Twins: Ten Thousand Letters To My Children

Today was our last in the city before the long journey home to the UK. Feet were sore from pounding the endless Avenues. Necks ached from gazing up at the countless skyscrapers. The superlatives roll off the tongue when trying to articulate exactly what New York is; some is iconic; much is super sized; most is expensive; everything is familiar - but at the same time, slightly artificial. It is clearly full of real people going about their real lives but simultaneously it is a fantasy; a giant movie set with filmic reveals around every corner. Marilyn's skirt blew up on Lexington Avenue by 52nd Street; Holly Golightly gazed into the window of Tiffany's on the corner of 5th Avenue and 57th Street. Do I even have to mention 'The Muppets Take Manhattan'? Much imitated, never bettered. The best film I have never seen. Miss Piggy at the New York Public Library Desperate to squeeze every last drop out of the Big Apple, we ate pancakes with the VB...

Its a short walk from Starbucks on 9th to the Hudson. The river is a broad, shining expanse of water and if my antediluvian geography serves me well, it deserves to be called an estuary or even a channel . The indigenous American Iroquois Indians called it the Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk or the river that runs both ways but Henry Hudson pitched up in 1609 and, deciding that this mouthful would cause future generations no end of trouble when trying to book a sight-seeing cruise, modestly re-named it. Sadly, the River Henry didn't catch on and the rest, as they say, is genocide. By 1775 The Thirteen Colonies were revolting and while some would say little has changed, the unstoppable momentum of the American Revolution swept away the British and laid the groundwork for the current foul up. Two hundred and forty two years later, as we began our own fresh revolutions astride sturdy two wheelers from Pier 84's Blazing Saddles, the Hudson dazzled in the morning sunlight. We cruised...

No Taxation Without Representation sulked the hastily scrawled graffiti on a hoarding near our hotel. And New York has a proliferation of taxes. Our hotel bill managed to run to thirteen entries, only one of which actually related to the cost of sleeping in and we didn't even touch the mini-bar. Unwisely, I took the graffiti's sentiment to heart when refusing to pay the state sales tax on my latte this morning. My barista gave me a solemn nod which I took to be a gesture of solidarity against the burning injustice of it all. The Founding Fathers would surely have applauded my stand against the state's overweening tax collecting powers in return for which my visa waiver didn't even grant me the right to cast my ballot. If only for the sake of sustaining the fatally over stretched metaphor, its a shame that I didn't (a) go to Boston and not New York and (b) order a tea and not a milky coffee. That way, I could have  extracted maximum historical resonance by d...

Donald, do you remember the story about the man who built his house on sand? Without checking, I am not completely sure, but he might have gone to hell. But at least, until then, you will have plenty of sand for your bunkers. Keep Digging Don. It turns out the builders of the 58 storey Millennium Tower in San Francisco did the same thing, when with just a little more gumption, they could have excavated down the bed rock like the neighbouring buildings. It seems that when you are working on a project of these dimensions, there is a hubristic tendency to think that the laws of physics that constrain the rest of us, don't apply. Whoops! Donald, the metaphors just write themselves. Predictably, the structure is sinking and leaning even faster than the builder's hastily briefed experts concluded, when faced with litigation but I don't think Pisa is worried about its tourist traffic just yet. Which will go first? At the southern end of Manhattan island, whe...

Airbnb. At first it looks like a mangled autocorrect but as your brain slowly starts decipher the chaotic scramble of consonants you wonder; is it an acronym or an abbreviation or both? Officially, according to something I once missed the beginning of, its supposed to be short for Airbed and Breakfast but if it really was it wouldn't have caught on. Every airbed I have ever spent time on, didn't involve much sleep and rarely does the kind of person who puts you up on one, cook you breakfast in the morning. I know this for a fact; I own one and I often make my guests suffer the indignity of slowing going soft in the night....and sleeping on a flat mattress. I mention this because having touched down at New York JFK at an ungodly hour, made infinitely worse by the time difference, an Airbnb apartment on West 48 and 10th should have beckoned us to our rest. It was all planned in good faith because we had made this trip with the firm intention of staying with our antipodea...

I think that we can all agree that the airport is always a fairly priced opportunity to pick up a few last minute essentials . To avoid this,  I work from a packing check list which has three things on it; socks, moisturiser and an ATM card. This is why I live in constant fear of forgetting my passport. We flew from Gatwick which is currently bidding for third runway status in a David and Goliath struggle with Heathrow. Gatwick has all the cards but Heathrow has all the Londoners. Common-sense should prevail but Gatwick's successful bid is bound to be a mysterious no show at the award ceremony, only to be found dazed and bleeding in a back alley dumpster, minutes after Heathrow scoops the prize by default. Gatwick's main disadvantage is that its easier to swim to New York whilst lashed to an anvil than to get to the airport; and so our journey proved. We missed our bus due to the perils of a second pastry; the train was cancelled at Reading and the scheduled replacement ...

When I was 11 I lived in Israel and went to school in England. Sooner or later, most children drag their feet on the walk to school but as my Dunlop Green Flash were regularly at 35,000 feet and travelling at 600mph, this wasn't a problem for my parents. What was a problem was the bomb. In the scheme of things, the emergency landing at Zagreb on a snowbound runway and the 8 hours during which  my waiting parents could only assume the worst, seemed preferable by comparison to the awful alternative. However, barring the abrupt meeting of fuselage and rock face, I like to think that I would have been alright. Private school has many drawbacks but in the 1980's it did equip you to achieve almost anything with a pen knife, a magnifying glass and a Walter Mitty world view. After all, Indiana Jones seemed largely unscathed after bailing out at altitude with nothing but an attractive blonde and an inflatable life raft to break his fall and as a result, he has been my yard stic...

Burying the children up to their necks in the sand entertained them immensely; and provided a few moments of relief from the relentlessness of it all. We could have left them there all day. When they were babies, the control was real. They couldn't walk or talk and even Alex's 'cowboy with an arrow in the leg crawl' was months away. As they grew, they started to assert their independence in countless different ways. First it was sleeping and then eating and one by one the barriers were broken down and the obstacles overcome until now they are fully functioning 4 year old adults. They have all the power of preference but none of the responsibility of choice and I fear that this is likely to continue until they earn their first pay check. Until then, the erosion of control is gradually replaced by the need to manage their increasingly wilful disobedience. At the moment I am deep in the territory of threats, bribery but mainly counting to five. Most conve...

So fleetingly rare is the chance for the parents of small children to enjoy normal discourse, unpunctuated by the perpetual round of threats and bribes, that date night has become an essential pressure valve. No less than 3 times per year, a reckless devil may care attitude surfaces. In a two fingered, hang the expense gesture to the universe, ruinous child care is procured and glad rags are shaken out for the occasion. Not for us, the bright lights and glamorous watering holes, when a carbohydrate heavy feed washed down with something alcoholic and fizzy will suffice. And so having duped Tom and Jenny into not only capturing the little people but also subduing them until our return, we sloped into the evening sunlight leaving a trail of occasional aftershave and bitter recrimination as the penny dropped. After inspecting the wares in the tourist pop up shops at Phare de Baleines (note: there is a big lighthouse but a scandalous absence of whales) we prevaricated until hunger ...

Guided by the unshakeable conviction that the best eateries are always situated by a war memorial, we elbowed our way into Le Moulin à Café, which playfully dominates the east corner of Rue Jean Moulin. It was busier. Whether John Mills was the café owner or merely a Napoleonic street naming celebrity from yesteryear wasn't entirely clear. Either way, in retrospect, shoving some elderly folk roughly into the gutter seemed an entirely fair way to secure seating as when the food came, it was delicious. There was competition for a good seat. Meandering back to the car, there were wall tops to be traversed and bollards to be jumped from but all were callously thrown over when the play ground hove into view. There were no pallid youths, smoking belligerently on the swings and it looked like a long time since any drug raddled adolescents had fired up beneath the monkey bars. This was a giant sand pit populated by a clutch of olive skinned cherubs...

Life between breaks always feels like a frantic 3rd gear chase. After a few days the holiday routine slips into an altogether more comfortable rhythm. The hangovers seem more forgiving; the heat more bearable; the prices marginally less crippling. It is a rapid process of acclimatisation. After all, if you don't come to terms with the continental way of life, the only alternative is to come to blows. So, it slowly dawns on the parents of small children that they can finally relax into the forgotten charms of simple things like a day at the beach. And so we did. Dressed, fed and frog-marched to the car while the world was still sleeping, the children's check list of essential beach paraphernalia quickly contracted to the remnants of a partly digested pain au raisin and a means of undertaking further beach excavations. My only concern was avoiding the relentless UV barrage. Arriving once again in the sand strewn par...