I finally find some books!

At the roundabout near Veer Narriman road there is an informal second hand book market. Thousands of English language books, scrounged from who-knows-where. Prices which, in Australia, you could only find in that sort of small op-shop where two old ducks like to put their heads together and debate whether a book is worth twenty or thirty cents. And there aren't many of those left.

I gazed on them in wonder. My god, the stuff! At the front were all the recent popular fiction, but buried in huge stacks at the back were some books I'd put down money for at any time. One dealer had the best part of an old naval library - books on compasses, ships navigation, naval history. Yum. Another had inherited a psychological library from somewhere - brilliant titles, obscure stuff like "Psychiatry and psychology in the USSR" and the like. Another had a big stack of Jane's militaria guides, which always sell for $40-$50.

And I looked on in wonderment. And went through it. And felt like crying.

None of them were good enough! Not good enough to cart back home, anyway. If I'd been in Sydney I could have pulled the car up, negotiated a bulk discount, spent the day going through it, then filled my car and gone away very pleased with myself. But as good as the books were, they weren't obvious WINNERS. There was nothing so clearly good that I would want to cart it home. It was just good quality stock, at very cheap prices. (I mean, take the naval stuff - no doubt there were $200 books in there. But I had no idea which. The only way would be to buy the lot and find the winners as you came across them.)

I went away. I thought of Daryl. He was shaking his head in sorrow. HE wouldn't have left a pile of books like that without finding something. I thought of his crazy dream, never realised, of saving up his US mail, buying himself a return ticket, loading his suitcases full of mail packages, and getting himself a free trip to Hawaii. I *had* to find something.

So I went back, and looked. And eventually found a very nice first edition Secret Seven, in dustjacket. It's only a fifty dollar book, but that's ok. It's cool, and I've never had a first edition Secret Seven or Famous Five with the dustjacket before.

Afterwards I went and had pizza, then ice-cream, overlooking the Arabian Sea at dusk. That was really nice too, and all-up was one of the best afternoons I've had on this trip.

Today, feeling succesful, I got a taxi and went around looking at antique shops and book shops for more treasures. The taxi guy was happy to stick with me for the entire morning, for about $10, but wanted to take me to super-fancy antique stores in the idea that I would buy stuff and he would get kickbacks, which left both of us frustrated. We worked it out, though - he would take me to places where he gets paid for bringing sucker tourists, I would spend ten minutes there, pretending to be interested in buying stuff, then we'd go somewhere I wanted to go. All cool - we were fine once we worked that out.

There's really only one decent old bookstore in Mumbai. Nothing too old, disapointingly - I think the books fall apart in the heat here. I got a couple of things that turned out to be junk, and a really nice, completely unavailable history of the Indian Signal Corps' dress and customs. That looks like it should be a hundred dollar book. One the way out I happened to glance at a spine, which read "Hound and Horn". That rung a bell from somewhere, so I got it down and glanced at the contents page. Yes! 1932 American literary journal, containing first publications of poems by T S Eliot an ee cummings, and a letter to the editor from Ernest Hemingway complaining sarcastically about something that had been written in the previous issue about him, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald. Nice! Lacks the original wraps, but whatever - at AUD $1.20, I'm always happy to buy a journal containing first publications by three of the giants of twentieth century literature.

So pleased am I with myself that I think I'm now going to go buy this $200 hand-cranked grammophone, which is almost certainly a piece of shit pieced together from a variety of parts that will stop operating in a week. But I love it anyway.

Berlin, now Mumbai

Yeah, I haven't updated in a while. Sorry. In Berlin the keyboards had inverted Ys and Zs which drove me to distraction. Also, I felt there wasn't much interesting I could observe about Berlin in a few days, when I didn't speak the language. I wrote this in my journal, which was about the best of my observations, and will probably make it clear why I haven't shared more thoughts:

Amsterdam reminded me of a SimCity city - all those trams. Berlin reminds me of a different sort of SimCity city - the sort where you get bored, and lay down great stretches of the city at the same time, and just hope they'll fill up, then demolish and change industrial to residential and back again, then fill up every hole with parks...

Not too profound, huh. At some point - maybe when I left the English speaking world - it seemed to become less about what Ive seen and done, and more about some sort of interior journey - an exercise in sensory overload and emotional deprivation - and that's all interesting, and I have interesting thoughts, but they're not for here. What else? Great sausages, ubiquitous beer, everybody young, some great neighbourhoods and parks. Still, I was maybe just a fraction underwhelmed, perhaps because it was overhyped to me by everybody and I expected some sort of nirvana, perhaps because I just got sick of switching between the U- and S-Bahns at Friedrichstrasse all the time. When you don't speak the language and have only a few days, any insights you have on a city are bound to seem like faux-wise travel tips from Lonely Planet. Um, what else - German 19th century painting is fucking awful. It's all neo-classicism and peasant romanticism and Bavarian castles at night. Sometimes, these strands are hilariously combined. It made me understand more clearly than anythng where Nazism came from. The Art Gallery had some good stuff, but it was all French - the Rodins and as usual the Cezannes were my favourites.

No such qualms about Mumbai. This is one great, chaotic, shambolic city. Everyone living on any spare patch of dirt, everybody running a micro-business or some sort of scam, the buildings held together with bamboo and corrugated sheeting, the traffic devoid of any rule except "get out of my way, dickhead - can't you see I'm HONKING?"

It's damn hot, though. You know it's hot when even the Mumbaiaikans are bitching about it and mopping their brows.

One of the best things I've seen on my trip - cricket being played on Oval Maidan in the centre of the city. There are about fifty cricket games going on all at once - there's a formal game in whites, with umpires, surrounded by dozens of neighbouring pitches, all with somewhat less formal games going on, though still with teams. I don't know how anybody knows where their own game's fielders are. The rules are a little chaotic as well - tip and run seems a common informal variant, but there's no "over the fence is six and out" - it seems almost anti-Mumbai, somehow. How can Australia maintain its cricketing dominance against so many cricketers playing with such enthusiasm? I would think it impossible, except for one thing: all the bowlers are CHUCKERS. Every one of them. And the batsmen spend all their time trying to play reversed shots.

Have strippenkaart, will travel

Some quick thoughts on Amsterdam:

* A city of bikes and trams would be a great idea, were it not also full of idiot tourists acting like idiots and wandering aruond like idiots and "getting into the spirit of things" and riding bicycles with stupid "look at me, I haven't ridden a bicycle in fifteen years but I'm *riding a bicycle*" grins on their faces.

* I am a total tourist. You are when you don't speak the language.

* I passed well enough in the university park to be hit up in Dutch for a light. Fortunately "got a light?" is universally understood through pantomime.

* The Dutch are so cool - brutally honest and wryly amused at the idiocy of tourists.

* I am such a tourist: I saw the Van Gogh museum, the Ann Frank House, smoked weed in a coffee-shop, and wandered through the red light district at a safe hour of the early evening.

* Van Gogh - did some nice stuff when he hit his stride, but was too often either hilariously maudlin or simply incompetent. Fortunately all the tourists were gathered around the postcard Van Goghs, and there were heaps of other really brilliant impressionist works to look at. And the stuff on the top floor was great, too - an illustrator called Redon who I didn't know, but was amazing.

* Ann Frank house - formed no sense whatsover of what it was like for Ann Frank, although it seemed a good building to hide an apartment in. Bizarrely labyrinthine. Short on stuff.

* Weed in a coffee shop - Amsterdam weed is kickass. It doesn't help that I still can't roll a joint for shit and ended up smoking ten times what I'd intented simply to thicken out a massive rolling paper. It was sold to me by a wryly avuncular Dutchman so used to the embarassed euphemisms of tourists that when I wanted coffee, it took a second or two to make clear I just meant a cappucino. I accidentally got completely bombed then promptly got lost and wandered around Amsterdam for a few hours.

* Red light district - Like a Disney version of a "wild west saloon". Far less sleazy than the backpacker district. The prostitutes in the window - I don't know. Personally I'd find it more humiliating to stand near-naked in a window while offering myself for sex before hordes of tourists than to actually BE a prostitute. But maybe they're all third generation feminists who see it as street art and are working their way through college. I tend to feel unqualified to have opinions on these sorts of things.

Berlin tomorrow.

Bored at Liverpool Airport

Blogging from Liverpool Airport - at a pound per ten minutes - because I'm bored. I wrote this out longhand, first - I'm not that crazy.

A train trip and shuttle bus ride have not allowed me much of an opinion on Liverpool. I saw a muddy river (the Mersey?) and some kids who talk like John Lennon. The Beatles are big here, the airport is the John Lennon airport and its motto is 'above us only skies', which was probably a better choice than 'all the way the paper bag was on my knees' from Back in the USSR.

I got freaked out at the train station by a talking bathroom. It wouldn't shut up! It told me its name and manufacturer, the location of the toilet, the location of the handbasin, and at that point I got out of there before it started narrating my micturation.

I've been meaning to document the signs of terrorism hysteria I've seen, which in NY and London was 'not much', apart from the occasional paranoid announcement or poster about unattended packages. Just now, upstairs in the dining lounge, I was stopped by a couple of bored security guards. 'Excuse me, sir, have you checked in?' 'It's not open yet,', I said. I'm just the idiot who made sure all his flights were evening flights - to allow plenty of time to get to the airport - while forgetting that check-out times meant I'd be wrestling with my backpack for hours on end.

'As good a reason as any,' they chuckled, and let me through. There's still some official propaganda about, but the people in the trenches don't care. The immigration woman at Heathrow just wanted to chat about Mumbai (which will be interesting, in this area. It's more recent, there. And Indians tend to an interesting combination of beaurocracy and chaos.)

Which is not to say I'd want to piss off the London police force. I've really enjoyed reading The Guardian each day while I've been here - from now, I will have to learn of new developments in the Ian Tomlinson story via the internet. (No time for links! Try guardian.co.uk).

This aimless ramble is what happens when I blog from boredom...

So long, and thanks for all the fish and chips

The booksellers of Charing Cross Road are very good and very expensive. Trans: I didn't find anything. Totally out of my depth. Not much Australiana, and what was there made me snicker at the prices. 50 pounds for a first edition of Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot?* It's a book that Australian booksellers always try it on with, at least a little, but wow. I should have brought a case of them with me. I talked to some dealers - I am already getting in the habit of talking to strangers, and will no doubt be talking to myself before long. Apparently the business of scouting - finding a bunch of books and carting them around to the high end shops - is pretty much dead in England as well. Everybody ebays these days.

Afterwards I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was amazing, but boy I don't think I can take any more priceless antiquities. I went around really quickly past things that two weeks ago I would have stopped and gasped at for ten minutes. So today I went to the Tate Modern instead. Lots of great Miros; weird, weird building. The weather today has been pretty miserable - I've mostly been lucky so far both in England and overseas - and just now while walking to get my dinner I got totally drenched by a car driving through a puddle, much to the hilarity of a passing tourist. I swore and he said to me, in heavily accented English, 'Like movie!' and made a camera-clicking motion. Ha ha ha.

Off to Amsterdam tomorrow.

* Daryl would be irritated if I didn't add, pedantically, that it's not REALLY the first edition, as it is a little-known fact that his books were published first in the US, unusually for a Commonwealth author. (Booksellers, by common agreement, never mention this).

York, Sheffield again, London again

Somewhere in York I crossed an International Dateline of the soul and lost a day. The place in which I was initially booked was run by Indians apparently in the habit of conducting informal auctions on their rooms, then passing on the overflow to a neighbouring establishment, which is where I ended up. This was a lovely B&B run by a 'semi-retired' Yorkshire woman who had given up the game when bookings became computerized. She immediately took a maternal shine to me, perceiving perhaps that I needed it. My room was lovely and so was York: small, and easy to get around on foot. I saw the Minster - predictably amazing, although by then my standards for England's beauty had become unreasonably high. Mostly I just walked around.

My second day there was mostly concerned with my cash issues, as I was down to about 15 pence. It was Easter Monday and everything was closed; my father had to wire money to the only open Western Union outlet, which was a small grocery store in the suburbs. It was off the edge of my map so my father had to give me directions from Google Maps, over the phone from Australia, which resulted in predicatble chaos particularly as Google Maps' idea of a street is often, in York, an historical laneway that is now a bike track or an unsignposted gap between two buildings. After about an hour of wrong turns I managed to get myself approximately in the area and some locals narrowed down my target for me. Got money from a half-stocked grocery store while feeling nervous about the shady-looking lads lined up behind me and observing my cash-wad closely.

After two nights it was back to Sheffield to return the car, which had proved a reliable if somewhat over-sensitive travel companion. I was very pleased with myself for locating the correct A road after only two circuits of the York Ring Road, and went happily off down it, only slightly disturbed by the constant roadside references to a town apparently not on my map. Approximately halfway to Scotland, I realised I was heading in the wrong direction and turned around. Fortunately I had allowed several hours for my lousy sense of direction. Back on the M1 and I was soon back in Sheffield. Sheffield is a mid-sized city that reminds me quite a bit of Wollongong, which was no help in trying to find the car return place. I circled the city centre aimlessly, hoping to chance upon it (it worked in York!), kept stopping to ask people for directions (Northerners are all lovely), eventually got a map from a helpful newsagent guy. Found the right street, the grimly appropriately named Corporation St, then drove up and down it 5 times before finding the place, which was prominently located on a roundabout I had been circling, unnoticed by me due to my efforts at catching the correct exits.

I was sorry to be without the car, but also a little happy, as sooner or later I was bound to shoot off a roundabout into an oncoming lane and kill somebody. (Although by now I'd match my roundabouting skills against any Australian driver. Still, there is something to be said for traffic lights.)

I found where I was staying, dropped my bag off - though it was still too early to check in - and went to sort out a train ticket back to London for the following day. Then I called Tash to go get a coffee and see if we could make things right. I didn't expect much from it, as when we had left it off neither of us could speak without offending or irritating the other.

So we had coffee, and made slightly grim chit-chat. Then started talking, and had another coffee, talked some more, went for dinner, had a couple of beers at a cool cheap pub, and somewhere along the way remembered how to act around each other, and why we were friends in the first place. And it was really nice, and happy, and sad - good that we worked it out, and sad that it took us until the end to get there. And I kept thinking how much I wished I could call her up in a few weeks and go have a beer and laugh about things. And, as with Bree, how much I wished some of my favourite people didn't live across the world.

I said goodbye to Tash and went back to the pub where I was staying. It was a little late by now - though not very - but the pub was obviously not a hub of Sheffield night-life. It was closed; there were envelopes stuck to various doors: ATTENTION MR N CARVAN. YOUR ROOM IS 5. PROCEED UP THE STAIRS. YOUR KEY IS IN YOUR ROOM. YOUR LUGGAGE IS IN YOUR ROOM. I followed the directions and found my room, although there was no luggage. I was too tired to be all that worried - I figured my luggage was too heavy for anybody to want to steal in its entirety. I crashed out. A half-hour later, I was awoken by a knock. The poor manager was there, out of breath, having carted my backpack up three flights of stairs. 'I'm so sorry!' She said. 'I forgot.'

The next day, today, I caught the train back to London. I'm back in Paddington, which is the next best thing to home right now. Going to catch the tube to Notting Hill to get some dinner, then tomorrow will have another try at the Charing Cross booksellers. I'm still to find a single winner to help defray the cost of my trip. At this point I could really use a first edition of Macbeth, preferably signed.

North

Sorry for the lack of updates -innternet has proved harder to find than \i'd anticipated.

But I'm spending my last pound on this post, so I hope you all appreciate it. Turns out that for whatever reason, English ATMs don't recognise my account is a chequing account. Thus i've been forced to a variety of expensive methods for getting cash... I can get cash at money change places, provided I buy foreign currency first, and then convert it back to pounds. As you can imagine, this proves expensive.

A real quick update, I don't have time for many colourful details. After I said goodbye to Bree I took a much delayed flight to London. Discovered I could not obtain cash from machines, cashed up from a moneychanger who regarded me with kind pity at just how badly she was compelled to screw me. Got the train to Paddington station, found my hostel, and crashed out.

Got up an hour or two later and rang Tash. It was nice to speak to her again. We arranged to meet the next day in Kensington Gardens. Got some food, went back to my room and watched some television.

The next day - a Sunday - I tried to visit the Charing Cross bookshops, but they were all closed. Walked around kensington Gardens, nursing my bum foot, then went to meet Tash at the peter pan statue. We got coffee, talked, then went and looked at really touristy buildings by the Thames. Then back to our hostels, and later we went to a cool English pub to have beers, and I nearly left my bag behind again.

Next day: British Museum, which left all other museums for shame, and the Darwin exhibit at the Natural History Museum. We saw a play that night - I forget the name, but it was cool if a little overly portentious towards the end.

Then, the next day, off camping! We made it to Oxford and walked around there for a while. Found the camp site - horrible weather that night, terrible sleep - up early the next morning and saw the Uffington White Horse, which was interesting if not spectacular. Then off to Bath; wandered around the town, saw the baths, of course, which as it turns out you truly cannot bathe in. The next day we took a monstrously long drive to Hay on Wye in Wales to see the bookshops. I was driving, Tash was navigating, and I tried to get comfortable with England's roundabouts, which are ubiquitous and tend to shoot off at constantly suprising angles which Tash had to keep pointing out to me (generally speaking, Tash proved an awesomely competent traveller, while I proved an equally awesomely incompetent one, viz. particularly putting up tents and orienting myself.)

Hay on Wye was a little underwhelming and I found no valuable books, although I had a nice conversation with a natural history bookseller and spent about thirty seconds considering moving to Hay on Wye and opening a bookshop. The next day was Stratford on Avon; unfortunately by then Tash and I were getting on each others' nerves quite a bit so we went our seperate ways while I tried to get money, or arrange some accomodation, both of which I was unsuccesful at. That night we saw A Winter's Tale by the Royal Shakespeare Co, which was a really wonderful production.

The next day, back to Sheffield, I dropped off Tash and said goodbye to her, then took off north. I hadn't planned to be on my own at this point and was a little unprepared, though I still had the car so wasn't too worried. I saw Robin hood's Bay, which was the most spectacular landscape I've ever seen, and hunted unsuccesfully for ammonite fossils. Then went to Whitby, where I hoped to obtain a bed, but in a Mary-and-Joseph fashion this proved completely impossible at the last minute on Easter Saturday, so I tried to find a place where I could get fish and chips with a credit card (harder than you'd think), then had a beer and went looking for a place to stay for the night.

I found what I was looking for - the most boring, slightly prosperous town, with a pub and a payphone. I found a quiet cul-de-sac to spend the night in the back of the car, had a couple of beers, and felt just about as lonely as you can feel. It was too early to ring anyone back home. I had one of those nadir travelling moments where you wonder why you ever wanted to spend money to do this to yourself, when you could just as easily be home and comfortable. Eventually I went off to sleep in the car.

Unfortunately the car proved hyper-secure - it kept identifying me as an intruder and setting off the alarm whenever I rolled over, so it made for a pretty ordinary night's sleep.

The next morning I made some phone calls and felt a little better. I headed for York, where I am now, in a lovely bed and breakfast for two nights (more difficulties as they didn't take credit cards, but we worked it out with the help of a nieghbouring establishment).

I've walked around town a bit but haven't really done anything here yet; I think I want to go sleep. It's been a while since I've had a bed, and my room here is lovely.

Right now I'm a bit too metaphorically and physically North for my liking, but it's all good. I miss home, and hope I can figure out some way to get cash tomorrow, as it turns out there are still a real lot of things you can't put on credit. Anyway, more soon, hopefully.

America

(Written in Washington Square Park, typed up in Paddington)

One thing I wanted to think about while I was here was my ideas about America. America in the way I've been thinking about it: Post Sept 11, post-Bush, mid-financial crisis.

My feeling about America from across the world was that it had grown fat, lazy and self-indulgent, over-confident and with an overstated sense of its own self-importance. I now feel that's only about half-true. The part that is true is its overstated sense of its own self-importance. The Americans \i've talked to, mostly college kids, show an amazing lack of curiousity about the rest of the world. Like the guy I met who said he was a student of WWII, then asked what Australia did during the war. 'Fought in Europe and Asia while the US waited for Pearl Harbor," I said (though not quite that pithily, in reality).

What isn't true is the idea of American laziness. The fabled American work ethic seems to be going strong, although not perhaps as a matter of choice. There is a man here who opens the door for you at Dunkin' Donuts. He doesn't work there - he does it for change. Subway stations and trains are full of buskers. Now I'm in Washington Square Park, and was just offered weed by a local businessman of the park.

But of course all these jobs, though self-motivated businesses in the American spirit, basically suck. I've found myself instead, since I've been here, thinking Marxist sorts-of-thoughts, which is very unusual for me. I'f I'd grown up here I might have been the sort who goes on a lot about the Capitalist Machine and how it oppresses workers. Those ideas have never appealed to me in Australia, but here they feel accurate.

America seems to me to be such a class-stratified society, which is interesting. There are the college-educated people - generally wealthy, that being the main requirement for a college degree here - and there are the immigrants and uneducated people, trapped by an appalling minimum wage, a lack of health-care, and the consumer dream which has been shoved down their throats (I've never encountered such miserable-seeming shop attendants as in the poor-area shops here - not the flashy Manhattan stores, which are staffed by perky white kids who are probably paid something livable).


But that indulgent, self-assured American arrogance, that sense of over-entitlement, does exist here in the college kids. They have this obnoxious insoucience - all of them.

Even the accent is different, American college girls in particular having the most grating accent, an over-loud, atonal sing-song that rises and descends a scale several times each sentence, and resembles in its worse form a duck's quack. Vowels whinily extended; 'like' used as a constant punctuation. I asked Bree why they spoke like that, when for the most part their elders don't, and nor do American actresses generally. She mentioned Jennifer Aniston and Natalie Portman as two who do; fair enough.

It does seem a society whose rules were created by the rich, for themselves. A little surprising that this should be my conclusion about the land of opportunity. I don't know what the solution is - but I can sure see why the proletariat (hahaha) whould take the financial crisis quite personally.

Letterman and Manhattan Chili Co

Today Bree and I went to see if we could get put on standby for the Late Show with David Letterman. As we emerged from the metro station, a man in a jacket said to us, "Do you guys want free tickets to the Late Show?" Yes! After answering a simple trivia question and acting enthusiastically we were given tickets. That was easy. We had a couple of hours to kill - enough for me to get in one thing from my list of things to do in New York - go to the Manhattan Chili Co.

Most readers of this would be familiar with my Famous Chili. I am one of the few people in Australia who are into the very American dish of chili, and I learned my chops from what I consider the best cookbook I have ever owned - an early nineties recipe book from the Manhattan Chili Co, which describes in loving, technically revealing detail the elements of a truly great chili.

It was in the dining concourse of Grand Central Station; it was a tiny food outlet like any other in the middle of a food court. It wasn't what I had expected; I think the Manhattan Chili Co has come downmarket over the years. The various chili recipes were, however, the same as in my recipe book. I knew what I wanted: Numero Uno, which formed the basis for my own beef chili recipe.

The verdict: it was OK, tasted quite like mine. Probably not as good as my best, as certainly less attention had been paid to the details and balance of spices. I thought it was way heavy on the cinammon, and the meat could have been more coarsely ground. Dissapointed? No - liberated. I now feel more confident to strike out for farther chili shores on my own, without having in my head the impossible standards of the Manhattan Chili Co.

Anyway it gave Bree lots of opportunities to crack wise about how I was probably the only person to ever visit New York to see a food outlet in Grand Central Station, and how I should have told the cashiers about it as it would probably have made their year. Back to line up for Letterman. By this point it was freezing - even the New Yorkers were looking cold - and we had to line up for half an hour while an insanely peppy and preppy staffer got us in the mood with lots of leading moronic questions designed to provoke a reponding "Yeah!" from a crowd. We were asked repeatedly if we were pumped and I was under instructions from Bree to look enthusiastic so we were not assigned to the back rows.

So I was not in the mood by the time we got in the theatre, but the show was a lot of fun. The set looks quite extraordinary in real life, and Dave was in very witty and sharp form, although I didn't know any of the guests. Letterman is quite amazing in his wit and professionalism - there was not a bum note, and he works from only the very briefest of cue cards, extemporizing spontaneously in a flawless manner. The slightly intimidating sense one gets, though, that one has to laugh and applaud or risk spontaneous ejection adds a somewhat crazed hysteria to the whole thing. Perhaps that's the point. I sure laughed a lot - whether because I was amused, or brain-rattled, I couldn't tell you.

Plane flight

The starting of this blog has been delayed by me not having access to a working keyboard; sorry!

The night before I left I went out to have a meal with my father at the Wollongong Golf Club. The meal was fairly average, but it was a club, and towards the end they came around offering us trivia sheets. Trivia! I convinced my father to play. We were only going to stay for the first round. In the first round we bombed out, embarassingly, due to a three point question on basketball teams - and also my father's hilariously obscure answers to the question of "name six countries outside the British Isles that end in -land." He generated obscurities from the past 5000 years, and, I suspect, Marx brothers movies. Anyway, this raised his and my competitive instincts, and in the second round our small team of two blitzed the field and we won a free bottle of wine. We didn't do so well after that, but it was a good night, and my father really enjoyed himself - I'm not sure I've ever seen him enjoy going out so much.

And I had a good time, too. Which was a good thing, as I've been generally not so great this year. Feeling bad about myself for a variety of reasons. And I was nervous about going away. The next morning - after my father and brother had seen me off at the airport, and I'd negotiated the exit lounge, purchasing along the way a bottle of duty free vodka (which will become important later), and got myself succesfully onto the plane, I felt good. Good to be leaving, excited about having some sort of change/break in my life. Overseas trips providing a useful sort of life division, I find; an ending of a chapter, if not a whole Part.

So I was undelighted to discover the proverbial, legendary overweight woman in the seat next to me. Well, she was large, and I reminded myself that I should not consider her "fat", for she might be a charming aeroplane neighbour. I asked her to slip by, and she grunted at me in an unfriendly fashion. This exchange proved the highlight of our plane relationship - man, she was a surly cow! She immediately took possesion of the arm rests, and a few inches beyond into my space. I tried to stake a small claim on the armrest - let her know I wasn't intimidated - but she proved to have no body consciousness whatsoever. Normally, a stranger will shy from casual physical contact, but not her. By the end of the flight I had retreated to the far half of my seat. Meals proved particularly difficult as her gargantuan chicken-wings flapped out a good foot to each side, leaving me with no room whatsoever to wield my terrorist-proof cutlery.

So, sitting there, I felt good, excited, relaxed. Then the pilot came on, and I'm not a nervous flyer, but he unnerved me. He mentioned we would be leaving shortly, that there was a small delay from traffic control - all normal. And then he started - there is no other word for it - bitching. "We'll be swinging out onto the north runway, then taxi-ing back south, we make a left turn, then a right turn - if you can believe THAT - and then, if it's OK with air traffic control, we might be able to take off." Whoah! Had he not slept well? Was he about to go postal? I sensed we would be in trouble if it came to an emergency landing on the Hudson.

Not much more to report on the flight - except for Fat American Woman's elaborate sighing whenever I had to get up to use the bathroom. We landed at LAX, I had difficulty finding where I was supposed to connect with my next flight. I was carrying with me a duty-free bag, containing vodka and cigarettes. Anyway I now had to negotiate the US homeland security's screening system. They only had one working metal detecting pinging machine, and the queue was a mile long. Everybody had to remove their shoes to ensure there were no shoe-bombers. The pinging machine was manned by a single asshole beaurocrat. Now normally, at those machines, you go through - you ping - and somebody waves a wand over you, and waves you on through. This guy had his own system. If you pinged, you were sent back through and told to figure out what was pinging, and removed it. Of course, everybody pings, so the queue wasn't moving. I removed all my metal and went through, and pinged. I was sent back. I said, "I have no metal other than my clothing!" This cut no dice. I searched my pockets, and found a single Australian 5c piece. I removed it and dumped it on a post. I went back through, no pinging this time. But more problems - they were concerned that my duty-free bottle of vodka might be used to create a bomb. I denied posessing the neccessary chemical skills for this. I said that I didn't believe anybody had those skills. I pointed out - to the girl, who was actually quite lovely - that if such skills did exist, and if I had them, I probably would have used them on the twelve hour flight from Australia. She escorted me back to the check-in section and told me I'd need to have my vodka stowed in the hold. (To her credit, she told me to come back to the front of the line when I returned). So the Qantas people and I discussed what to do with it. We wrapped it in a hessian bag with loads of tape and fragile tags, and together gave it one chance in three of making it. Personally I thought it a dumber idea to have a loose bottle of high-proof alcohol in a glass container rolling about in the hold, but I was given no vote.

Back to the pinging machines, and the asshole beurocrat. I was now late. I was pinging again! He returned me to the other side. "We just did this!" I said. "I have acquired no new metal." "If the machine pings, it pings," he said, profoundly and with a couldn't-give-a-shit shrug. He told me to remove my belt. I did so, and this time didn't ping. "Now you know," he said - smugly and menacingly. "Your machine is making it up as it goes along," I muttered. I collected my belt, and my shoes - again - and made it to my flight.

I got off at JFK, my bag was late off, and I started to worry. Then, after everyone else had left, my bag appeared - followed, a few seconds later, by bottle of vodka, remarkably intact. I left the terminal, and Bree was there, waiting for me, peering about blindly. I felt a great wave of affection and relief; it was really nice.

More soon about my time in New York, hopefully. Apologies for bad overlong sentences and excessive adverbs; this is all single draft and not edited this at all.