Welcome back... briefly

I’m in New York. The weather can only be described as balmy. It feels like the height of summer. It’s rather muggy. The orange, late afternoon sun is casting long shadows down the streets. A sort of haze is hovering on the horizon. The smell of singed pretzels and caramel-coated peanuts blended with the curiously sweet aroma of newly sun-kissed bodies fills the air. I strolled up 42nd Street, eating a slice of pizza. There is nothing better than the first food you taste after emerging from a long-haul flight. The fattier and more carbtastic the food, the better it tastes.

Flying across the Atlantic on my own was a strange sensation, which I’ve not experienced before. I felt a little pathetic at Heathrow airport. I’m a nervous flyer and as I walked around, searching for a WHSmith to buy God knows what in, I kept experiencing these nervous little twitches which I didn’t enjoy in the slightest.

I find sleeping on a plane impossible. The moment I doze off, I immediately wake up again with a bolt of adrenaline, which is always coupled with me flailing about and whacking the person sitting next to me. It’s irritating enough for a close friend but the poor guy sitting next to me today must have thought I was an absolute lunatic, especially when I realised I’d lost my mobile phone and had to ask him to get up to see if it had fallen down by his feet. 

He was suitably jolly about everything. I apologised profusely in my best impersonation of Hugh Grant and he was able to pass me off as an eccentric Brit.

Not that us Brits get to play the bumbling-but-kind card abroad any more. The Brexit wankers have given the rest of the world the sense that we’re hideous, self-important, self-centred bigots.

I hosted a Eurovision party last night and the UK was predictably bashed into last place. I would have blamed Brexit had the song not been a cheap rip-off of an X Factor winner’s single, circa 2004. We selected a lad with bad skin and no stage presence, who’d won a third-rate TV talent show because the viewers liked that he was an ordinary lad from Newcastle. But as a friend texted last night, as the lad shouted that his dreams had come true, “Europe doesn’t give a shit about your back story.”

European countries put up their best artists: wonderful creatures with astounding stage presence and brilliant voices. And we shove a lad on stage who’s just happy not to be doing karaoke down the Dog and Duck. I sound cruel. He’s plainly a great kid, but Eurovision matters too much to too many people to be disrespected or misunderstood by the BBC like that.

Of course, the problem is that we always kid ourselves that it’s political voting. Someone always cries that we were robbed. To that, I answer that Israel won last year, weeks after troops had opened fire on a group of Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel don’t exactly have natural allies in Europe and antisemitism is at an all-time high. Yet they can still win Eurovision.

So why am I writing this blog? It was always my intention to write one blog for every one of Samuel Pepys diary entires exactly 350 years after he’d written them. Pepys kept his journal for 9 1/2 years. A wave of brutal sadness on my part stopped me writing mine after 9. So, I figured I’d pick it up for the last two weeks of May, so that I’m writing an entry on May 31st, 350 years to the day that Pepys stopped writing his. Curiously, Pepys also stopped writing for somewhat tragic reasons. He thought he was going blind. By the end of 1669, his wife had died, so realising he wasn’t actually losing his sight was probably no consolation and the diary was never written again.

I end this blog sitting by the River Hudson as the sun sets. Lights from piers and passing boats are glinting on the calm surface of the water. It’s a warm night. People are sitting at picnic tables, drinking beer and laughing. I can smell barbecues, cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes. A family of Indians are posing for a photograph but the youngest son is attempting to sabotage proceedings to the chagrin of his Mum who, no doubt, just wants a photo where they look like a normal, happy family for once!

You’re never far from noise in New York. Cars roar, sirens wail, music thuds and thumps and people shout angrily at each other from car windows. No one comes to New York to relax. 

This is the exact spot where Chesley Sullenberger, that amazingly brave pilot, skilfully landed his plane after a flock of geese flew into his engines and the plane lost power. It’s unsurprisingly become known as the Miracle on the Hudson. I can’t quite imagine how I would react if, right now, a plane skidded along the surface of the river!