Englishman in New York

I’ve been reading a couple of local blogs today, A Brooklyn Life and Mona’s Apple, they both discuss food and they’ve inspired me to share my own opinions.

In this order these are the best foods in the world. No discussion or debate is necessary—I speak objectively.

1. Indian
2. Korean
3. English

1.
Indian Food is the best food because it has the most flavor and the flavor is the nicest. People used to kill each other for those spices. Enough said. I don’t go for subtlety with food. I’ve had delicately flavored elaborate gourmet dishes, and they have always been disappointing.

2.
Korean food tastes almost as good as Indian food but it is much, much healthier. I am constantly amazed that there are no good Korean restaurants in our part of Brooklyn (Park Slope). The closest place we’ve found is a hole in the wall outside the entrance of the Pratt campus. This ‘restaurant’ is miles better than any Thai, Chinese or Japanese rubbish anyplace around here. If I were only allowed to eat one kind of food for the rest of my life, I’d choose Korean.

3.
And I know my third choice is controversial so I’ll argue my case. Only last week a food snob colleague informed me: “I’m sorry, English food is really bad.”

Bitch.

I’ve encountered this attitude everywhere I’ve ever been. In Granada, in Spain (the worst food I’ve had in my life), my students loved telling me how crap English food was. I’d smile and say, “Yes, we have a bad reputation, but things aren’t what they were.” Now I believe that things were never that bad. People who say English food is bad are usually repeating what they heard someone else say or admitting they went to the wrong place to eat in England.

I don’t care about 100 euro saucy meals in chic Parisian restaurants; I’m never going to eat one, they are irrelevant to me. I don’t care about a great American sandwich with 3 inches of fake turkey inside it on my choice of one out of a hundred breads. I literally can’t eat the thing; it won’t fit in my mouth. I like 1 slice of real meat on two slices of fresh brown bread. Brown bread that lasts 3 days after the day it was purchased; not 30.

As I may have mentioned before (once or twice), I HATE cheese, so goodbye Italy, Switzerland, Germany etc. You had your chance but you’ve ruined it by covering all your food in fetid gunk.

Chips are 1000% better than fries. Meat pies are tastier than fruit pies. In England mashed potato is made out of potato, not white dust. Our sausages are the envy of the world and are integral to the finest breakfast in the world. Our biscuits, cakes and deserts are absolutely the best in the world. We plundered the furthest reaches of the globe refining our tastes for centuries and we know what we like.

Have you tried an American cup of tea?

Even in the smallest, plebbiest of towns in England the supermarkets have the widest selection I’ve seen anywhere in the world. The quality is also consistently better than stores over here.

To get the kind of meal you can buy cheaply in a good English pub would bankrupt you here, and wouldn’t even be an option in most countries.

Even our cheese is good (apparently).

English food comforts you and fills you up like no other, and isn’t that what food is for?

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What’s happened to PD? Don’t tell me they don’t have the Internet in Denmark.

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These signs on the back bumpers of cars have always irritated me. Why should we be extra careful because we know there is a baby in a car? Are babies’ lives worth more than adults’? Logically they should mean less, as there literally is less. There is less body, less brain, less consciousness, less self-awareness, less personality, less knowledge and less hair (usually). The only thing they have more of is potentiality and that is a very slippery subject.

I now find myself in a new situation. If I could drive I wouldn’t hesitate to buy one of these stickers. In fact I’d encase the whole car in egg cartons and foam if I thought it would protect Billy. I’d look a right pillock driving such a vehicle, but don’t all fathers look inherently uncool anyway? Who cares anymore? Not me.

He seems so fragile that almost everything outside the apartment has become intolerably brutal. 10 ton hunks of metal hurtling down the street, rapists and lunatics ready to pounce at every corner, deadly viruses exhaled from the mouths of passers by and of course the nasty weather. I am so scared he’ll get pneumonia or frostbite I check his stroller every 5 minutes to see if a limb is protruding from his 15 layers of clothing and 5 blankets.

He had 2 red blotches on his neck and one on his leg this morning so I was worried today. He had a temperature when I got home and was acting strange, so I am worried now. It never ends.

Here is a video of him being a froggy this morning.

Click the TV for video. Quicktime 7 required.

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Last night EINY’s three substitute bloggers braved the Brooklyn night to meet up. The topics under discussion were varied and ranged from employment to enjoyment, from striking to striking out (or not) with women, from Granada to south New Jersey. For a while though, the conversation focussed on EINY himself and how he manages to write so many posts on his blog, all the time. He’s certainly got a lot of opinions but it is a mystery to us where he gets them from, and he meets a lot of interesting people, but it’s another mystery how he meets them.

Later in the night, after some hearty Mexican fare and several ginger ales, we discovered a possible answer to this puzzle. We were chatting away about our families when a woman at the bar, who had been eavesdropping, decided to chip in with her own, not entirely relevant, tuppence worth. In the next ten minutes we learned that she was of Greek extraction; was from Texas; had a mother who suffered from a mental disorder; had a father with a martyr complex; hated Houston, TX; thought our generation were too willing to give when the going got tough; had been in New York for six months, but was leaving because she hated it (NY, apparently, is like a Greek god: you didn’t have to like it but you had to respect it); thought the MTA strikers were evil, evil-doers; and that when she googled herself she came up with only one entry.

Perhaps, we idly wondered, she was coming on to us (we are handsome fellows after all). That illusion was shattered when her date arrived and the deluge ended (or, one presumes, diverted to a new channel). I’m from Yorkshire, so I find this sort of indiscriminate chatting that Americans seem to enjoy both unsavoury and unsettling, but Yorkshire folk are not especially adverse to sharing their opinions with people, and perhaps that explains EINY’s prolific blogging: he’s a Yorkshireman gone native.

from l to r: bald/glasses, bald/no glasses, hair/glasses

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So farewell then Leeds. I leave for Copenhagen in a couple of hours…

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This afternoon I was entertaining Billy by swatting the cord that dangles from the light fitting in our bedroom. The swinging motion utterly enthralled him; he kicked his legs squeaking with joy every time I did it.

Seeing any unusual occurrence in his immediate environment seems to delight him no end. Childhood is a bit like a prison. You go from being physically unable to effect your environment to being given strictures about everything you’d like to do by your parents. Wherever you are for most of your early childhood you aren’t there by volition you are there because your parents have put you there. Whether it’s in the back seat of a car, led in your cot, strapped into a high chair, or supine on an itchy rug.

It got me thinking about the little things I used to focus on to help the time pass when I was a kid. The most redolent memory I have is of following the tracks of raindrops as they snaked down the window of our car. I can still see them merging with their fellows as they fell, gathering speed toward the bottom and disappearing out of sight. I’d then pick a new one, usually a wee fleck of a drop, the underdog of the window, so a successful descent would be all the more rewarding.

I can also remember staring at patterns on wallpaper and carpets. I’d let my mind drift until a face or an animal made an appearance. Sometimes I’d get an image of a perfectly expressive face with perhaps a beard and a scowl. Then it would melt away in front of my eyes. I never saw the same face two days running and this always troubled me.

I liked to hold a finger so close to my face I could see through it, or poke said finger into my ear and taste the acrid wax.

I’d ruffle the sheets in my bed so they formed a rich moonscape. I’d then look at it side-on and imagine I was much smaller and could explore the ground I’d just terraformed.

I used to pick at the edge of the carpets to see if I could squeeze my fingers underneath; always wary of the nails that could prick me if I wasn’t careful.

I think I must have spent 2 full years of my life staring at the crack of light that filtered in through my bedroom door. This was pure torture. Listening to the rumblings of activity and seeing the flicker in the crack as my parents passed. Please come in! Please end the monotony!

I can only apologize in advance to young Billy for the hours of tedium we’re about to put him through. The only comfort I can offer is that it did me no harm, and it sure made me appreciate my freedom when I grew up.

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At Home

In the Street

A Mate’s House

Down the Boozer

And on the Box

Click for video (Quicktime 7 required)

Shirt courtesy of R. Shepherd.
Trousers courtesy of F. McGarry.
Thermals courtesy of J. Hoe.

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