yes, mr chairman

i am in the throes of attempting to gain entry to China…you know, that small insignificant nation of 1.3 billion, that has somehow wangled the right to have all 9.6 million square km of its land on the same time zone…

ordinarily – china is pretty welcoming. yes you have to fill out some paperwork, and send along an ugly mugshot and sometimes even go and smile at a lady behind a desk to prove you are who you say you are…but if you are a foreign devil like myself, hoping to go there for longer than a few months…suddenly the hoop-jumping obstacle course becomes a lot more challenging.

that said – i think i am prepared for battle…at least – i have subjected myself to an eleborate labyrinth of medical tests; proving my hardy, healthful demeanor on a multitude of levels. i have documentation to prove my height, my weight, whether or not i have experienced ‘toxicomania’ (if i had, would i know?), that my eyes work, that i am not HIV positive, that i don’t have syphillis (even the doctor was surprised at this one), a pretty zig-zag graph to show my heart works (really?!) and a beautiful shot of my lungs to show i am a TB free zone – hoorah.

When i first started looking into this whole razzmatazz, i naively thought that if i gathered a bundle of relevant medical information and got myself jabbed and stabbed and viewed from the inside out, i could then just cart this off to any old doctor with a big red stamp who would tick all the boxes and send me on my way. how wrong i was. there is a method to this madness.

no – first you see a physician, who pokes and prods and draws blood before handing you over to a nurse with the COLDEST hands. she then uses the aforementioned COLD HANDS to sticks strange adhesive circles all over your semi-naked body while you endure massively over-zealous air-con. a few beeps later and you can return to the doc, who  then writes you a letter so you can toddle of to the hospital next door to meet the guy who zaps you with a quick burst of radiation. x-ray images in hand, you go to find another guy, who ‘reads’ your images and signs something else that you can then get stamped back at the first place by doc number one.

and a day later – in flies a report painting a nice picture of how well your blood is doing, that, again, you need to get stamped by the doc.

so i am feeling very proud that i have managed to get all this done ahead of time…but did i mention that all this is just to amuse the Chinese Labor Bureau while they think about cobbling together the vital letter that makes me eligible even to APPLY for the visa that i need to travel to china, where i will have to jump through a million more hoops to get the necessary certification to start work and live without the fear of a midnight raid on my apartment and a slow painful sea passage back to blighty.

yes, mr chairman, i comply with humble grace.

a drunching and a drenching

new york is famous for its brunch. the best excuse known to woman (occasionally men also partake of this indulgence, but really, it’s one for the ladies) to pile into a cutesy, cosy brasserie, order any meal that suits your mood and wash it down with a number of bloody marys that corresponds directly to the number of vodka sodas you had the night before…

for those of you who are still of the old school mindset that the term ‘brunch’ (and in particular its roots in a combo of breakfast and lunch) refers to a morning activity – i offer up a correction. in NYC, brunch means any time between 12 and 4…sometimes later.

so now i have set the scene for brunch…i would like to introduce to a variation on this theme…something that i will from here on out refer to as ‘DRUNCH’. i wish i could claim to have invented this term – but alas, i fear i have borrowed it from many who have travelled this road before me…however – it serves a very dedicated purpose – to describe succintly what happens when one established weekend tradition meets another…yes, you guessed it:

drunk + brunch = drunch

of all the venues where this hungry hooliganism takes place, one stands out as being just that little bit louder, that little bit wilder, and, naturally, that little bit harder to gain entry to. so, at 10 am exactly one month before the selected date when i and 5 partners in crime would take the plunge, i bombarded Bagatelle with phonecalls…succesfully! 30 days later, and the red cord is pulled aside to allow us entry to this infamous cave of wonders.

well…i say cave, but in fact – as the entire front section of the restaurant was pulled back to let the summer breeze (ha – fat chance!) in and allow the pounding bass to migrate slowly down the street – it was less a cave and more a stage…a simultaneously serendipitous and alarming discovery for many a tourist. i imagine it looked like what someone wearing night-vision goggles might be unfortunate enough to experience in a night-club…the entire venue holds a subscription to the adage that you should dance like nodody’s watching and sing like nobody’s listening…

the general idea is that you arrive, you enjoy a drink, you order some food if you are so inclined and then you dance on the table. if you are superbly rich, or obliviously drunk, you order a fish bowl – which looks like it sounds, and while it could happily house a 20 lb koi carp, is more likely to contain your cocktail of choice for the bargain price of $700…if you and your friends are extremely thirsty you order a magnum of wine…if you haven’t had liquids for days you order a double magnum of wine and sit there revelling in the fact that you now look like a borrower, dwarfed by your beverage purchase.

my friends and i arrived at 1.30pm, and, restrained as we are – ordered some substantial food, a pitcher of sangria and enjoyed a nice conversation, screaming at full volume over some Ibiza essentials and hip hop classics. as you can imagine, we pretty soon gave up, ordered some more sangria, danced around our table for a bit and finally succumbed to the pressure and joined the rest of the restaurant at table height.

while this sort of behaviour is not entirely condusive to healthy digestion – it is certainly a lot of fun…and i can proudly report that at 50% of our party danced our way solidly through to 6pm when the staff turf out the stragglers and prepare for round 2 – and i can only imagine the evening session is a no holds barred affair…

and so on to sunday…when i awoke with that slight feeling of melancholy that the event i had been waiting a month for, was now behind me. but also a glimmer of pride at having made it through an entire day of non-stop partying without any evident lasting damage, to myself, or public property.

to congratulate myself, and because i am down to my final 3 weeks here in NY and have realised that my proximity to such a vast range of inviting shops is not going to last forever – i went shopping. when i set out…it was a little blustery, but i merely thought “what a lovely change from the over-heated sweat-fest we have been enduring these past weeks”

more fool me. no sooner had i hit Soho – where the only shelter comes in the form of intimidating high end doorways than the heavens opened. and down came a dumping of gigantic, dolloping, soggifying torrential rain. i panicked and ran into Ben Sherman…the shop, not the man…and promptly ran back out again once i realised there was no way i could feign interest in all that menswear, even to avoid a storm…like a semi-concussed, increasingly sodden rodent i scampered this way and that until i found the door to Mango.

i fell inside and was immediately greeted by a smiling security guard holding forth a plastic bag. i looked at it. i looked at him. i looked at it…I contemplated getting IN it…and then looked back at him.

“it’s for your umbrella” he stated, dead pan.

i gestured at my sopping wet clothes, and the hair clinging like damp straw around my face as droplets shimmied down my nose and my skirt started to deposit a neat circular puddle on the floor.

“clearly, i don’t have an umbrella.” i replied, dead pan.

he smiled, i smiled and we turned to stare through the door at the typhoon that was wending its merry way down broadway. and from sunday til today…the rains have continued to tumble…

it definitely feels like the winds are a-changin’…could this be the start of fall? all i know is that i wish i wasn’t so organised, and that my wellies were not, at this moment, packed into a box half way to china…

curioser & curiouser

last weekend i went to a tea party. it was quite a large tea party, and quite an extravagant tea party, but a tea party nonetheless…

now, i wouldn’t exactly claim to be an expert on tea parties…in fact, if i am honest, i might as well admit i haven’t really put in the hours as far as tea parties are concerned, but i would be willing to bet my last cucumber sandwich this was the best tea party ever.

how many tea parties have you flown 3641.34 miles to attend?

of course, i don’t mean to mislead you, so i will take this time to explain that, while the aforementioned gathering had much in common with the traditional notion of a tea party…i mean, there was, tea…well, not tea, per se, but there was pimms, which could easily be mistaken for tea…and there were tea pots, albeit stuffed with haribo…and there was jelly! yes, jelly you would find at a tea party – although, perhaps the vodka component might not always come as standard…hmmm…

Party! there you are. there was Party. good, old fashioned, celebratory, fantabulous, food-shovelling, booze-guzzling, bone-rattling Party.

And there were guests…gloriously attired! (for the most part)…until things all got a little bit naked! but that was later…(for the most part.)

yes…while this tea party had a few physical traits heredited from its ancestors…it was still a very unique affair that took place in the Old Farm holiday camp in Old Jersey.

So, what exactly do you call it when a pile of 50+ fun-hungry revellers, oodles of sugary snacks, a menagerie of over-sized games, shed loads of booze, a dance floor and 14 papier mache mushrooms combine to wreak havoc on a summer’s eve?

Why,  it’s a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party!

Everything started off very civilised…there was Alice, and some of her friends; Tweedles Dum and Dee, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Jaberwocky, the White Queen and a plethora of lesser known characters…there was flamingo croquet, giant-sized jenga, enormous playing cards, and an inflatable darts board all accompanied by a steady stream of liquid encouragment.

there were challenges, speeches, coordinated dance routines, food frenzies, toasts, tipples, totally uncoordinated dance routines, and upwards of 800 unmissable photo opportunities.

one of the advantages of holding your tea party or party party on an island is that you have to import your guests ahead of schedule, in order for them to clear customs/acclimatise/earn their invitation as slaves. and this occasion was no different.  the boundless enthusiasm that our guests displayed already deserves a pat on he back…but add to that the creativity that was fished drudgingly from the depths of many a hungover soul and you should be applauding with gusto.

2 days, 10 metres of chicken wire, a week’s worth of newspapers, some hefty dollops of gooey slop and some stubbornly skin-adhesive spray paint – and you have a dozen mushrooms and a cheshire cat. and that is before you even start thinking about concocting the mountains of food my angelic mother magically produced!

as is the case with all the best bacchic bashes – things start off all lovely and polite and refined, meaning the slippery slope down into wierdly wonderful drunken tomfoolery is a steep and rapid gauntlet – some time between the DJ’s last song and the last man abandoning his standing position…things all got a little bit, well, for want of a better word, strange.

the maine event

now, i am not one to get noticeably homesick…but every now and again i do get cravings for the sights and sounds of home…the seaside, the seafood, the trees, the seafood, the fresh air, the seafood…and i am also not one to rest on my laurels (at least, i don’t think i am – although seeings as i know very little about what, where, or why my laurels might be – i can’t say for sure). i enjoy an adventure.

so – i came up with a magical solution to treat both these niggling itches…i like to call it ‘New England’.

i set off north, out of Manhattan in search of a new world version of the fair isle i have abandoned, and who better to act as companion on my voyage of discovery than someone who, by genetic law, has to put up with my antics – my older (even older now that she squeezed another birthday into her suitcase) sister Olivia.

we two are very different…she embraces her glowing gingerosity, while i beat mine back with bleach; she clings to every last wink of slumber, while i awake daily with a fresh set of ants in my pants; she is brave enough to drive the vast highways of America, while i shudder at the thought of having to make a car go backwards; but we do share one important quality – an unfaltering desire and capacity to eat lobster. lots of lobster. all the lobster.

if you’ll indulge my sisterly pride, i feel that before i go any further, Olivia deserves a special congratulations for setting a personal best by consuming not 1, not 2, not even 3…but 4 lobsters within 24 hours. not bad – for a girl.

New England, and more specifically, Maine, and even more specifically Bar Harbor, offers no shortage of activities for visitors, some more abnormal than others. unfortunately, our fleeting 4 day trip forced us to prioritise our time and i hate to say it, but some things fell by the wayside.

so devasted were we to realise we had just missed Timber Tina demonstrating log rolling in the Great Maine Lumberjack show that we totally forgot to book our slots for ‘lessons in lumberjacking’. and in our subsequent state of deep depression we further failed to attend the ‘Nature Prints on Canvas Bag’ workshop, the ‘Wild Mushroom Identification’ workshop and even the ‘Hexagon Lampshade’ workshop…nothing short of a travesty.

but despite our absence at these blue ribbon events, we still managed to stack up a good menu of achievements.

first we located our living quarters…tucked away on one of about a dozen, quiet, leafy lanes whose grid formation makes up the entirety of the Bar Harbor ‘CBD’…or town centre as we might view it. we had the attic/penthouse in a traditional New England yellow painted wooden house, whose proximity to a church and a particularly vocal neighbour from an unidentified branch of the poultry family afforded us 2 complimentary alarm clocks.

having dumped the our Mazda (!), we set out on foot, and approximately 10 minutes later had sussed the lay of the land and quieted any fears we might have had about having to eat something other than lobster. we also had it brought to our attention that Maine’s other claim to fame is mountains of blueberries…just in case you choose NOT to eat 4 lobsters and dive in for a blueberry pie dessert instead…oh wait…Liv went for the pie too…how does THAT work!?

seeings as we were a) tired, b) a little hungover and c) just plain lazy, we decided to hop aboard Oli’s Trolley, more for its name than anything else, although the guided tour of the Acadia National Park and its surrounding area was an added bonus…and our mere presence on the wooden seats pulled the average age of passengers down from its stratospheric rafters to at least 60. or 65.

after all this strenuous activity there was little to do but dine and scale our way into our vertiginous bunk. dinner having been what we had been building up to pretty much all day…so we had to do it properly!

i am not saying that we have excellent taste in restaurants…we do…but that is not what i am saying. what i am saying is that is was quite the flattering coincidence that Obama ALSO has admirable taste in restaurants and that we could well have dined shoulder to shoulder with him (or one of his heavies)…had we arrived a week earlier. oh, and did i mention i ordered lobster? drowned in hot butter with a side of buttered vegetables…mmmm

Day 2 was the Big Birthday. there were candles in the breakfast fruit, candles in the lunch time blueberry pie and a multitude of additional spontaneous well-wishers…this newfangled england sure is a friendly kind of place. but in other respects, it really isn’t unlike blighty…down to the detail of the rain.

no sooner had we come up with the cunning plan to hire bikes and peddle around the labyrinthine carriage trails of Acadia than the skies decided to open and treat us to that really annoying fuzzy kind of rain that looks quite harmless but slowly and persistently gets you downright soggy. luckily – we took so long to scramble ourselves into some sort of acceptable leaving the house attire, that we hoodwinked mother nature and (disappointingly) didn’t even need to buy sexy plastic ponchos.

cycling led to seafood led to shopping led to siesta (old age) led to dinner! and after we gorged ourselves on yet more seafood – lobster with a hint of scallop, tuna and shrimp – we headed off to an improv comedy show. which was, as you would hope, hilarious. i can honestly say i have never before, and very probably will never again, see a woman execute the stage direction “shoot meatballs from your eyes and shit snowballs” with such conviction and skill.

a very brief stint at the local disco hotspot concluded our night…it was very brief. we checked out the clientele and we ran away.

Day 3 started slowly…but blossomed into quite the food-fest. we had heard tales of a Lobster Pound, balanced on a pier jutting out into a kind of fjord, where, by day, a parking lot of picnic tables becomes the stage for a scene of crazed gluttony as customers fly into a frenzied fever, curable only by cracking, picking, chomping and sucking every last trace of lobster meat from the scattered remnants, that less than 10 minutes prior had housed a happy, unsuspecting crustacean.

we took the “go big or go home” approach to this challenge…and when 2 lobsters, 2 tubs of coleslaw, a corn and a jacket potato didn’t fill the hole…we dived in for round 2 – this time with 1/2 a pound of crab meat thrown in to boost numbers. it was messy. but, dear lord, it was good. and this time, there was no room for blueberry pie…

and finally we took the ocean – set sail on a 40′ schooner to drift around the bay while the sun floated slowly down into the horizon. the sea was the proverbial mill pond and the cool evening breeze reminded me so much of a fresh Jersey evening. i spent themost of the 2 hour trip sculpting a mental to do list:  fall in love with a rugged, rustic seafarer, learn to sail a schooner, inherit a schooner, set sail on the high seas and never return to the city…

or something like that. but for now i will just comfort myself with the fact that i will be returning to the English Channel in less than 10 days!