This blog article is for me a shameful departure into criminal activity: the seedy world of publishing without permission, license, legal release or consent.
A little while ago our good Scots-Italian friend, Peter Gallo (not the famous New York artist, Italian photographer or Albuquerquean beekeeper) erstwhile of Hong Kong, arrived in NYC to lend an investigative hand to the United Nations. Since then he has sent missives to politely enquire, send regards and deny paternity suits/culpable responsibility, etc. This last entertaining epistle tickled me wotsits and I, knowing his inability to shrink as violets do when it comes to matters of head-turning self-aggrandisement, decided to put it to the electronic ether for benefit of popular consumption and entirely royalty-free! I hope he doesn't mind.
I should now add that a kinder, more gentle and generous soul than Peter Gallo is impossible to find and that I would dearly wish to have his babies.
Dear Richard & Brenda
First off, I should apologise for the fact that this has actually taken me so long, but I am using the excuse that I thought you would appreciate it more if I waited til Chinese New Year... Honest!
Anyway, I do hope life is treating you well, and indeed (perversely enough) that you don't actually GET this message for a while, having excused yourself from the (former colony) in search of more amenable climes for the Chinese New Year holiday.
Life in New York (although a tad chilly of late) is good and agrees with me very much. The temperature has dropped to minus 12 on a number of occasions. I saw a brass monkey this morning, desperately trying to find a welder.
The chill notwithstanding, the sun is shining, the air is cold but it has not really snowed. Still, the coffee is hot and the bagels are good. God is in his Heaven, I am here and I have come to the Earth-shattering conclusion that all is well with the world –at least the bits that impact on me!
More out of a sense of adventure than any fear of the weather, I bought a pair of (Army Surplus) snow shoes last week. These are not unlike an enormous pair of aluminium handball rackets – fully 48 inches in length – and I understand one simply straps them on to ones boots (or even perchance ones bedroom slippers) and goes off for a walk in (or even ON) the deep snow. This should be a giggle, though it may get me thrown off the local golf course.
I am also considering compounding the lunacy by buying a pair of cross-country skis. I might as well enjoy life, snow and all. With all of that, plus the wellies, the down jacket and the new scarf as well I shall be a bit disappointed if it DOESN'T snow!
Work is good. The investigation part is easy, learning to deal with the bureaucracy is more of a strain but I continue in the endeavour. We are running a pilot project on something called a Compressed Working Arrangement. Basically, this requires me to finish work at 6pm rather than 5 for nine days and then get the tenth day off. It doesn't take the brains of an archbishop to see that this is not a bad deal.
I also drive a Jeep. This is a typical piece of impractical Americana: it cost a fortune. It is noisy. It is slow. It is not comfortable. There is NO room in the back for anything at all and, to cap it all, the damn thing drinks like an alcoholic worried about closing time. Still, on the other hand, it's probably the best fun one can have on four wheels...
American women are slightly eccentric, I must tell you. For reasons I cannot comprehend, they are not impressed with any of the above. They have something in this country called "dating" which is some sort of wierd ritual surrounded by rules and conventions that are so patently obvious that nobody needs to enquire as to what they might be. Unfortunately, it would not occur to anyone that someone from a far and distant land might not have the faintest clue as to what all (or ANY) of these patently obvious rules and conventions might actually be either!
The trick, apparently, is that you have to claim to be interested in museums, art galleries and Broadway shows, when – as you and I both well know – absolutely f•••ing NOTHING could be further from the truth. 'Honesty' it seems, is very important in these things they call a "relationship" provided you lie through your back teeth about being interested in museums, art galleries and Broadway shows and conceal any mild affiliations you may feel towards malt whisky, Sophia Loren movies, the Jaguar SS100, licensed premises or such really good testosterone-fuelled stuff as alcohol, tobacco and firearms... or fly-fishing.
Do NOT waste your time trying to tell American women about fly-fishing. For reasons I cannot fathom, fly fishing – even on the most idyllic English chalk stream on the most glorious day of the summer – is not as good as standing about in some art gallery on the Upper East Side looking at some out-of-focus artists impression of... a chap fly-fishing on a mediocre river on a fairly average day.
There is also some significant stage in American relationships which one enters by giving a woman your tie-pin, apparently. I was told this by a Scottish woman (a nurse, and apparently an amateur anthropologist) explained that she had, and I quote, "absolutely nae f•••ing clue whit it's all aboot" either! Everybody in HER office, however, somehow did know and the woman who got the tie-pin seemed to busy herself with redesigning the blokes apartment. In the furtherance of academic enquiry, I raised the possibility this might be some American equivalent of when a woman starts keeping a change of knickers in a guys flat but she seemed to think it may be more legally significant than that. We remain blithely ignorant of what this is all about and are reluctant to ask.
For this reason, and curious though I may be, I am scared to ask any woman to hold on to a pair of my cufflinks. While this could well be a coded invitation to come away for a dirty weekend in a cheap hotel under assumed names, it might just as easily be an admission of paternity. This is a very litigious society, one does not like to take unnecessary chances.
People are, however, all very polite. New York seems to have something of a reputation for rudeness but I have found the opposite to be almost universally true, particularly the people where I live. I went into one of the local supermarkets once, to be greeted by a smiling shop assistant who greeted me cheerily and and made me feel welcome.
“Lovely to see you again, Sir, how are you today?”
I assured her I was well, and exchanged pleasantries, as is only polite.
“And how was the paper, Sir?” she asked. Paper? She had me on that one. What paper? I had no clue, and clearly looked unsure.
“Last time you were in, Sir? About tho weeks ago.”
She was quite correct. I had in fact been in about two weeks earlier. I had been buying toilet paper, and this particular young lady had kindly pointed out that there was a special offer on an alternative brand of said product; equally soft, equally strong, padded, luxurious, etc, etc, but on special offer so it was half the price of the stuff I was about to buy. This young lady very kindly redirected me towards this particular bargain.
Now she was asking how I had got on with it! I did, I admit, have just the tiniest degree of answering the young lady's question, and having used the product for the purpose for which it was intended, I remain unsure of how I was supposed to answer or, indeed, why she was asking in the first place. Still, it was terribly nice of her to ask, and show such interest in my welfare...
People have asked if I miss Hong Kong, and of course there are some people there and some places that one does miss –like the old ladies on Ladder Street who, for HK$10, would sew in a button or a new zip or stitch up bits of your clothes that are parting company. They don't do that here: everyone is too busy separating their cardboard rubbish from their glass rubbish and talking about their carbon footprint, but to actually RE-CYCLE something yourself, and actually keep using last years model rather than buying a new one –well, that's just plain nuts!
New York city has more than its share of the same shallow consumption-driven people as are to be found in Hong Kong. I have come to realise that idiots play a very important role in society: if it were not for them, there is a real danger that the entire business world would come to a grinding halt, bringing everything else down with it. The whole economy depends on people who cannot think, spending money they haven't got, buying crap they don't need, to impress people that don't matter, in order to look like something they are not.
I was passing a shop the other day and in the window I saw they had a snowball maker. For only US$10, you can buy this big red plastic thing which looks like a pair of over-sized salad tongs with two hemi-spherical ends. Brilliant. This allows you to scoop up snow and mold it into a perfect ball –without getting your hands cold by actually touching the snow! Now all I need to figure out is how you are supposed to THROW the f•••ing snowball without using your hands; but I am very confident there will be an assortment of mechanical contrivances available for the purpose; some of them no doubt meeting the legal definition of a firearm!
Still, the great American public seems to be happy to pay money for plastic snowball throwers and I have little doubt there is a factory in China somewhere happy to supply them, and everyone in the middle makes a profit on the way through and why else did God create the credit card? I think I shall set myself the challenge of trying to find the most useless product for sale in America.
At least the Christmas lights have now come down, which must reduce electricity demand significantly. A lot of people put up so much illumination that their houses must be visible from space. What scares me is that we are now on that short hiatus period, the Christmas lights and decorations have been taken down and the Valentines Day tat has not been put up yet.
Why anyone would want to decorate the outside of their house in the manner of a cheap 'Hello Kitty' themed whorehouse is a bit of a mystery to me, but I am assured that there are people who do. In the name of decency I hope none of them live in my town!
Is it any wonder the women in this country have so much trouble with the dating concept?
So, stay tuned to this channel for more news, and and when it happens, but in the meantime, as it is Chinese New Year, I suppose this is probably the best time to wish you Kung Hei Fat Choi!
Cheers
P
Told me about it? ...I was there!
Posted by: Richard Peters | Tuesday, 31 January 2012 at 01:15 AM
This is so Peter! Has he told you about the night of the Pink Plastic Pig?
Posted by: Account Deleted | Monday, 30 January 2012 at 07:19 AM