Train from New York

We flee from New York at a clickety blur at the end of the day. We have done so for an hour now and the sun is just setting across an industrial landscape that  is old brick buildings (a few soft with refurbishment, the rest hard in broken abandonment), vacant weedgrown lots, rail-tracks, water towers and broken glass. Have I mentioned derelict cars and graffiti? The last tint of gold catches the towers of Philadelphia in the far distance, grey on the horizon against a grey sky threatening rain. Read more

New York - What Can I Say?

What is it about New York that gives you the sense that absolutely anything is possible? Just around the corner is another world with another language and another teaming population. Read more

This is so, like…like!

Overheard (not of this guy) at Washington Union Station… “Hi, yeah, it was so like, well… like you know, like… you know. Uh huh, uh huh, No like, I was so, like worried, like, ….I don’t know why I was like, but I was like, really, you know… uh huh, uh huh, No, like he was like smiling at me like! Yeah, like… like!”    Snap, hang up. What on earth was that? Read more

A Degree of Freedom in Baltimore

Here I am ten years later in Baltimore and on a very different “mission”. My earlier visit was in the company of some crazy Hungarian and other European counter intelligence officers. We were on a “school excursion” hosted by Uncle Sam to visit the National Aquarium. (Definitely worth a look). Read more

Capital on the Capitol

The squirrels jump around in the lawn of the late afternoon and are (hopefully) oblivious to the fact that they are nut hunting and burying in the shade of the building which best symbolises the power of America, perhaps even more so than the White House. That is only the working office of the President. This is the seat of Congress. Where the course of America and all who sail in her is charted. Read more

Food by Weight

This country still has the capacity to surprise me. Mainly with the little things - launching an air-strike against someone in the middle of the night on the other side of the globe, or firing off yet another shuttle from Florida are so passe. But this morning, sitting behind the Capitol in a hole in the wall cafe for the first time ever, I paid for meal by its weight! Read more

When in Rome Do What the Romans Do

In DC that translates, in my book at any rate, into going to “the Mall” - and not to a shopping centre but to the strip of beaten up turf around which Washington seems to turn. Read more

You Have a Foggy Bottom

Any town that can straight faced call a Metro stop (and suburb) Foggy Bottom has to have something going for it. That the train line stop is underneath the George Washington University Hospital suggests someone in the planning department might have had a sense of humour as well. Indeed, this town has a lot going for it and my wandering out for a coffee last night and a quick downing of the books for a quick sneak into the Smithsonian Air and Space museum reminds me again how attractive and appealing this town is. Read more

Docile in Los Angeles

We have become docile travelers, tamed and very compliant.  Watch us be herded around the appallingly designed Terminal 4 of LAX by TSA teamsters trained (by Heathrow strumpets I imagine) in the cattle yards of Texas and who consequently have little discernible notion of what service looks or sounds like. Service is not their mission. Their mission is to keep the long tangled queues moving. And they are very long and very tangled. I look with some wistful nostalgia at the now unused escalators up which we used to bound arriving from overseas and heading off to our US domestic connections without a bag screening device in sight. Now the lines (I have Christened them the “Mohammad Atta Lines” for that is his enduring legacy in this country after all) snake out onto the sidewalk as passengers wait their turn to have their shampoo checked and shoes examined. As I joined the Mohamed Atta conga line this morning I was keeping a surreptitious eye on my watch as the countdown to my domestic connection started as QF107 arrived at the terminal at LAX. Fortunately, in the end I walked from the careless embrace of the TSA teamsters straight into an aircraft mostly boarded and getting ready to leave. But see what has happened? No hustle or bustle. No remonstrating at the counter. No rush from cab rank or connecting terminal to make a closing gate. We have learned to add hours to the check in process, how to pack our pockets to clear X-rays quickly, to don socks on the day of travel with no holes in them. We shuffle along, herded in murmuring acceptance of all the impositions made in the name of security. We even tolerate the bored attempts at humour by the TSA staff (”Ladies and gentlemen, if you do not have a boarding pass you do not exist” OK, two LA cops thought it was funny. They were the exception). 13 hours over the Pacific in cattle class does not predispose me to their jokes - even if they were trained to handle us in the cattle yards of Texas.

With my Back to Harry’s, Evening…

It’s been far too long since I stopped here. Stopped at all now that I think about it. The seagulls stand around me silent and sulky. Not a crumb from my pie falls away to catch their eye. But the sky is sunset grey and the harbour is darkening through green to black - its time to settle down after all. The background sounds are soporific. The traffic hums along behind Harry’s Cafe de Wheels (purveyor of fine pies and peas). In the distance sulphur crested cockatoos fight a raucous and strident scrap over nesting spots but they are far enough away to not be discordant. The US Navy is tied up alongside and the occasional drawling accent, softer than the Sydney woman on her cell phone, murmer past as pair after pair of young men with short haircuts make for the city lights. USS John Cain is lit from bow to stern with its Christmas lights as these warships do - painted ladies in port, snarling beasts on the high seas. Apparently visiting to commemorate a round-the-world voyage of the US Navy in 1908-9. The warships signal with the tinkle of bells and the tannoy clips its messages to the crew across the water. I can’t hear the instructions, but there a dozens of them. Orange lights scatter reflections down the harbour as the sun makes for Perth and lights in the apartments along the wharf start lighting up as people arrive home. One imagines a very convenient lifestyle there and I guess the warship announcements every couple of minutes or so would soon fade into the background. Water sloshes along the rocks at my feet - sounds that take me to childhood places vastly different to a harbour city of 4 million people. The homeless of them are drifting past with their trolleys, mixing with the suits walking with more purpose to their expensive apartments. But Harry’s is something of a “leveller” - one of the suits props beside me and eats a pie with a plastic fork and protects his garb with a paper towel. I could prop here all night but tonight has another purpose and I had best get on with it.

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