We went out for a lovely meal on Saturday night, here in Brooklyn. It seems you have to spend real money to get a proper sausage in this town, but that’s OK – you can spend all the money you like in London and get nowhere near a decent burger. It was such a nice, mild evening that we decided to sit outside and we had a mostly pleasant time that was occasionally ruined by horn-honking drivers having their progress delayed by at least one fourteenth of a second by someone else pulling over. This is on Union Street, by the way, which is a two way street on which the opportunities to pass a double-parked car are frequent, especially at nine on a Saturday.

The excessive honking was one of the first things that struck me about New York when I moved here and I feel a little spasm of fury every time somebody parps at a light just gone green. And this phenomenon is not confined just to New York. I myself was the target of some energetic car quacking as I double parked in a sleepy loch-side village in Scotland, and on a Sunday. As I type this drivers audibly assault each other outside my apartment building. What’s the rush? Really, where’s the fire?

This is a bit of leap (there are smaller steps in my brain) but I think it’s all down to the American Dream. In its noblest form it’s a dream of equality, self-sufficiency and fairness, but like any good idea it can get tinkered around with just a little bit and made to mean the exact opposite of what it originally stood for. For lots of people the Bill of Rights has become a Bill of Entitlements. Gone are the responsibilities that go with freedom and instead they are replaced with what we are owed, and sod everyone else. Never mind that the parked car might be waiting for its owner to pick up an inhaler for a child who has to sing at his Grandmother’s hospital bedside, ‘So You Think You Can Dance?’ is starting in ten minutes! Or maybe I could just relax and enjoy my sausage.