There’s a handful of words in the list I hardly even recognise, such as “French letter” for a condom, or “jam sandwich” for a police car – although if it was speeding along I would be much more likely to use blues & twos than the USA’s awkward ‘lights & sirens’ or ‘code’. What is more surprising, however, is the sheer volume of words that I use on at least a weekly basis which have made it into this list and which I’ve recently ascertained a good portion of my American friends have no definition for. Perhaps this, rather than my Cardiff-English accent, explains the blank looks and non-sequitirs I get in response from them from time to time.

I’ve educated some closer friends on knackered and jumper (in the US, a sleeveless dress), and whilst other entries such as launderette and [five dollar] note sound a bit off, they’re close enough to be understood, but there are still a few which I had no idea are utterly baffling to folks over here. I found it amazing that strop is nearly unknown and that I would be completely incoherent were I to say that someone mincing around was a bit camp. Let’s examine a few more though:

If, feeling a bit peckish I put some petrol in my motor and popped off for a pukka hot pasty, no-one would think me a plonker, but things might go a bit pear-shaped if I asked for some Spotted Dick – they might think I was a bit of a ponce (not to be confused with a nonce). If I then suggested some toad in the hole, they’d probably think I was just another pisshead out on the razz and chuck me out into the street arse over tit.

The roads, though, can be a curious affair. If, just past the motorway, the flyover, or the dual carriageway you were to be waiting on the pavement under the Belisha beacons at a Zebra crossing, then Americans would think you were talking codswallop when you mentioned cats-eyes, sleeping policemen or suggested that, because of the roundabout, perhaps it would have been better to take the subway to cross the tarmac instead.

The bedroom could be an infinitely embarrassing source of confusion too, given the British predilection for social-awkwardness and the number of sexually-themed words appearing in our fine list. On the plus side (questions of chivalry aside), a Page 3 quality bird probably wouldn’t have the nous be upset if you called her a slag or a bint but, she might think you a bit twee if you asked her for a snog or tried to get her kit off. My mother reads this, so I won’t avail myself of the rest of the sexual entries, but I will just let my American friends know that blower, cack-handed and suck it and see wouldn’t have made it into this paragraph, whereas copping off and topping are indeed precursors to rogering some totty.

Honestly, I find it amazing I’ve ever managed to have a conversation over here.

Xx

At a glance, building a table seems like fairly easy work. One gets some wood from Home Depot, attaches some legs, and finds some intelligent way of connecting the two. Turns out though, there’s a few more steps than that involved. First up, the wood has to be sanded, roughly at first, and finely to finish, because no-one wants bits of splintered wood brushing against their arms or mixed into their food as they sit at the table. This, apparently, is an action best performed in the snow.

In addition to lacking resilience to the million dangers faced by a piece of household furniture that now cause me panic attacks when I think of them, a hunk of untreated wood also lacks some aesthetic appeal, and so the next stage is to give it some kind of lacquer. Polyurethane, originally used to coat airplanes in World War II and later the main feature of all-plastic cars that had some brief success in the 60s, is a man-made polymer. It’s robust, abrasion-resistant and lends a rich veneer to any wood it is applied on. Polyurethane suffers badly if overly exposed to UV light, or fire, and therefore is best ‘stored in a vacuum, in darkness, at a low and unvarying temperature‘. Well, quite.

Each coat (four atop, three below) took around 12 hours to dry and had a fantastically pungent smell that has happily dissipated.

This complete, the next job was to find some legs to suit the wood. I wanted a tall table, something at a comfortable height when standing, but which we could also eat off from some high barstools. Table legs over 30-something inches are pretty hard to come by, and stable ones which would support the weight of a table and its users harder again. My first pass was some adjustable desk legs from IKEA but, as you can see below, with some spare wood precariously balanced on a couple to find an ideal height, they were rather ugly and simply wouldn’t do:

So, I scoured the Internet. I failed to find any legs I wanted to buy, but I did come across a shop on Etsy by a craftsman selling custom-built tables with the old Eames-style hairpin legs on them. He fabricated the legs himself so, I asked, could I get some made at the scintillating height of 36″, and could I have them painted just the same shade of orange as my beloved bookcase? Well, he did a few experiments and determined that the legs were likely to be safe, and four weeks later I got a parcel from California within which were my beautiful new legs.

With everything now ready to be finished, I put some girls to work assembling the sweet, adjustable, rotating red barstools I’d gotten for a fraction of their usual cost from the wonderful Overstock.com, and commenced finalising the table.

The body of the table is plywood, which is made of layers (plies) of wood veneer glued together with the grain of adjacent plies at right angles, giving it a high degree of strength and durability. The notion of plywood has been around since Ancient Mesopotamia, but modern plywood was invented by Alfred Nobel’s father in the 19th century. Despite its many benefits, plywood suffers from having fairly ugly edges, where are the separate plies can be easily seen. Fortunately, I discovered a roll of wood veneer which could be wrapped right around the table edges, and with some careful staining, be indistinguishable from the main body of wood.

This had to be fairly painstakingly glued on to the table body, and once stained, had to be trimmed with a straight razor and a trimming knife to remove any remaining impurities and odd edges, but it was worth the work for the final result.

Careful readers will note the legs already attached in the above picture. It was a lot easier to trim those final edges with the table nicely raised off the ground. It took some time, and some fastidious measurements with the legs both off, and in-situ (supported by some canned goods and fruits) before attaching the legs…

…and revelling in the final product.

I’ve kept the straight razors from trimming the edges handy for the first person to spill a drink on my new table.

Xx

Now, New York may love food, and I do too, but the true way to my heart lies in coagulated caesin derivatives — cheese. This past Saturday was then, quite a treat, as a cheesemonger friend (the best kind of friend) kindly got me free entry to The Big Cheesy. Any food event in New York is going to be popular, but anything featuring cheese or bacon – and everything features bacon – is going to sell out quickly, and tickets for this event were snapped up within minutes of going online.

7 cheese shops – well, 6 cheese shops and a misguided entry from a sandwich place – were competing to offer NYC’s best grilled cheese sandwich, and the responsibility of judging their artisinal entries fell to myself and my fellow attendees. Some, including my overall favourite, Lucy’s Whey were confident enough to base their entries simply on a quality cheese with minimal trimmings, but others saw fit to go a bit further.

Above, we have an entry from Say Cheese in which the only cheese was Mascarpone, complemented with a Nutella & chocolate sauce served piping hot from a pipette on a brioche roll. Obviously, this was delicious. After everyone had filled up on cheese and cast their votes, there was still a line to get more of these. But it’s really not a grilled cheese sandwich, and so, couldn’t get my vote.

Other entrants also tried to tempt we judges away from considering the quality of the cheese with more bacon, shallot jam, bacon-crusted brioche, shots of tomato soup and other such novelties, but in the end my favourites were those who kept it simple. Some bread, a couple of light condiments, and beautiful, sticky, gooey cheeses that I feel I can still taste today.

I should have felt bad for the chefs who for two days spent 7 hours in that cheesey, smokey room cooking more than 600 sandwiches in a day, but it was hard to do anything but smile when so many people were clamouring to feed me these treats.

Finally, as mentioned, one entry came not from a cheese shop, but from ‘wichcraft, which has sandwich booths in some large tourist areas of New York. Votes were cast by throwing ping-pong balls into a container on one’s favourite stand. Here, at the end of the show, I might have felt a little bad, as they stood in the corner (bottom left), ignored, with a mere two votes, but when it comes to cheese, my heart is not soft.

The moral of this story then; don’t enter a cheese competition if you’re a sandwich chain. I think we can all learn something from that.

Xx

Well, as apparently most Americans – and doubtless all Italians – know, Bocce (literally, ‘balls’) is just another name for a game in the Boules family, of which I’m most familiar with Pétanque and the superlatively English recreation of Lawn Bowls. This past Monday, I quickly learned the game and the differences between it and the others in its family with which I was more familiar, as I subbed in for a friend in that same social league, and brought with me two English lads who are visiting New York for the week, and hadn’t yet made it out to Brooklyn. And, after all, if you’re going to visit Brooklyn, it should always be to a dark bar with a showy leather-bound library and a semi-ironic, competitive sport on offer. They loved it.

Bocce is played with balls of a thick, dense plastic. The jack (known as the pallino) is thrown down the court, which is made of soil, asphalt, clay or another similar substance which has some give, but will quickly deaden a ball. Some degree of skill and luck is therefore needed, as every passage of a ball slightly alters the lie of the course, leading to unintended swerves, dips, accelerations and stops. Each team then, with play always to the team without the nearest ball to the pallino, aims to get as close to this as possible, with points at the end awarded for each of the closest team’s balls that is closer to the jack than the closest ball of the other team.

As a player, I’m much more used to Pétanque, the French variant of the game in which striped metal balls are thrown after the wooden cochonnet (literally, ‘piglet’). This is generally played on gravel, dirt or beaches, and has the same aims as Bocce, but quite different dynamics due to the differing surfaces and balls. On venturing out to Bryant Park this past Sunday, the day before my début in Bocce, I discovered some old gentlemen enjoying the beginnings of spring with a game at some previously unnoticed Pétanque courts there. I passed a sedate couple of hours in the leafy, sunny tranquillity watching these gentlemen of leisure effortlessly excelling at the sport and enjoying eachother’s company, and along with my friend, inventing their backstories and player profiles.

People often say that you need a 3-year or 5-year plan. I’m normally not much for plans beyond say, about 7pm on the same day, but I do have one overarching goal in my life that I want to achieve. It is my dream, my resolution, and my firm plan, to become an old man, and I really think it’s an achievable aim. I look forward with all my heart to the day when I can wake up, put on some slippers, have some tea, complain a bit about things (without reproach), eat a spot of lunch, meet some friends for a drink, some fishing or some boules, and then go to bed early whilst listening to some classic music. The elderly have spent all their lives running around, working hard and going out partying. They know all that has to offer, and they instead make an informed choice of a cup of tea and some slippers. Who am I, with my fragment of their life experience, to argue with that conclusion?

For now though, I’ll just practise my tea making skills and my Pétanque, and keep an eye out for some good slippers.

Xx

In the last year, Mike had a dream that no New Yorker would go out and consume any sugary beverage over 16oz. For those of you who don’t measure liquids by the weight they’d have if they were made of pure water (go America), that translates to 473ml, which is exactly one American pint, and is a bit short of a British pint. This doesn’t prevent refills, and still allows for supermarket shoppers to pick up 2L bottles, so it seemed quite bizarre to me that anyone would actually feel a pinch at this rather light legislation. After all, in France, Britain, Japan and Brazil (at least) a ‘large soda’, as defined by McDonalds, is about half the size of their ‘large soda’ in the USA, at around 450ml as opposed to 30oz (887 ml).

This isn’t Bloomberg’s first health kick. NYC was one of the first cities to ban indoor smoking, and in 2011 added most public outdoor spaces to that too. He pushed through the first law requiring fast-food restaurants to display calorie counts, which is now a federal law for any chains, and can be horrifically scary if you venture into say, KFC. He also banned trans-fats in restaurants and is looking at cutting back on sodium too.

Maybe thanks to Bloomberg, maybe thanks to continuous immigration from healthier places, or maybe just because they’re always so busy and don’t have cars, New Yorkers are already a healthy bunch. The average New Yorker, whilst maybe somewhat bigger than an average European or South American, is a generally fit and slim individual by American standards. A walk down the street shows nothing like the ~30% obesity rate that is generally given as the average for an American adult. My Portuguese teacher recently told me that she was surprised people were so thin when she moved here, after growing up seeing American TV and tourists. “Thinner than in Brazil?” I asked. She didn’t stop laughing for a good few minutes.

Bloomberg began with a campaign “Are You Pouring On The Pounds” which showed as graphically as possible just how much sugar is in one bottle of soda, iced tea, or even ‘Vitamin water’ and so on. Some of them were quite sickening, some wonderfully enlightening and none of them really felt too far from the truth. It worked, too, I went from the occasional fizzy drink to drinking nearly nothing but water, tea and fresh fruit juices.

Not generally having access to TV, it was only very recently I saw that campaign at a friend’s house. In the ad I saw, three friends sit at a bar, two ordering a ‘cola’ and the third sitting there eating his way through sixteen packets of sugar. “You wouldn’t do this”, ends the advert, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the IT Crowd’s anti-piracy parody.

One major difference I’ve noticed about American advertising is that it’s very confrontational. Rather than a simple ‘enjoy our product’, advertisers are happy to call out their competitors by name and make hilariously selective point-by-point comparisons in the areas in which they have an advantage. In much the same style, the drinks companies quickly fought back with some very directed adverts of their own, such as the “Don’t let bureaucrats tell you what to drink” campaign. This, unfortunately, didn’t quite have the same impact because, let’s face it, it’s a pretty hard case to argue on the actual health merits being called into question.

That’s not to say it’s only rich companies arguing the point though. The papers today are full of quotes from ‘real New Yorkers’ in favour of choice, and in Mississippi, the state with the highest obesity rate of all, they’re going one step further. Not just content with avoiding having hippies like Mike Bloomberg (who is, lest we forget, number 13 on the Forbes Rich List), they’re actually looking to proactively pass laws protecting gluttonous consumption.

There may not be any need though. Today it was ruled that Bloomberg’s latest soda law will not pass because it is overly arbitrary, given the loopholes needed to prevent NYC stepping outside of its jurisdiction. So, it seems that for now, the great state of Mississippi, the obese activists in New York and soft-drinks companies are – per the American Dream – free.

The ruling “serves as a major blow to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s incessant finger-wagging,” said J. Justin Wilson at the Center for Consumer Freedom, created by restaurants and food companies. “The court confirmed what most New Yorkers already know: They don’t need a government regulator to dictate their diet choices. New Yorkers should celebrate this victory by taking a big gulp of freedom.”
~Associated Press

The large Big Gulp sold by 7-11 was recently reduced in size to a mere 50oz (1.5 litres). America, Freedom, Liberty…Fuck Yeah.

Xx

The learning process itself can vary in enjoyment. Falling down a too-tricky slope repeatedly is as much a part of learning to ski as is sitting in beautiful surroundings watching a graceful friend demonstrate some tips. On the more intellectual level, struggling with a particularly difficult maths or physics problem can often be absolutely fascinating, but it can also sometimes be near mind-numbingly boring to see and digest the lengthy reasoning behind how and why something works. Making the same mistakes in a new language over and over, and constantly coming up against a lack of grammar or vocabulary is one of the most frustrating learning experiences for me, but I’ve rarely been in a language-learning class or discussion that hasn’t involved a whole lot of laughter.

But, after all this, when I’ve actually acquired some new ability, the rush of pleasure is superb. Realising I’m skiing with a remarkably improved technique; being able to solve some interesting classical mechanics problem and seeing its outcome in reality; and the meta-conscious thoughts of ‘wow I’m talking about shower-head pressure in a different language’ midway through the conversation are all memorable moments from recent months. Obviously, I’ve been out skiing a lot, and when I’m not in my Portuguese classes I’m often chatting with some Brasilian friends, but I also spend a good amount of time at work learning too.

A lot of my more academic learning – both at work and at home – has come from Coursera. Back in 2011, I was enthalled with the free MIT physics lectures and material I was enjoying through OpenCourseWare but Coursera, just 9 months old right now, has taken that to a whole new level. It was founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford, and I’d previously taken a free online Machine Learning course from Andrew Ng, the success of which was presumably a large influence in his decision to found Coursera.

Coursera offers both undergraduate and graduate-level courses – known as MOOCs, or Massively Open Online Courses – from top universities, mostly US based, for free to anyone who wishes to sign up. Starting in the next week we have courses in Classical Music Composition, Epidemology, Latin American Culture and Volcanic Eruptions, to name but a few. I’m currently pursuing both Calculus and Data Analysis courses, and am signed up for Discrete Optimization and Computer Vision courses in the future. One could, with absolute ease, fill up their days from now until eternity (for a precise date see The Future Of Humankind, beginning soon) with online learning from Coursera.

These courses are not just series of video lectures, but generally include some metric of evaluation and a forum for peer discussion. The forums I’ve seen have been alive and well, often staffed by the professor(s) and TAs, but with the majority of help and discussion coming from the course community. Meetups and other physical reading groups are encouraged, and in the R&D department at which I work we often have such groups dedicated to a Coursera course. The evaluation may be a series of exams, of weekly assignments, but in some cases I’ve seen nearly everything hinge on a final exam or a few large-scale, peer-reviewed assignments.

Even more interestingly, these courses are beginning to gain merit and recognition. I’ve seen a number of résumés listing Coursera or other online courses recently, and they’ve even begun to offer a Signature Track and College Credit. The former, for some small fee, allows one to confirm their identity and that they have indeed earned Certificates of Achievement (or Distinction) for completing a Coursera course and gaining a certain percentage/grade. The latter, even more interestingly, is offered on a few courses which have been evaluated by the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service, and allows for completed Coursera courses to be used as ‘credit’ in an American Universities. The general system over here is that once a student has obtained a certain number of ‘credits’, they may graduate, and the cost-per-credit at any respectable University is massively higher than the fee Coursera charges. Whilst Coursera generally runs on an honour code, for these there is often some more trying stage such as a proctored exam, to give confidence to employers and other interested parties that a given student has truly earned their qualification.

All in all, it’s a superb service, and a great learning opportunity. Check their latest courses and sign up for one today.

Xx

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

It was with this frame of mind that I landed in Seattle’s exquisite Sea-Tac airport last week, expecting maybe a few approximations of the offerings of a big city, and some amusingly quaint small town attractions to divert, but mostly just heading there to see good friends and take advantage of the excellent skiing in the surrounding area.

The skiing, obviously, was beautiful – I almost got sunburnt on one particularly glorious day – but after too much of that I spent the rest of my time in Seattle playing silly games (anyone for Maponimoes or Pentago?) and simply exploring the place. To those of you chuckling the obvious ‘how can there be such a thing as too much skiing?’ I direct you to my lower back and calves.

I certainly found the countryside and signs of Real America, from the Native American reservations proudly offering fireworks and gambling through to diners that weren’t just based in a trailer for some kitsch appeal. People struggled with the concept of arriving somewhere other than by car, and everyone was unbelievably friendly. Much as I would in NYC, I’d set off against the light to cross a road, timed so that I could easily step between cars without anyone needing to slow, swerve or wait, only to find that the cars would simply stop in the middle of the road and wave me across with a smile. “How do you do?” didn’t seem to be a greeting, but a genuine inquiry that may well have been followed up with some home cooking if I suggested ‘hungry’ as a response.

My favourite urban find was Twice Sold Tales. Whilst I love The Strand in New York, the one thing it is undoubtedly lacking is a good selection of cats roaming the aisles that one can pick up and idly pet whilst browsing second-hand copies of such classics as 50 Naughty Games for Lovers.

The real appeal of Seattle to me, though, was in its scenery, with lakes, parks, old water towers, and a view of the mountains from anywhere one chooses to stand. I discovered these partly through aimless rambles in the British style, but this trip was also my long-overdue introduction to Geocaching. Through my geekier nature I was well aware of this sport, and a big fan in theory of its counterpart, Geohashing, but I’d never actually gotten around to doing it until this week.

For the uninitiated, Geocaching is essentially one giant community treasure hunt, with countless caches hidden throughout the world, found by GPS co-ordinates and hints – sometimes straightforward and sometimes cunningly tricky. Once located and removed without alerting any muggles, one investigates the contents of the cache, swapping or dropping goodies into the cache if there’s room, then signs the log book and re-hides it for the next cacher.

Some caches are found nearly daily, whilst others may go for years without being located. Some are underwater, or on Antarctica, or up a mountain. Some are large boxes and others are tiny fake rocks or pieces of chewing gum ingeniously tucked away. One of our caches, hidden in a local park, is apparently well-known to the Parks Department, who left us a little note in the logbook and always re-hides the cache after trimming.

All in all, Seattle was beautiful, and I expect to discover some fantastic Geocaching challenges in New York City over the next few months.

Xx

Skiing is great fun at any time, and any trip with my Capoeira family is guaranteed to be a fantastic and spirit-lifting time, but this trip was even more satisfying as I got to sink back into the ski lifts and look down at trails I spent the summer racing up in the mud and rain. The steepest hills were no longer a heartbreaking sight to be exhaustingly scaled or painstakingly descended, but an opportunity for some speed and fun. The breaks dotted through the mountain were no longer icy water or barbed wire, but bars and eateries.

I was pretty nervous about getting back out on the snow after such a long break, and it didn’t quite occur to me until I was halfway up the first ski lift that I wouldn’t be able to ski when I got off at the other side. So, I sat nervously as the bar was raised and the exit platform approached, staring at my skis and desperately hoping for some degree of muscle memory, as my mind was drawing a complete blank as to the mechanics of skiing. I let my skis brush the ground, reached back and pushed as hard as I could, flying down the hill with grace and relief that it was all coming back to me so easily. What I hadn’t quite realised was that instead of pushing off the chair lift, I’d actually pushed off my friend, but as she’s a beautiful skiier who would ski every weekend in the Basque Country, she barely even complained.

Still though, I was a little nervy throughout the first day, aiming to stay on just the green and blue slopes and help a couple of the newbies out with basics, until I accidentally took a wrong turn and ended up on one of the black diamond slopes. Fortunately, it seems fairly common that the American – or at least, East Coast – ski trails are marked very generously, and a black diamond over here is rarely more difficult than a blue over in the alps. The double-diamond, then, became the symbol of danger, and it didn’t help that the single time I attempted that trail the mountain had its artificial snow machines on, blinding me as I came around turns.

All in all though, it was a wonderful trip, with big family dinners every night, all day spent out skiing on the slopes and mini road-trips to get there and back. I fell a few times but wasn’t hurt, and the only real accident came when one of our first-timers, instantly famous for his ability to gain fantastic speeds with absolutely no ability to stop or turn, cracked his brand new goggles during one particularly sensational faceplant.

I’m heading out to Seattle to go skiing in the mountains north of there in a couple of weeks, and I’m also planning a couple of day trips in New York before the summer sun returns, including one to the nearby Mountain Creek, home of the Super Spartan race that nearly killed me.

Xx

My new home, however, is – par for the course in this older neighbourhood of Park Slope – a little older and rougher around the edges. When we arrived a week ago, one bedroom had horrific green paint on every conceivable surface, even the ceiling light mouldings, and paint was flaking off the walls around old nail marks. Doors were hanging listlessly in their frames and those that weren’t were off-kilter and dragging on something above and below. In this brief week, that’s been rectified, and I’ve found time to tidy up a few other pieces too.

We have a coat rack affixed to the wall, which took some effort, lacking a drill or an electric screwdriver. We have a new toilet seat, a job that surprisingly wasn’t as unpleasant as I imagined. The wonderfully bright orange bookcase (IKEA easy assembly) is a constant reminder of the time my mother offered my teenage self the opportunity to paint my own bedroom walls – I opted for roughly the same shade of orange on two walls, with a slightly tamer yellow on the other oppositional pair.

Whilst occasionally taxing or time consuming, none of this has been particularly challenging, but it has put me in a hands-on frame of mind, and to that end Alex and I eschewed the default of choosing a dining table from IKEA along with the bookcase, and instead headed out to a hardware store to find some lumber. We came across a beautiful piece of red oak, far too large for a table in our modest apartment, but with such a beautiful grain it couldn’t be passed up.

The remainder should serve well for shelving, providing a beautiful bit of consistency in the place, having all been cut from the same bough (as it were). I’m hoping that with some sanding, protection, veneering the edges and getting some legs together the whole effort shouldn’t take more than a weekend, and whilst it probably won’t look as beautiful as a professionally handmade effort, it’ll certainly have some charm, and every meal will be all the more satisfying from being served atop our own handiwork.

Plus, it turns out, this is a pretty cheap way to go. That entire hunk of red oak was a mere $50, and I doubt the whole thing will come to more than $130 or so in total.

Xx

Having moved so many times, one would assume I’d be better at it, but at the tender age of 26 I’m still unable to actually get my things into boxes without some female assistance. I did, however, manage to pack up all my belongings in one short evening, and by now I’m an expert at disassembling and reconstructing my IKEA furniture. IKEA, by the way, has been around since the early 40′s, used forced labour in East Germany in the 1980′s and is the world’s third-largest consumer of wood. Who knew?

Packing and corporate scandal aside, this move was made particularly difficult in that I was the one driving the cargo van on the 6 journeys between the rental location, our old houses and the new place. Things didn’t get off to a great start when I turned the ignition key and remembered that the van would be automatic, rather than manual, and looked for the…automatic gear stick? Drive shaft? I have no idea what this thing is called:

…but, glossing over the the gaps in my vocabulary and looking down to my right in the van, I didn’t see any sign of this shifter, and also nothing that resembled a handbrake, just a blank space, which was useful for my guitars, and later a third passenger, but wouldn’t be of much use in driving. The handbrake was, apparently, the leftmost pedal, which I completely avoided lest I confuse it with a clutch. The gearstick/shifter/transmission(?) was above the steering wheel and involved an improbably degree of pushing and raising/lowering that confused me every time I needed to switch between Park, Drive and Reverse, which made parallel parking into the tight spaces even more fun.

These mechanistic problems dealt with, the time came for my first experience driving on New York’s streets. This was also my first time driving anything larger than a car, and the snow and ice on the ground simply added to the challenge.

There were momentary flutters of panic for my passengers as I obviously debated the merits of taking immediate left turns, versus driving halfway through an intersection and taking a longer left turn onto the correct side of the road. My commentary on the ridiculous system of priority at an intersection, where I thought I should clearly have the right of way but was willing to slow down for traffic, was cut quite short by screams of ‘red light!’ — which, in retrospect, I accept as a fair architecture for the road system.

In the end though, all went well and I’m not aware of having caused any collisions, even if I did earn a couple of enduring new nicknames from the experience.

Xx