Lessons Learned In The Last Week Or So

1. People get very shirty if you take reading material with you to the toilet on aeroplanes.

2. In much the same way Victorian-era taxonomists named the best examples of a genus twice in Latin - felis felis, conger conger etc. ... some people warrant being called both asshole and arsehole. Krissa and I can provide this service simultaneously.

3. Never give your wife and your mother cause to combine powers and nag you to do something.

4. Snails are really, really weird.

5. 'Spume' ought to be a dirty word.

6. I had entirely forgotten about Anthea Turner, and very nearly managed to forget about Pam Ayres.

7. Downtown Manhattan in warm weather has a very welcome-home smell to it.

8. Apart from the roadworks by Cedar Street.

9. I've had a year and a half of coping with New York's thronging streets, dealing with its incessant stimulation, admiring the insane all-directions-at-once movement of the city, the heat, the cold, the rain, snow, smoke, fumes, wafting smells of roasted nuts and hot dogs, sirens, horns, shouts, traffic, lights, dirt and noise. I've had eighteen months of struggling to make it to work on time, to meet so-and-so on time, cursing the trains, grumbling about the open mouthed meandering tourists, the prices and the attititude on some people.
After all that it is an overwhelmingly wonderful feeling to walk along the bottom of deep streets and feel very much at home in them.