Anyone who has ever been taken for a walk by a large dog will know the feeling. You're sure that it should be the other way around. You should be walking the dog, but the dog has other ideas and it's stronger than you are, so there's very little you can do about it. There is a great force tugging at the lead, and the best thing you can do is try and steer it the way you want it to go, regardless of the dog's own ideas.

All this time I've been hopeful that eventually, and with intelligence, we as a planet will get our own big dog to head in the right direction. The dog is money, business; the global free market economy. I was certain that there had to be a way of getting a social, environmental and welfare agenda in front of the dog and make it want them: to make environmental concern economically profitable; to make it all worth the while of those who want to make money.

I mean; how else could we do it? We can force money-makers to be ecologically sound and sustainable on pain of financial retribution, or give tax breaks to those who operate morally or with humanity rather than adhering to their own rules of economics, but there will always be reticence, avoidance, a dragging of heels...legal tussles. It will not be a goal but a grudging burden which stands in the way of economic streamlining.

What better way to do it than to find a way in which the rules and practices of economics point towards these goals? To make their achievement economically valuable?

It seemed to me to be an attainable goal; on a par with the Holy Grail, but something which could be a reality through technological advancement, value shift..any number of routes.

All of a sudden I'm not so sure.
Where are we going, exactly?

And will there be a drool-covered sponge ball to fetch when we get there?

Well, it is the day before my first Thanksgiving. I have a vague idea of how this holiday is meant to have started, but a much better idea of what it stands for. It feels strange to have, and please excuse my upcoming perversion of the English language, such a Turkey-centric festival without it being Christmas, but I'm right behind the culinary decadence and the gratefulness.

You see? I put in the little double-line break and I'm instantly thinking back over the last year to see what I'm grateful for. But this time last year was, to me, simply a time when the traffic for the autoblography dropped off as America ignored its computers for a couple of days. If I'm going to do the yearly sum-up, I'd better leave it for New Year's Eve and the boys' visit.

For now it's time for me to start this annual holiday with a quick look over my shoulder and a nod to all those days when something happened, however small, to get me where I am today; sitting, blissfully married, in a freshly painted office in our apartment in Queens, NY, which is literally and figuratively thousands of miles from where I expected to be on this day a year ago. And to all the people who played a part in that, for me, against me, in spite of me or even ignorant of the fact they were playing a part at all, I'd like to say:

Cheers guys. That was cool.

Now I'm a big fan of great design. I've studied it, I enjoy it, and just occasionally I spout something which, if viewed in the right light and phase of the moon by someone of a technical frame of mind, isn't half bad - even if I do say so myself.

But PaulyG and RTJ are right up there. I'm an Apple newbie, but these guys spent their Friday night camped out in the queue for the new Apple store on Regents Street, London. That's dedication, and in this cruel and bitter world, that's what you need.

...and paulyg blogged it all the way.

Join them (retrospectively) as the die-hard Apple fans of London Town come together in a mildly competitive queueing saga! Behold the camaraderie! The guitars! The laptops! The discussions about single mouse buttons! Follow our two heroes on a quest for 704 pounds' worth of goodies for just 250 quid, and feel the pain as the quest reaches a bittersweet conclusion!

Read it all now, only at antigeek.net.

Now then, our kids.

How about a quick update on all things Stuartical? There's the jobhunt to tell you about, there's the whirlwind of social embarrassments- sorry -engagements, and general good cheer and married enjoyment as far as the eye can see.

Let's get started.

Jobhunt-wise, things are a little holey, but still; looking extremely promising in several quarters. I'll let you know the second anything turns up, but you might not know that there's a certain buzz from knowing that through extremely thorough jobseeking skills you have made yourself the only applicant to a post you're extremely excited about. But we'll see.

Oh, I'm getting all nostalgic. There was a time way back when this blog was me ranting at the human resources departments of several companies I had applied to. At the time I had no idea that after blogging for a while I would google rank higher than many of the company websites themselves...even, and this is funny considering how much I got messed around by them...even when the company is a web advertising agency.
Ahem.
I digress.

As always. This really is like the old days.

New York and the people I've met here are bloody marvellous. So much going on all the time.

Also (Adrian, you might want to look away now) Krissa is wonderful, beautiful and fabulous.

Heee.

I'm reading: the Lemony Snicket 'A Series of Unfortunate Events' books, Thomas L. Friedman's 'The Lexus and the Olive Tree'.

I'm listening to: Snow Patrol's 'Final Straw', and lots of different things now that I've been formally introduced to iTunes...

I'm surfing around: on monster.com and a load of recruitment agency sites, and mooching around on irc with the vobblers, which is nice cos it's been ages since I have.

I'm watching: 'The Simpsons' voted-for top 20 on Fox5 when I can, the various incarnations of 'Law & Order', Eddie Izzard...

Anyway. I've been jobseeking pretty intensely. How's things in your neck of the woods? Sorry I haven't kept in touch.

There are two types of people who hold opinions.

The first is the type of person who refuses to believe that there can be any right opinion than their own. Everyone who disagrees with them, or does things slightly differently is therefore wrong. At different times in history people of this first type have taken 'wrong' to be worthy of everything from a disapproving glance across a royal court, all the way through burning at the stake up to extended torture, religious recantings, forced confessions and eventual death. In honour of that dubious pinnacle, let's call this first group the Hieronymouses, or, if you prefer, Hieronymi. The world has seen a lot of Hieronymi.

The second group hold opinions but accept that other people might concievably hold differing views to their own. This scale can range from hearty and passionate disagreement and discord, but with a retained level of respect, to a level of passivity and intellectual, if not principled acceptance of all points of view. This is obviously a more sophisticated and complex frame of mind, so it isn't surprising that there have been fewer of this second type. Let's call them Voltaires, after the chap who coined the, "...but I will defend to the death your right to say it" line. Killing everyone who disagrees with you is pretty much as far as you can get from dying for the rights of those you disagree with.

Over the course of human history, the world has been slowly wrested from the hands of the Hieronymi by the Voltaires. Look back.

There may have been fair and reasonable absolute rulers in history, but they still perpetuated and represented a Hieronymous way of living - that there is one will, one opinion which really matters. Kings, Sultans, Emperors, Chiefs...humanity needs its leaders, but leaders have had to change.

Whatever the motives behind the changes, power has devolved from the will of the individual to the represented will of the many, with important shifts in human and civil rights along the way. You might pick out Plato penning The Republic, you might see a serene yet serious-faced Gandhi amidst a peacefully protesting crowd.

Being reasonable to be able to get power away from unreasonable people has not been easy, and it's taken thousands of years and an untold number of deaths. Free speech and everything that has evolved with it has had a very heavy price. Part of that price is living with it. It's not easy to be reasonable about the right to be unreasonable. (Look at democracy, for a start)

The world has been wrested from Hieronymous clutches to a point where a leader or any person of public exposure can't afford not to be a Voltaire. Or say they are one, anyway.

There may be only two types of people who hold opinions, but they are not always honest about which they are. Leaders or not, everyone fits somewhere along the spectrum between the two extremes, so your boss might be an heartless slavedriver whilst declaring that he is a people person, or a TV news station could be so biased as to be practically skewed while declaring that they are fair and balanced. Your best friend could be a Voltaire and your enemy one of the Hieronymi, or vice versa.

Regardless, on a personal level I really hate people who pretend to be Voltaires but are really Hieronymi, dictating the way other people should be and think from behind a mask of pretence of reasonability and apparent sense.
I respect their right to be that way, but I hate them.

That's all I'm saying.

I've been introduced to the joys of Audioscrobbler in the last week or so.

If you want to come and join the fun, or if you already have and you want to know where I am, this is my page.

Audioscrobbler. As Dave said: Promoting Realtime Music Snobbery.

I'm not turning the autoblography into a photoblog, I swear, but I've been out and about with a camera a lot recently.

Jason and I went out to the site of the New York World's Fairs on Saturday. The site is now mostly parkland, but several items remain from 1964 - the more recent of the two events. There are the iconic unisphere and the fair's observation towers, shown here, but also a lot of assorted statuary sprinkled throughout the park which suggests that there used to be a lot more there.

Also in the park is the Queens Museum of Art, which features an epic warehouse-scaled model of New York City, from Staten Island in the South and out past JFK at the other extreme.

A great exhibit, which made me grin at its fantastic scale, was a square tarpaulin about forty feet along each side which was draped down one wall and across the floor of one of the exhibition spaces. It had the form of a giant spirograph. It had been made by attaching spray paint nozzles to the bottom of the cars of a whirligig fairground ride and setting the thing going. It was brilliant, and the video of the making of the pattern made me laugh at the brilliance of sheer childish ebullience writ large.

Krissa and I accompanied Kate to get her tattoo, and myself, Stan, Jason, Krissa and Geraint played around with toys and products in a wood shop on St. Mark's while she was getting it done. This was followed up with risotto fit for a bevy of Kings at the aptly named Rissoteria in the West Village.

Saturday, Krissa and I had a lounging around marathon until Heather's celebratory brunch. Heather had a great article published in the New York Times' Sunday Style section. (The article is here)Being relatively new to this cosmopolitan business, there are a lot of things I've never had before, and brunch yesterday covered two of them: a Bloody Mary and Eggs Benedict, both of which were delicious.

In the afternoon yesterday the Empire Fell. In style. Biscuit and Mike hosted the party whose decadence rating pushed the dying days of Rome down into second place on the list of all time greats. I've never seen a Jeroboam of Riesling before. I didn't get to see it for long either, as it was drunk in its entirety washing down some delightful food prepared by none other than our hosts.

It was a great weekend.

I spotted a job I really wanted today. I've already applied, and I'm incredibly excited about it, and it's all I can do to not sit on my email inbox, refreshing it every thirty seconds.

Although the HR department for the company have probably gone home by now.

Also I have been (rather excitingly) been invited to write a short piece for my small hometown newspaper. Anything approaching 'Sex and the City' would probably be frowned upon, because the readership tends towards the elderly, and the ambulance services on the Isle of Wight are already stretched. I suppose newspapers with an accompanying mortality rate don't keep printing for long.

Hmm.

I think I'm getting a grip on one of the many appeals of New York.

It might be the appeal of cities generally, but don't ask me - I went from growing up in a small decaying Victorian seaside town to university at a medium-sized West Midlands town to working in a charmless London commuter satellite town....to the Big Apple. This is the first city I've lived in.

Whatever your angle on life, whatever your dream is, you can do it here. If you want to do aerial acrobatics whilst juggling marmots above a pit of porcupines smeared with honey whilst a fat man in a leotard sporting a Village People moustache stands by and waits to release the bees, then it might take a bit of doing, but I'm pretty sure you'd be able to do it if you tried hard enough.

Musician, entrepeneur, gymnast, chef, businessman, gourmet, sportsman, aficionado, multiculturalist, artist, naturalist, naturist, spiritual being, nihilist, politician, writer, absurdist, fetishist, train spotter, orthopaedic surgeon...it doesn't matter what your thing is - there's something for you here, and more than likely you'll be able to find people who share your passion.

The only thing New York doesn't cater for are those who do not need to be catered for; those who don't have a passion. I get the feeling that you can be very quickly left behind by New York.

Stepping out of our apartment after a morning of trawling job websites is like stepping into the sea. The feeling of immersion is the same - that all around you is constantly moving and flowing and that you are surrounded by it; you move within it and you move through it and in spite of it. Because all around you is moving itself, it is not unlike moving in water - there is a very slight resistance to each move you make - but like bathing it is refreshing and invigorating, and the resistance of the water is good for you and makes you stronger.

After a slippery noodle lunch the other day I walked up past the Flatiron Building and onto Fifth Avenue and spotted the New York Museum of Sex. It was a plain looking building with a few banners bearing tongue-in-cheek pictures of lotus flowers. Right next door was the Gershwin Hotel, covered with large white and glowing horns.

Sometimes you've really got to love this city.

It's a free country, right?

I've had an interesting morning. I think there may be another thermodynamic principle waiting to be expounded, and I have a sneaky suspicion it has something to do with cottage pie.

On Tuesday night when Krissa and I made the pie, there was only a thin layer of potato on top of sumptuous amounts of filling, and now these properties are exactly reversed.
We're not talking about a little extra potato. This is a rectangular pyrex dish about 35cm by 20cm, and we only used five potatoes to begin with. They were spread pretty thin. Now, however, it is as though we gave the dish a quick and dainty wipe over with a cloth which had recently been used to clean up a small beef mince and gravy spill, and then dropped half a ton of squished root vegetables in there.

From this finding, we must logically presume that there is some sort of potatogenic process, galvanised by transferral of energy from the beef mince through it being kept in the fridge for a couple of days.

Or maybe that's why every cottage/shepherd's pie you buy is heavy on the potato and light on the good stuff.

It's not that companies are trying to screw you over and sell you 99% mashed potato on top of 1% of meat; the pies turn that way because nature abhors a good cottage pie, much like it abhors vacuums, housekeys, overdue library books and so on.

Editorial: If for nothing else I do in life, I wish to be remembered for coining the word 'potatogenic'. Thank you.

There's so much which stimulates and affects in the city. It was only a matter of time before I started playing with things.

On street safari as the end of the day came around, I started hunting the last few sliding shards of orange daylight on the tops and sides of buildings.

Click through to the flickr albums for some more photos if you fancy it.

New York is fun. I'm heading out this evening with Biscuit and co whilst Krissa entertains with some of the female contingent of the People Who Sleep With Men.

I hope you're all right.

I've just had some great news! Dave and James, two of my oldest friends, are coming to stay with us for the New Year celebrations. I can't wait.

Take care all. It is only what you make it, right?

'Soon to be stateside' was a bit of a misnomer - I've been here over a month - so my beautiful and wondrous wife has made me a new banner.

All hail, cottage pies etc etc!

Hurrah!

It's an odd feeling, looking out over the city on a sunny day from its highest point.

To the south, skyscrapers, and orange plastic construction barriers stand out from the skeletal form of yet another monument thrown up by high finance. To the west of these the sun whitens the river as it turns to sea, and the comparatively low huddle of Jersey City clusters on the far bank. Below, flat, dirty rooves and the spinning fans of air conditioners and heating systems catch the eye before the slow ponderous movement of technicolor traffic in the half-day between the buildings.
North, midtown crowds in, the pale pastel of concrete and stone against corporate black uniforms of smoked glass and a glimpse of the russet of the trees of the park. Manhattan flies away from you, bound by the river on both sides, supported by the rusting steel of its bridges, impossibly massive but balanced precariously at your feet. The wind curls around you and steals the breath from out of your mouth and snatches a leaflet from the hands of the woman next to you. It spirals, flapping as if in panic. She cries out unintelligibly in surprise and laughs.

A white triangle is set, seemingly unmoving, in the grey blue of the river. The wind wrings an empty metallic moan from the masts above and it flees downward through the concrete underfoot. People pose, stare open mouthed, point, laugh, stand thin-lipped.

I speak to England. England hears me, briefly, before the wind takes that breath too, and I fold my phone and slip it into my pocket.
My wife is taking a photograph over the edge.
I smile.
I can see my house from here.

Marriage is panning out to be pretty glorious. To qualify that, it's not the institution itself, but more the woman I am married to.

It's a sunny autumnal day in New York City, and after a few chores this morning, I'm off into Manhattan (I'm having to forcibly restrain myself from using my habitual phrase 'I'm going into town'...I don't think there's any place on earth for which a grander understatement could be concieved) to print out a few CVs and send them off, and then in the afternoon I shall have a bit of a wander around the West Village (oh, whoops, no. I was wrong. There's that grander understatement) to pick out a venue for tonight's meal.

I need to get out into Manhattan, into New York, more. I'm not just talking about the nightlife (of which, for the first time anywhere I've lived, I'd say there is about the right amount) but the city itself. I put my hands up and say that while I love it to pieces so small they could be used as cat litter, I do find it a bit intimidating sometimes, but never when I'm there; only when I'm at home and the have the idea of it. It's a mood thing. I'll get used to it, I'm sure. When going into the city gets routine. It's less of an intimidation, really. That's the wrong word. I'd say more of an overwhelming...and again only because of what has gone on in my mind.

Before I arrived in New York I thought, idly, to myself, that the best way I could use the time (possibly the afternoons, after jobsearching) before obtaining gainful employment was to Get To Know The City. Pound the pavement. Get to know the Big Apple on a foot scale...walk around til I have a mental map of the place, and know a few of the landmarks, the neighbourhoods and the more noticeable bars and cafes...that sort of thing.

Something which might have been a bit much of a task to set oneself whilst sitting on a sofa in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, waiting for SSX 3 to load.

Sometimes, catching the subway from Astoria to Manhattan, the city feels like poetry. Motion in four dimensions, with myself as a part of the pattern as it expands, intermeshes with every other element and goes on, moving, walking, driving, flying, existing in and around and through itself, linkages unfolding and spinning through each other as the carriage comes around on an elevated track a hundred feet above the cars below it, lining up with the bridge, you can see the skyline of Manhattan; the Empire and the Chrysler buildings above the river and the carriage moves into the interlaced girders and tracks and platforms and the looping feeder roads for the bridge and the track angles downwards and you plunge through the complex web of steel and concrete to the tunnel under river, and above and through it all is the light of a setting sun and a few pale clouds...it's beautiful.

I romanticise. The city is people. People and the places they have built to do the things they do. But it is itself as well, and the sheer mass of it is breathtaking.

There is intense small-scale detail on top of the majesty of size, which makes it all the more overwhelming for the mind to take in, if indeed, it tries.

That is the option I don't want to take. I don't want to stop trying to take it all in, to see it all and to get to know it. It's just an impossible task, but at the same time, something which will happen...by itself, gradually, I suppose.

This little-town boy is melting away.

So, yes.

An outcome is an outcome.

Anyway.

What were we talking about again?

Looking at the content of this morning's post, I feel sure that if there was some sort of cataclysmic opening of the Earth's crust in the garden outside our house, I would somehow find the time and inclination to blog about the state of my toenails.

Sometimes I wonder.

It's been bloody Election fever here in the US for ages. I cannot vote through the virtue of falling into one of the above categories, sadly enough, and even though I haven't been privy to as much of the build-up as the rest of the country, I feel more on edge about this election than any election I was involved in in the UK (apart from the university one where I managed a friend's presidential campaign, and only then because he'd promised me a pint if he won).

I'll stake this out so that people can see it; I don't want Bush in charge of the country I live in.

Way back when the man was just two weeks in office I had already decided I didn't like him. It may have been prejudice but I haven't changed that initial view.

Tonight I will be watching nervily for the results to roll in. I don't know, in today's climate, that the socio-economic differences due to a Democrat in the White House will be all that drastic. I just think that whatever changes in that direction can be made, should be made. I feel that maybe the contention caused by the American presence in Iraq could be lessened, but I feel it would be wrong for the US to instantly withdraw support. Maybe the US could pay the Swiss to drop in and oversee matters. No one has anything against them - they've steered clear of sticking their international political heads over the Alps for over seventy years...another voice of vagaries and confusion is added.
Sorry.

Anyway. The election results will be coming in tonight, at least, we all hope so.

I can't help but feel nervous.

The last time I was unemployed I wrote a novel. It wasn't written particularly well. I invented a country which rang incredibly false on re-reading, which isn't exactly surprising, as I'd never invented a country before.

My characters were...all right, I suppose, but the story hung off two immensely strong characters who made all the connections, motivated everyone else and generally saw to it that stuff got done. Everyone else, whilst definite characters of their own, well, they were a bit passive. And the first lead central male? So brainless and niave as to be unbelievable. AND I started him out based on me.

One week I was feeling a bit lonely and on one particular evening in the book three couples had nights of passion in three different locations. It wasn't wrong that this should happen, naturally. People have sex all the time, but that they all got it on at the same time, on the same night, and they all had to have morning-after scenes more or less at the same time...creating a little more than a mental frown and a raised eyebrow in the reader.

I went back and inserted chapters to give other characters a background, an extra edge of reality...how our twisted and meddling drug baron pulled himself and his ugly wife up from the streets, the moment the two main female protaganists met in a bar in Peru...

In the fullness of time I couldn't make up my mind how to end it, so I wrote three endings, all of which are now lost.

As a whole it was very patchy; too loose. It had no integrity, and it would take a near full re-write to give it that. I had more or less been developing a style; learning to write, as I started and carried on. And as I carried on, I liked more and more of what I was producing; churning out. I was slowly grinding my way up a learning curve. I hit the difficult decision for the endings and all of a sudden I got a job and I moved to Hatfield.

I'm not expecting to be unemployed very long here in New York.
Uh, let me rephrase that.
I hope to be employed soon, here in New York.
That's better.

Anyway, the point being, seeing as 'tis the season of NaNoWriMo and all that jazz, I thought to myself, why not take everything I learned before, and just sit down and do it again, better this time? Not the same story, but to start to write again? After all, I know I can do it, or at least produce the required amount of words to tell a reasonable yarn.

So yesterday, trying to avoid the myriad temptations of Krissa's Mac and after going through my daily job-getting routines, I sat down at the kitchen table with a pad and a pen.

I'm sitting looking at what, depending on whether I look at it with an egotistical or reasonable hat on, is either four pages of the best introduction to a novel I can write right now, or four pages of pretentious, nonsensical drivel, three and a half pages too long.

The trouble is, I can almost see both simultaneously, like trying to see both sides of an optical illusion - both the candlestick and the faces, both the young woman and the old crone - but it is making my brain hurt. The two sides are stretching my ambivalence between wanting to crumple up the pages and start again, or charge on with a strong chin and produce more stuff which, as I've already said, could be drivel of a pretentious and nonsensical tilt.

I may yet branch out into an homage to 'Spot the Dog' for simplicity's sake.

It had to happen, really. The Halloween Party on Saturday night that Krissa and I went to called for a costume, or random items from the Costume Box of Embarrassment and Doom would be unleashed. A spot of dash with a hat, a few scarves and a screwdriver from under the sink, and the transformation was more or less complete. The hat was a floppy woman's hat that didn't fit me...or Krissa for that matter, and had to be held in a foppish curve through judiciously applied coathanger and a small parrot feather. I hope you all had a good weekend, and you, as D puts it, didn't kill too many small children.

There are a few more pictures from the party on my flickr profile Click on the image and then cycle forwards of backwards through my photos.