Season most likely to succeed

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.





*

Snowmageddon-The Sequel

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.

Snowmageddon

If frenzied local TV news reports are to be believed New York is on the verge of becoming a real life version of 'The Road'.

"It's a big time storm people!" NY1 has been screaming for the last 24 hours.

If Ny1 had pants it would be wetting them right now. This week they've had a City councilman charged with fraud (Larry Seabrook claimed $170 for a bagel), the last fashion week at Bryant Park and snowmageddon-all in one week. There is even the possibility of these stories colliding-should the accused decide to turn up at the tents and become trapped by a giant snowdrift while trying to get a receipt for $120 for a can of coke.



The fervor was fed by mayor Bloomberg who called a press conference yesterday about the snow, which he kicked off by declaring the closure of all NY public schools on Wednesday. After that annoucement from the NY Department of Knee Jerk Reactions came this advice from The Mayoral Ministry of Stating the Frickin' Obvious:

"Wear hats, scarves and gloves"

Bloomberg then looked serious before decreeing:

"Don't shovel snow if you're not in great shape, we don't want anyone having a heart attack"



This all smacks of British weather panic and brings back memories for me of sitting at news desks writing headlines like "Batten down the hatches", even though I was always pretty sure no one had hatches and I remain unconvinced 'batten' is a word. I expected better of hardened New Yorkers.



Meanwhile on the lovingly low budget NY1 there's some more advice for the advice frenzy machine. Just to make sure you get the message they are running them over some cheap snowflake graphics:

'Find your snow Shovel'
'Plan your parking'
'Be ready for airport woes'

Telling New Yorkers how to deal with snow is a little like telling Brits how to deal with rain.


As I write this evening Bloomberg is doing another press conference live on NY1. He's telling us all how well he's dealt with the snow and how justified he was in closing schools.

Just in case anyone should think he's making a icy mountain out of a snowy molehill he's chucking in a serious news angle. New York blood banks have lost 1500 donations today so Bloomberg is urging us all to go and donate.

Then for viewers bothered by the serious tone, there's some light relief from the Mayor-Fear not fans of musical theatre! The likes of Jersey Boys and Wicked won't let 10 inches stop them! Oh no!

"All Broadway performances will go on as planned."




The show must go on. Thanks Mike.

That's more like the New York I know and love.

Slobbing in is the new going out...

New York is an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Problem is, when faced with a smorgasboard of choice, if you try and eat everything it just makes you really sick-best to have a little nibble now and again.

So last week I didn't leave my apartment for three days. Not as tragic as it sounds, although I was wearing sweatpants for most of the time. This was a real treat for The American, who no doubt wanted to jump my bones every time he caught site of the grey marl fabric caressing my unexercised backside.

There are many thing I should be doing in New York. I should be going to musuems and exploring Harlem and jogging around Central Park. I should be finding the perfect cupcake and getting to know Brooklyn. I should be, but very often I am not.

Asides from the sub zero temperatures I have another justified reason for my hermitation and that is "Getting serious about my freelancing" because now I am now "Freelancing full time". This is a phrase I will repeat over and over until It becomes actual reality. I do this in accordance with the advice in 'Six Figure Freelancing'-a book written by a former lawyer who approaches her writing with the organisational skills of a Whitehouse press secretary.

The thing with New York is that as well as facilitating a great social life that means you need never need be home, it also facilitates you never leaving home. I mostly blame delivery.com where you can order everything from Thai curry to a pack of toilet rolls.
Why walk to the corner shop in minus 2 degrees when you can get a man to deliver you a pint of milk and a loaf of bread right to your door? Or as delivery.com puts it 'Why cook when you can click?'. Even though I love to cook, it's a sentiment I find hard to disagree with.
On delivery.com you can even get bars of Dairy Milk delivered. They should use that as their advertising slogan.




In any case my corner shop's not much cop. It's a Yoga health food supermarket that sells Acai berry smoothies and tortillas made of sprouts. The receipts say "Om Shanti" at the bottom in place of "Thanks for your custom". It may as well not be there for all the good it serves on weeks like this when I'm hormonal and would step over human flesh to get at chocolate. They don't even have anything with sugar in there. The closest is Agave Nectar, which is something to do with a cactus.



But it's not as if staying in means I have to become an unhealthy slob. This is what I tell myself on day one of not leaving the apartment as I order a new diet book from Barnes and Noble online while inhaling a Hersheys Cookies and Cream bar. The only flavour that doesn't taste of vomit.

I then go on Fresh Direct to order food required by the new diet book and begrudgingly some other stuff for The Teenager and American to eat. I work full time now, they should shop for their own dinner.

Next I open the box to the Davina workout DVD that Paul sent me for Christmas. And they I shut it again. And open. And shut...

On Wednesday while procrastinating some pitching emails I buy myself a vintage coat from Etsy. It's for Fashion week, so technically purchasing it is 'work'. It will serve the function of keeping me warm on days when sweatpants won't be part of my ensemble. Days I look forward to with mixed emotion.

That night I realise that I don't even need to go to the video store as I can order films from the tele or from the 'Roku', which is one of 657 unfathomable technical gadgets that The American has bought into the apartment-the result of which is a kind of electrical version of Day of the Triffids.

On Thursday The Teenager sends me an I.M. from her bedroom next door and when I get up from the sofa I realise my arse has gone numb



In the summer I will take myself to parks. In the spring probably even coffee shops?

On Friday I am forced to leave the house to go to Connecticut to work with my NYFW partner. That's short for New York Fashion Week. Did you like that acronym? It's amazing how quickly you can become a wanker when fashion is involved. Anyway, I get out of the house super early (well, before 8a.m.) and I am like a newborn blinking into the daylight.

I skip around to 8th avenue and hail a cab to Grand Central station in 3 seconds flat. When I get there I come in through one of the second floor entrances I am greeted with the sunshine streaming celestially through the floor to ceiling window ahead. I stop. It makes my breath shorter. New York buzzes it's business around me. It's how I imagine heaven would look, well a busy heaven anyway.

I breathe it in and it tastes all the sweeter after my enforced starvation.

Now eat me New York.

Arctic flunky

I was warned about the New York winter. I didn't really listen.

The American used to drone on about the temperature for years while I listened via SKYPE from the comfort of my centrally heated thermostat controlled house in Cardiff.

"Honneeee it is 22 degrees here in New York! 22 degrees!"
"Is it darling?"
"Honneeee, do you even know how cold that is?"
"Umm, not really, are we talking Celsius or Fahrenheit?"
"Fahrenheit Em-ma."
"Right. Yeah. Which one is that?'

I am still not really sure now. All I know is that when it hits '70' in the summer it's hot. And '0' in the winter is really cold. Freezing in fact. It's not my fault I was taught metric in school but suffered parents who still talked imperial. Therefore I am a hybrid of both. How wide is that? About 2 metres and 5 inches I'd say...

So when it came to the NY winter I just thought The American was being a drama queen because he spent the previous decade of his life in California, bathed in year long sunshine. Now I see he had something of a point. Every day he tortures himself by checking the forecast on the West coast:

"Honneeee. It is 70 degrees in LA today."
"That's great babes" I say as we face the biting headwind wind along 7th avenue.
''70 degrees!"
I t least know that means hot.
"So what is it here?" I ask
"IT. IS. Twent-teeeee Twoooo fucking degreeeees!"
"And that is below freezing?"
"Uh yes Honnee! Thir-teeeee Twooo is freezing. IT. IS. Twent-teeeee twoooo."
He likes to spell out the stats like that. It adds weight to his suffering.

Not having a car is the kicker. Back in the UK I would go several metres from my front door to my car and then several more from the car to work, preferably by parking illegally somewhere near a BBC entrance. Admittedly my W reg Fiesta would take a while to heat up, in fact it would usually only kick in by the time I was pulling up to Broadcasting House.

Here you walk everywhere. And it's way colder. When the headwind hits you is face palsy freezing. It makes me want to wear a balaclava. As a fashionable substitute I often leave the the house with headphones and sunglasses and hat and scarf- looking something like a rapper about to explore the Arctic.


Here there are two options to keep warm. Real fur or a duvet coat. Being as I am not about to throw my principles out the window, it looks like I will have to throw my fashion sense out instead. Let me explain to those of you fortunate enough not to be familar with a duvet coat. Think puffa, but less puffy. Literally it is a duvet-with down inside and the fabric outside. The fabric is usually nylon, so possibly more like a sleeping bag? Anyway, yuck right? Do I need to add pounds at any time of year, let alone the winter? Do I want to look like the Michelin man while strutting my stuff around New York? Do I want to hark back to my puffa wearing rave days of the early 90's now I am a grown up? No, no and no. So I tell myself ''Emma. You will freeze rather than wear one of those hideous things."

I have scoffed at the duvet coat for years of visiting New York. What I didn't realise is that not only have I not visited in January before but have never lived with extreme cold day in day out.
What I was forgetting is that what New York demands, New York gets-and New York wanted me properly bundled up against the cold. This city had made me succumb to flats after years of being a die hard heel wearer. Who did I think I was trying to fight?

So I found myself playing with the idea in my head. Could I? Should I? I watched other duvet coat wearers and scanned them for signs of style. Could It be that even the fashionable were donning these too? In secret I logged onto some department stores and browsed the duvet coats. The models seemed happy enough, they didn't look like anyone was forcing them to wear duvet coats under duress.

Then on a snowy January 2nd The Teenager, The Boy and me are shivering in Madison Square Park waiting for a famous Shake Shack burger. In front of us are two stylish looking girls wearing duvets. They are cool and warm.

''I want a duvet coat." says The Teenager
"Me too."

So we find ourselves in Macys coat department and there's a whole sub section of duvet coats and everyone is buying them and it all seems quite reasonable and normal and what's this? Betsey Johnson does duvet? And Calvin Klein? Oh. They can't be that bad then.

The Teenager has the Betsey on and it's not hideous. In fact I might go as far to say it looks funky. I tell her I'll buy it for her as duvet-coat-by-proxy seems like a less painful way to initiate myself. She makes an 'I'm not sure' face and says she needs more time.

And then I am trying one on and it actually looks ok on me too. Then I am trying lots on and I find a navy one which is more sort of horsey that council estate chav and the duvet pattern is quilted, like a Chanel bag. And it's $80 down from $240. This excites me even though I know the full price is a con in the perma-sale world of Macys.

It's by Tommy Hillfiger, which just makes me think of pretty blond preppy girls in navy polo shirts frolicking in sunny parks with frisbees. Which seems like a nice image in the depths of the bleak mid winter. I am ignoring the other half of me says Tommy Hilfiger? Tommy frigging Hilfiger? Have you lost your mind woman? Next you'll be hanging out in malls.



So I remove myself from Macys and go home to stroke some vintage clothes and forget the duvet coat ever happened. But the coat has got to me. I toss and turn that night and stare at the Macys extra 20 extra percent of sale voucher on my bedside table. Sleep comes in the early hours but it is disturbed, peppered by dreams of duck feathers chasing me.

Then the next morning I find myself back in Macys and a woman is packing up the Tommy Hilfiger duvet thing and I am handing over cold hard cash that could have paid for something far more beautiful and far less practical yet I feel strangely excited and compelled to leave the store wearing the coat like I am six again.

So I bundle my vintage velvet number into the carrier bag and I put on the Tommy and I step onto 34th street and I feel no cold. I catch sight of others and realise that no one looks slim in a duvet coat, so there's a kind of great democracy in duck feathers.

I was warned about the New York winter but I didn't really listen. Next time I'll remember the city is the boss of things, not me.

Either that or I'll do as my friend here suggested and get a fur burka.

Wellington Roots

• 

While on my way to buy rainboots this week I pondered a memory: Many years ago when my fabulous new life in New York was just a twinkle in a social networking site's eye I imagined how life here would be. And naturally, the reality is quite different. But the biggest shock is that I would have been pretty certain that I would do it all in heels. And here I am off to buy wellies. And not in an Alexa Chung 'partying it up at the VIP tent of a festival' way. Just in an everyday wearing way. Scary.

It doesn't take a genius to work out what was responsible for the fantasy of skipping around New York in 6 inch stilletos. A certain TV show that we never dare speak it's name after they sold out and made that appallingly saccharin big screen version.

When I first started coming to New York in 2006 I figured that I couldn't do the smoking (gave up in 2005) or the dating (had met The American by then) or the Jimmy Choos (skint single mother) but I could do stuff in heels. Ya for heels! I love them, spent my whole life staggering around in them. 'Car to Bar' heels as my mother calls them. Only good for going from the car to the bar. I also found them good for the car to the supermarket, the car to the office and the car to a friend's house for dinner.

Problem is now I don't have a car to go to the bar, unless I get a taxi-which is reasonable for a night out but not so much for a food shop. Come to think of it, I don't have a supermarket either, just 'gourmet markets' and I no longer have an office. I have only just started to get some friends so you can see how the 'car to bar' shoes start to become redundant.

But I stubbornly stuck with those heels in 2006, wearing them to sightsee and shop and I simply ended up with feet that looked like they belonged to 90 year old Grandma.

New Yorkers wear flats and rainboots are an acceptable part of an outfit in the snow or wet. I resisted of course, but it was futile. Since I arrived in September my heels have not moved from their place in the shoe rack and my flat boots all need reheeling. And now I find myself buying rainboots. And callling them rainboots. Wellies Emma, they are fucking wellies.

''What is this 'Wellie' you're taking about?" asks The American.
''Wellies?"
''Yeah, what is a 'Wellie?' We don't know that name in America." When the American says Wellie it sounds like Willy so I giggle.
''Galoshes do you call them?"
"Rainboots?"
"Yeah I want Hunters."
''What is this Hunter? We don't know that name in America."
"Yes you do. They sell them in bloody Bloomingdales."

Which is where I am heading now. And while I am there I will stroke pairs of heels with a great nostalgia and I will say:

''I will never forget you. I will always love you."

Because flats might be what I need right now, but heels will always be my solemates.