New York City: a place to visit

What a marvellous trip!! Many places we have seen, nice people at the Van Halen concert with us, great weather all along, and the food.... yummy!! I'm trying hard but I cannot decide what I liked most. MoMA, Empire State Building, the fire escapes, the subway steam in the streets, the Village, the boat tour... I guess it's the whole thing. It really was like I had always seen it films - just different!

New York & real life

Last week we finally sat down and booked our trip to New York for the end of May. We have been thinking about it for a long time, and I have been dreaming about it for even longer. So once the booking was confirmed and the trip had been paid - what a joy!! Oh the feeling when a dream comes true! I smiled when I opened the confirmation email, I smiled when I started whistling the song New York, New York, I smiled over dinner, I smiled at the supermarket.... I kept smiling. And adding stuff to the list of things I want to do ad see. The big apple - I'm coming!

Then yesterday evening it dawned on me that not only we're flying from Heathrow Terminal 5, but that we are also flying British Airways. Shock!! It feels like the Atlantic ocean is getting bigger and bigger and New York is silently drifting away from me... I'll have to talk to Oliver.

My bad luck with past flights is not to be underestimated: 2 flights missed, 1 flight cancelled, 1 flight nearly cancelled due to an attempted terrorist attack (the one with liquids), 1 major delay due to fog, 1 major delay due to technical faults with the main air radar in northern Italy, 2 baggage delays. Am I flying too much or is there something wrong out there?!?

Ah, yes, I do live on an island.

Easter & books

During this low key Easter weekend spent with Oliver in London, all our four other housemates off to somewhere nice but equally cold and wet, I have dedicated plenty of time to reading newspapers, and book reviews in particular. There has never been a time with more literature prizes. Now even supermarkets and coffe shops give out prizes. And chocolate companies. Maybe an online travel agency will be the next one to invent a book prize, probably for fiction or biography.

The Guardian has dedicated the front page interview of its magazine to Jordan, or Katie Price if you prefer, whom I now find a whole lot more irritatingly horrible than before. And who at the age of 29 has 3 biographies out. Richard Hammond has co-written with his with Mindy a book on before and after his near-fatal car accident in Semptember 2006 during the shooting of Top Gear. And commedian Russel Brand just brought out his biography too, of course. And then Clarissa Dickson Wright, one half of the duo of Two Fat Ladies. At least she has lived long enough to have plenty to tell us... I look at all these biographies and cannot stop thinking it is a mere business. Yes, it is interesting to read about other's people's life, and the occasional one can be inspiring too. But all these many to me simply read like gossip, and this is when I appreciate people like Stephen King who wrote a short memoir of his life (and it is indeed not very long) as the beginning part of his book On Writing, where his autobiography is actually an integral part of the following and main part of the book. Thoughts and tips on writing. In other words, this is a book for the sake of writing, not merely of money.

Contrary to all my expectations I must admit I really like audiobooks. Yes, it's very nice and important to read books yourself, but I decided to give it a go and went to the local library. Among the rather poor selection on offer I found Andrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years by Sue Townsend, loaded it on my iPod and went to the gym. Well, I liked that session a lot more than many others!