Choral power

There's something so strong, breathtaking and compelling about a choir in full flight and today I was reminded how potent massed voices can really be at a St. Patrick's service held at Eton College.  Granted a great setting too helps where the sound resonates just right off the walls.  Stony amplification.

Two pieces of music that have no instrumental accompaniment keep popping into my head.

One was the Scottish choir singing at the Queen Elizabeth II September Garden in New York City on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 - they sang an extraordinary medley of Amazing Grace and Star Spangled banner al fresco (and in a studio - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YimrX3hxwhY).  The other was the London Youth Gospel Choir just belting out some tunes at a JazzFM Awards ceremony in London.  I think they were memorable because they were live, so very raw, human and uniting.

Coffee beans over tax

On a trivial afternoon six months ago, I trawled the coffee shops near where I work in the City of London for a brief price check of a double espresso.  The price band is quite tight.  My suspicion about Costa Coffee, Nero, Starbucks and all the other shops is about the freshness of the beans.  No disrespect, really, but Costa seems to have a bitter coffee, amaro.  I don't know why, but even at Linate airport in Milan, the coffee is strong, but the edge is sane, even creamy tasting without cream.

London coffees are suspect.  I am still arguing this with my colleague from Puglia, who may not agree with my fine Milanese friend who makes the coffee outside Mansion House Tube.  I am shy to call him a barista as I think that's phoney, but he tells me the taste I like is is also how he makes the coffee, it is not just the beans.  Anyhow. Find him outside in Bow Lane, in an "ape" in a churchyard space, a sort of pop up caff.  £1.80 for my double espresso fix.

Up in the attic at Westminster Abbey

What a privilege to mount seventy seven steps to be shown what is known as the Triforium at Westminster Abbey, a huge expanse of upper space that covers three sides of the inner Abbey walls and looks down on all the ecclesiastical fun and pomp below.  It's dusty, broad, hard to spot from below and with just a few metal bars to prop the television cameras that get those fantastic views of royal weddings and other ceremonies.  Unlike St. Paul's, the Abbey has no crypt, apparently it's marshland underneath, so the Triforium has served as an attic for bits and pieces that need storage over the years.  Through the windows are vistas of the Houses of Parliament and sights of the roofscape and other gargoyles within.  What an exciting space right in the heart of this Royal Peculiar.  The next level down you can see a library and a ground level there is now also a decent restaurant, where Benedictine monks would once enjoy their repast.

New York City: snap, crackle and pop (edited highlights)

Second day after the storm

The storm has passed so it's the mopping up in hand.  The private cars started reappearing yesterday, so that's a sign of recovery.

Once the subways, tunnels and trains re-open it'll be business as usual.  It's just that which is stopping the workforce getting in.  BUT the electrical damage means where you plan to stay will be important.  I was told it'll take "seven days" to get power back downtown.  And even 39th St where I was staying (near Grand Central) is dark.  I saw a group of Japanese queuing outside a Prada shop in the Rockefeller Center yesterday waiting for it to open.  Sort of surreal.  Once bridges and tunnels working, I think the City will come back to life - just a bit like a cardiac arrest I guess....

Day after the storm
Yes, chaotic.  The perfect storm combined high tides (full moon), a north eastern front clashing with Hurricane Sandy which meant the waves reached 14 feet and promptly splashed into subways, electrical sub-stations one of which blew up like a firecracker.  Darkness ensued.

I checked out of my hotel on 39th Street yesterday evening as it had no power, no telephone and no running water and even the lift with the local generator packed up, so we were using the service lift in pitch black darkness which meant the eighth floor had an edge of disaster movie to it.  So I left.

With half of Manhattan (south of 39th St) with no power, the tourists and locals all also tried to migrate to mid-town which has run out of space.  Nowhere to stay! After unsuccessfully pitching a Philly work colleague for her address book (she's spent the night at her Pennsylvania idyll with no power, under the stairs, trees toppling over her neighbours' houses) I successfully begged space in the end from a Canadian friend who has a condo.  Plan B would have been to  bunk with poor Adrian Lim who is also trapped in NYC.

It'll all take time to repair.  And the parks, schools, trains, subways, restaurants are all closed ("locked down").  Odd to see people herding outside shut Starbucks to get free wifi and tourists aimlessly photographing the devastation.  It's a movie town!  So the local economy last night was in the hands of the odd Mom and Pop stores, cab drivers.  Corporate America has vanished.

Oddly enough it is colder back in England and the rain is pleasantly vertical when it comes, barely a breeze this morning.  JFK is due to re-open today but the backlog will take some time to process. I'm due out tomorrow night but now need to know if the bridges and tunnels are re-opened or not today. That's it so far!

We're all volunteers now!

I have returned from sunny Spain to a transformed UK that is rejoicing in Olympiad fellowship. With no internet where I was in the Costa de la Luz, I feel I have missed something vital those few weeks away. Stories abounded of visitors happily picking up the litter of others at the games, opening doors for the elderly, a spirit of shared goodwill and bonhomie unheard of in contemporary inner London. 

So as I donned a corporate branded polo shirt for our yachting sponsorship yesterday, I too transformed into a "volunteer", with tourists smiling and asking me the way to the ferry, public loos and ticket prices.  Maybe it's the idea of a uniform, especially a casual one for baristas and holiday reps, but it's now a jovial universal passport to a sort of Big Society anonymity.  So a bloke winked at me in the Kilburn High Road last night, but wearing a jacket with the words "Sailing Team" on the back can carry a different, even metro ironic tone the further you get from the Solent and the Isle of Wight. 

Thunderbirds are go!

Oh wow.  They've landed the space shuttle, with its mothership 747, in a corner of JFK airport in New York.  No one knows whether this is a resting space, a permanent fixture, a fair or a funeral.  And I gasped as mad Pepe wove his yellow cab (bald tyres and all) up the slipway towards Terminal 7.  The shuttle is big and clunky, full metal-jacketed and built in an age where rivets still commanded some authority.  Should the day come when our ipaded, soft electronic devices with their squishy compatibility go zap and burn out, I sense the shuttle will be wheeled out sedately to save the world.  It's sort of admirable, not beautfully designed like Concorde, but broad-shouldered.  A sort of Amtrak for the skies. 

A brief taste of Caribbean life

Thinnking back on it, there's no reason why bits of the Caribbean should not embrace the sort of fellow traveller one tries hard to avoid at Gibraltar and Gatwick airports. Both are near-seaside sorts of places. I think it must be the sea, or the ocean, but there was a dispiritng number of tattoed men with metal necklaces at the back of the plane to Antigua. They seem cash rich. And why not?  Didn't Long John Silver cavort much of his piratical life in that neck of the woods ("pieces of eight")?  And hasn't the Caribbean always been a smuggler's delight, from days of the US civil war, running blockades, to money centres of dubious repute in more recent times.

The Dominican Republic now caters for mainly a North American clientele; most of the Brits decamped our BA plane which docked briefly in Antigua and we carried on to Punta Cana (inbound flights galore from Miami, even Moscow).  I now understand the meaning of all-inclusive resort living,which first involves being awestruck by the bright photoshopped blue skies and white beaches on websites, trying to figure out where would be a nice place to stay.  Then the experience itself ends as a Truman Show of predictability, nice at first in a sticky cocktail way, like visiting Disney, no thinking is involved, just a vague mindlessness and safe for the kids. Eventually sand flies (which bite aggressively) are a reminder that it is no dream. It was not without relief to return to the wintry chill of a damp British Easter.

Gasping in all that Swiss mountain air

The "fumoirs" at Zurich airport are so elegant, glassy and alluring that I half-wanted to take up smoking again last week.  I have staggered past their British airport equivalents catching planes, those sad little pens of shame and have felt comfortable with my decision to quit seven years back.  Zurich almost tempted me back into the fold.

The relaxed Winston room (see left) looked as cool and fun as a London boutique hotel's cocktail bar.  The etching of the brand and the well-typset English health warning, "tobacco can seriously damage your health" on the glass frontage just added to an appetising feel that dragging at a Winston is not only cool, but somehow cleansing and healthy, sensual, minty even.  Why is it that the idea of smoking up in the snowy Swiss mountains or down on a sunny Mediterranean beach might seem somehow less injurious than puffing away in the damp cities of the Thames valley?  

 

I had almost forgotten how powerful smoking is as an idea - 'Cigarettes are not positively beautiful, but they are sublime by virtue of their charming power to propose what Kant would call "a negative pleasure": a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity; the taste of infinity in a cigarette resides precisely in the "bad" taste the smoker quickly learns to love. Being sublime, cigarettes, in principle, resist all arguments directed against them from the perspective of health and utility.'  Lovely.  Better to have loved and lost.