up the wrong way by not only getting a seat in front of them at the Dior couture show in Paris but blocking their view with her giant Philip Treacy hat.

I should mention that Tavi is just 13.

These nobodies turned somebodies are gods here-the equivalent of Carine Roitfeld and Anna Wintour turning up to address a bunch of 'proper journalists'.

My fashion week partner is the first to spot Tavi's arrival. She is standing unassumingly at the back of the hall with her Mum. They look similar and are wearing the same glasses, expect Mrs Gevinson looks like she shops at Walmart. They both have an air of Deirdre Barlow from Coronation Street, although Tavi with her blue rinse actually a bit more like Deirdre's mother Blanche. Or how I imagine Blanche would appear if she was styled by Patricia Field in Amsterdam on a bad acid trip.

Then, just before it all begins Tavi's Mum takes her seat-right next to my fashion week partner. We both dive straight in, confirming who she is and then questioning her furiously.

Annoyingly she doesn't say anything controversial like Tavi is really a midget granny in disguise or that she secretly shops at Walmart too and Joanna Coles is her ghost writer. She is even media savvy enough stop and ask at one point ''Is this an interview?"

It's at that stage I stop myself and remember that as a news journalist I used to interview cabinet members, police chiefs and pop stars and here I am getting excited about a possible scoop with the mother of a tweenage blogger.

In the hour Q and A with the panel Tavi turns out to be sweet and articulate and disappointingly lacking in pretension. Bryan Boy makes everyone laugh and keeps his wraparound star trek glasses on the whole time. Susie Bubble is passionate about the politics of it all (She's a Brit so I wonder if she has any Dairy Milk in her bag). Phil the Street Peeper sees himself as more of a photographer than a blogger (he is, his pics are beautiful) and Lauren Sherman from my personal favourite site fashionista.com reveals she is in fact a 'proper journalist' and use to work in news. I knew it. She wrote a great piece recently on the fact that designers actually pay celebs to be in the front row.

The biggest topic is the Editors versus the Bloggers debate and how it's a fight perpetuated by the media. I'm not quite sure which media they all mean, but I assume they mean the one that's not them. The one that is still printed on actual stinkingly un-hip paper.

As a journalist and blogger, I'm not quite sure where I stand. Or sit. Which is usually what it all boils down to in the fashion world. Right now I sit next to Tavi's mother. Earlier I sat in a row with New York Times writer Lynn Yaeger and the head buyer for Harrods. As I may have mentioned (several times, possibly becoming a bit obsessed) it's all about where you sit, not stand in fashion.

Now the bloggers are getting into the front row it's got some of the cognoscenti pissed off. Who can blame them? After decades clawing my way up the shit splattered gilded fashion ladder, I'd be pissed off too.

The bloggers claim the editors are scared. They've shaken up the hierarchy and were gauche enough not to ask permission. People that read the blogs feel they might be able to be the next Susie Bubble, but they're not so sure they could, or even want to be the next Anna Wintour.

It's all about accessibility. The industry wants to stay elite, because it sells aspiration. But technology is forcing fashion industry change; several shows at NYFW have been streamed live on the internet and London is doing the same at every show- so now we can all have a seat in the front row. And in the midst of this is the cold hard finance-Magazines are struggling while everyone reads blogs for free. Which gives the kids more money to save up for a Tavi Rope scarf.

On this issue I'm not sure exactly where I sit. Or stand. So my stand is that I would like to sit on the fence.

If I remembered to RSVP properly.

I am at a show and I know who the designer is

2010-02-15T12:08:00.018-05:00

Security is really tight at Carolina Herrera-a show I am particularly excited about not only because I know who she is, but I can also pronounce her name (just about).

The strict ticket and bag checks gets me all excited and my journalistic senses tell me there's huge names inside awaiting the veteran Venezuelan designer.

But in the tent is more than Miss J from America's next top model and I've seen him twice already.

More exciting is the third row seat I've blagged myself into; next to legendary NY writers Lynn Yeager and Judy Licht. Unfortunately I don't know who I am sitting with until they get up and leave and I read their seat signs, but I sensed they were somebodies. They, in turn, sense I am a nobody. They also know I am not Dee Poon- the person assigned the seat. She is a chic Chinese boutique owner, so quite a hard one for me to pull off.

But thanks for being a no-show Dee-you made my day. I have a great view of the brush stroke print dress that's opened the show and makes way for a whole host of English inspired Lady of the Manor looks; Floppy wools hats, super high waisted belted wide leg pants, high necked ruffle blouses, big shoulder pads and swing wool coats in a palette of rich red, chocolate and camel. Oww, it's yummy! High end daytime glamourama. I am even more excited now as I already own a floppy wool hat.

Herrera is showing us the kind of lady who drinks Claret the colour of the collection's palette at midday and likely has a rampant painkiller addiction. She also wears metallic brocade in the day.

And here comes the fur. Oh. A lot of fur. In capes, as a trim and on it's own in vests.

When not showing us unapologetically what she can do with fox or six, Herrera gets back to her Latin roots and throws in flamenco ruffles on skirts and on bolero jackets over washed out watercolour florals for her eveningwear looks.

Back to the fur and I just realised why the strict checks. They were clearly looking for anyone from Peta with a pot of red paint. I do not have any paint, but I do have a deep need for the red trouser suit and matching hat in the collection. I'm adopting the bonkers lady of the manor look immediately.

I'll just be leaving the fur where it belongs... on the estate.

Village green

2010-02-15T07:51:00.018-05:00

There's a male model smoking a fag outside The Green Shows in the East Village. He's wearing a lots of black eyeliner. Sometimes the universe sends you signs.

We've cabbed it over from Bryant Park and have arrived early to try and catch up on some writing but are surprised when organisers tell us there's no media room, they seemed surprised we even asked. So we pop back out on E11th street in search of a cafe with Wifi.

But blogging fades quickly into the background when we spot two fab looking vintage shops over the way.

Within minutes at Buffalo Exchange I have bagged some ridiculous but fun Willy Wonka-esque sunglasses and a chunky bright purple wool beanie for $13 total and then with heart pounding I snag some Michael Kors heels for $35.

There is even a pair of Navy Pradas courts for $80 but they are a little tight so I tell myself not to be greedy.

I don't listen to myself for very long though as 10 minutes later I am at Angela's Vintage Boutique next door stroking the most beautiful 1950's fur trimmed coat. It is heavy with quality and it fits perfectly. The lady (Angela I assume) is giving it to me for $70 and the ticket said $95 and I never even asked for a discount. It's as if the fucking vintage fairy has landed on my shoulder.

What is happening? Does this have anything to do with that Chinese cat statue that woman gave me in a coffee shop the other day? This comes off the back of a run of unbelievable vintage finds. I made out like a demon in W17th street Homeworks thrift store just last weekend. It is fash week shopping serendipity I tell myself.

But where there is ying there is is yang and I was about to pay back with the most depressing 15 minutes of my life when we head back over the road.

Without seeing every show at NYFW I'm willing to bet that Thieves by Sonja Den Elzian is the drabbest of the week. Judging by the visible boredom and eye rolls in the audience, I'm not the only one who thinks so. Black and grey urban minimalist sportswear in cotton and some kind of eco rubber, the sort of stuff Jill Sander was churning out in the early nineties. It's surprising as previous Thieves collections have been packed with unusual but desirable daywear in lighter and brighter hues.

There are some pieces that try to save the dreary pretension from disappearing up it's own organic cotton clad arse- like the wool wide shawl collared coat, the ruched jeggings and the rubber waister. But I'm distracted by the hilarious description of the collection 'The inspiration is humanity in its evolving state within the erratic and harsh climates of constant transformation...visually exploring the exploitation of Canada's Boreal forest through the mining of tar sands". You what?

Just in case I wasn't suicidal enough at that point the excellent DJ is made to switch his funk and disco pre-show sound to some kind of experimental dirge that makes me think we are maybe being hypnotised Zoolander style, but rather than killing the Malaysian Prime Minister we are being made to like Elzian's clothes.

It's not working. I am wearing vintage sequins and Chanel pearls for fuck's sake.

I make a swift exit and head back over the road to stroke something sparkly from the 1950s.

Buying vintage will be my green contribution for today.