Around age 16, I became actively aware of the concept of a Gentleman’s Club. To my young mind, this was a mythical heaven where all the joys of life – cigars, alcohol, and naked women – came bundled together, with soft leather seats and dubious pop music (which, at 16, was my genre of choice) as the trimmings.

I’ve found somewhere that not only sounds better when described, but actually lives up to its full potential when visited; unlike the sticky seats and dank smell of the aforementioned clubs.

Imagine, if you will, a large, underground, open-plan room. Give it some nice carpeting, and throw a well-stocked bar with interesting and tasty beers right by the entrance. Make sure there’s a yummy apricot wheat beer on tap whilst you’re at it. We’re just getting started.

Beyond that, place a whole bunch of sofas that you stole from people’s grandmothers’ houses in the dead of night. Not tatty ones covered in cat hair mind you, but the kind of sofas that you can fall asleep in if you relax your guard for so much as a second. In front of these sofas, leave a few board games out – Scrabble, Go, Othello – whatever takes your fancy. Make sure the sofas are arranged so anyone playing a game is pretty much forced to make friends with whoever is sitting nearby. That’s phase 2.

Next up, we need something for the less casual gamers. Paint the remaining tables with chessboard markings and put a bunch of chess sets behind the bar. Throw in a shuffleboard table, a whole host of pool tables and a few ping-pong tables behind some netting. Take a moment to admire your achievement.

We’re still lacking something though, music. Time to sort that out. You see that little area you’ve got to the right that’s currently empty? Throw a stage up on there and get some world-class jazz performers in every night: the $3 cover charge and admirable bar takings should more than cover their fees. Don’t forget the amateurs though: how about a jam night led by a talented and ever-changing house band that runs from half midnight ’til 4am every night of the year? Perfect.

Add a mixed crowd, a great pizza place across the street and you have my new favourite hangout. Fat Cat, Greenwich Village, New York, New York.

I’ll see you there.

Xx

I’ve spent weeks reading about the snow in Britain and watching endless streams of photos flood my Twitter and Facebook feeds. So now it’s my turn. As I mentioned, we had a rather impressive blizzard here recently. Here’s some photos of my walk to work a couple of days after that finished.

I’ve put together a pretty little gallery with a bunch more pictures over here. Do click and enjoy.

Xx

New York is often described as a cultural melting pot, where immigrants from all over the world come to share and disseminate their traditions, mores and attitudes. Upon arriving here, however, you’ll swiftly notice that whilst there’s an unparalleled plethora of ethnicities in the city, there’s a clear set of demarcations and boundaries that group these into distinct cliques.

Step out of my front door and take a brief walk and you’ll end up in the most famous of these, the inimitable Chinatown, but just beyond that is Little Italy, and brief walk over the bridge will bring you to hubs of Ethiopian culture, Greek expats, Orthodox Jews…and so on.

But, you didn’t come here to read about that, did you? You came here for pictures of bagels, followed by religious analysis thereof.

You see, my thinking is that given the quite shocking level of casual anti-Semitism that seems to be the norm over here, an effort needs to be made to bring together the substantial population of Jews in New York with the prevailing Christian relative majority. So, what better than a Jewish bagel stuffed with every part of leftover Christmas Dinner I could find?

Religious amalgamation never tasted so good.

Xx

To the tune of Jingle Bells. Sing along now.

Hashing through the snow,
on a trail made with Kool-Aid.
Freezing to the core,
as the route begins to fade.

Brooklyn locals stare,
as we search around in vain.
I think we’ve lost the trail,
and my feet have lost their pain.

Lying in a ditch,
covered in fresh snow,
from afar we hear “on-on”
and it’s to the bar we go!’

Yes, I’m aware there are too many verses, but frankly I think it’s a miracle I wrote anything whilst running through snowbanks and icy streets trying to find rapidly fading purple blobs in the snow, and then work out which direction they implied.

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to run around in the snow that last night’s hash presented, but I hadn’t quite considered how cold it would be. And, this is after I ran the last hash a week or so ago wearing just a pair of shorts with no real complaints about the temperature. Part of the problem was that I kept slipping and ending up with snow up to my thighs, but I’m pretty sure New York is just a lot chillier in general right now.

The purple blobs used to mark the trail were, as the song implies, made of Kool-Aid, which is a terrible terrible powder used to make a very bad form of squash. On contact with snow, however, it dissolves to form a faint mark – purple, from grape flavour in our case – which, with 20/20 vision and a bit of luck, might guide a dedicated hasher to the on-in (aka the bar).

The trail was 3.5 miles long. With a lot of searching to be done, I ran just over 5 miles, and if you think running in sand is hard; try snowy Brooklyn streets. To give you an idea of the challenge, it took 11 of us twenty minutes to find the second mark (of around forty), which was hidden less than two blocks from the check; the mark which tells you to go search.

In related news, iPhones cope extremely well with being submerged in snow. Repeatedly.

Xx

After I’ve spent the last two weeks looking longingly at pictures of all my favourite haunts in the UK utterly covered with snow, New York has finally delivered. When I woke up yesterday morning, still happily full of Christmas cheer (and food), all I could see out of my window was white. Twelve hours later, nothing had changed; they’re predicting somewhere between 15 and 20 inches of snow by the time this storm dies off.

The subway system here has an interesting approach to dealing with snow. Instead of closing entire lines, or having constant severe delays on them à la TFL, the New York metro simply skips stations that are directly affected by the snow.

That said, I haven’t heard any stories quite as bad as 500 passengers being stranded on the A-Train in Queens since 1am without food or water for endless hours. It’s 10am as I write this, and they’re still there.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go see if they’ll let me build a snowman on Wall Street.

Xx

Post-Christmas, the cupboards here are pretty full: somehow I think that SeamlessWeb won’t be getting a look-in for a while. Here’s a quick run-down of what Christmas brought in duct-taped parcels from afar, and Tupperware from closer to home:

• Leftover Christmas Dinner (cooked by Rob & Natasja)
• Leftover Christmas Dinner (cooked by the wonderful folks that had me to Christmas, with some help from me)
• Jaffa cakes
• 250 breakfast teabags
• A selection of various other teas
• Jaffa cakes
• Heinz baked beans
• Robinson’s squash
• Mr. Kipling’s apple pies
• Did I mention Jaffa cakes?
• McVitie’s digestives
• Minstrels, Malteasers, Dairy Milk buttons, Eclairs, Flakes…and on
• A selection of home-made chocolates
• An entire home-made American apple pie
• Mince pies
• American bacon
• American pancake mix
• Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup

I think there might be some vegetables hidden under all that too. Maybe.

Xx