Please place your valuables and electronic devices in the hands of muggers before leaving the country.

It has been a long time since I have recorded my movements in this blog. This results partly from a burgeoning workload and an increasing familiarity with my less than new surroundings. A brief summary of happenings is as follows:

• New Years Eve at big house in Connecticut. Mainly talked to the pets and passed out curled up in the bottom of an arm chair
• Went skiing in Whistler to visit friend (Katie Salter) doing ski season. Very snowy and cold
• Have been contracted out to client in New York and so spending four days a week in the city. It remains busy and tall
• Currently coming to the end of a two week business/pleasure (that fatal mix) trip to the UK. All was going swimmingly until...

And now the incident that has prompted my return to the blogosphere:

Last night, while walking to Kilburn tube from my Aunt Celia’s house, I was mugged by two hooded youths who ended up with some cash and my bag containing my laptop. While this is perhaps not an event that would normally be suited for a publication of this tone, the rather pathetic humour of the event is worth relating. Thus, I present for you the events of the evening of 13th March 2012.

(Enter Patrick, a fine looking young man dressed in his smart casual work wear, a dark navy pea coat and carrying a large black satchel. Glowing with the recent encounter with his extended family, he is strolling back to Kilburn tube to return to his temporary place of residence while he visits London. His gaze falls to the other side of the road where it inadvertently catches the eye of a hooded youth, walking with his companion [also hooded and youthful] in the opposite direction)

[The first piece of evidence in my realisation that I am about as ‘street’ as a Countryside Alliance march in the Royal Opera House is my complete inability to recognise any of the vocabulary used by my assailants, thus I have translated based on context and inflection]

Hooded Youth 1: I say! You there! Does my appearance bother you? If not, why is it that you have chosen to look at me so?

(Patrick walks on, now a little flustered. Youths 1 and 2 cross the road to continue the encounter)

Hooded Youth 1: Is it a physical confrontation that you seek? I am quite prepared for fisticuffs?

Patrick: [actual words] I’m sorry, I don’t really understand but I don’t want any trouble.

Hooded Youth 2: Give us your wallet/purse/money clip and also your mobile telephone.

(Hooded Youth 1 moves in ‘Central Line in rush hour close’ and reaches into his pocket, removing an object that resembles a flick knife, but could quite easily have been a travel comb or a Mont Blanc ‘luxury writing instrument’)

Patrick: Can I keep my cards? They are useless to you.

Hooded Youth 1: A good point well made sir. Let us have all of the currency that you are carrying then.

Patrick: I think I’ve only got American currency on me.

Hooded Youth 1: It will suffice, I know an excellent Bureau de Change a short walk from here.

Hooded Youth 2: Give us your bag!

[the following line is a damning indictment of me as a human being, please be prepared]

Patrick: But it has all my work in it and I haven’t backed up my files for a while!

Hooded Youth 2: Give us your bag or we shall have to stab you!

(Patrick reluctantly hands over satchel, laptop and all. The youths, growing jumpy, turn and run [were they rapscallions from the early to mid 20th century, they would have ‘scarpered’])

Hooded Youth 1: Now we shall go our separate ways, I suggest you don’t look at us or follow us.


At this point I attempted to follow them at a distance, but lost track of them while speaking to the lady in the Police incident room. I then stood and waited for a police car to come and pick me up so we could search the surrounding area. My woes followed the following process:

1. Bugger, that was a nice laptop and I don’t think it will be covered by any insurance + I am going to lose some work
2. Shit, my glasses were in the bag
3. Wank, my book (John Niven’s The Second Coming) was in the bag, I was really enjoying that

Eventually, I found the police car (they had been sent to the wrong road) and we drove around fruitlessly while I tried to be as CSI as possible in my description of events. The officers dropped me home with the promise that they would be ‘turning over’ anyone who matched my descriptions.

On the bright side, I had not been stabbed, my passport was not in the bag, and most importantly, my novel was actually in my coat pocket (this brought an irrational quantity of comfort). Only my ego is injured, and I’m sure some of you will agree that that can only be a good thing!

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Pan the Package Store Man

On occasion, after a long day in the office or a hard earned win on the Rugby pitch, my roommates and I are very fond of having a little drink. Often this will take the form of one of the fine range of American Light Lagers. These fine beverages boast a luxuriant range of flavours from 'over-hydrated urine' to 'fizzy water' and come in amusingly small, soft drink size cans. When purchasing a 'thirty pack' we tend to pop round the corner on to State Street, past Modern Apizza to Pan's Package Store. This is possibly one of my favourite places on earth and is run by one of my favourite people, living or dead.

It is difficult to know where to start with Pan and his store. To describe them separately would be to neglect the fact that the dangerously and bizarrely packed shelves are very much an extension of Pan's (potentially) dangerous and bizarrely packed, certifiably insane mind. I shall attempt to relate to you the wonder that is PPS through an imagined visit.

One enters, often after waiting for Pan to unlock the door during perfectly normal business operating hours, to the beaming face of Pan. With his broken English, he'll meet you with a traditional Chinese greeting such as:

'hey good boy'

or

'you a Doctor right?'

(The latter was I believe, inspired by the tweed jacket that I was wearing at the time. While it may have simply been a witty observation on the sartorial choices of those in the medical profession I would not entirely put it past Pan that he would allow me to perform major surgery on him)

Having passed the initial test of recognition, one clambers, quite literally, across a floor strewn with boxes of alcoholic drinks usually towards the large refrigerator at the back of the store. There one picks out his piss-juice of choice, 'perhaps a busch light tonight? I heard that a man in the factory knows a guy who once saw a hop'. It is then very important to check your thirty, to ensure that it is in fact a thirty. Pan, not being one to stick with the conventions.....or laws when it comes to vending alcohol, enjoys cutting up boxes of beer, resealing them with electrical tape and selling them in smaller quantities at a premium. He also enjoys secreting well disguised bottles of paint thinners and industrial lubricants among the hard alcohol to catch the less-observant shopper unawares...what a joker!

With beer in hand, one approaches the counter, trips over a crate or an unfortunate victim of methylated spirits consumption, gets back up and reaches our beaming Chinese friend. What follows is often the highlight of the trip. Who knows what magical journey Pan's (probably diseased) mind will take us on now. Will he tell us about his son studying medicine at the Michigan State or perhaps he postulate a political explanation of the special relationship between the UK and the US. One thing is always certain, he will rigorously enforce the drinking laws of Connecticut with the oh so cunning: 'you twenty one right?' Once this has been established beyond all reasonable doubt one is free to leave and enjoy your purchase, chuckling on the walk home about Pan, that wonder man.

Finally, here is the conversation/insane diatribe that Nathan and I were party to last night:

'Hey doctors!'

'Hi Pan'

(To Nate, I am giggling in the refrigerator*) 'What's your major'

'Oh, I majored in English'

'English Writing!! Great, Thanksgiving!!'

'Yer...Thanksgiving?'

'My first Turkey Party (mimes large bird) phwoar.....we eat some then (mimes throwing semi-consumed fowl with some gusto)'

'You threw it into the garden?'

'Yer!! I see a bird, can't fly, so fat hahahahahahahaha you twenty one right.....

That tale of avian cannibalism is just one of the ways that Pan lures the potentially under-aged in before he strikes.

*Its walk-in

Pre-Christmas

How one of the worlds greatest superpowers has got away with celebrating Christmas twice in a year is little short of amazing. You would think that the people of China, with an annual Turkey based feast count of zero, would be up in arms at the flagrant over consumption of bald fowl by one of their key nuclear rivals. But apparently that is not the case.

Across America, on the fourth Thursday of November, families gather to gorge themselves sick, watch football (American) and recall their country’s relationship with it’s indigenous peoples with some of the most spectacularly rose tinted glasses to leave a metaphorical opticians. For those of you not in the know, the origin of the feast day is as follows:

Back in the day (16 something and something) a group of people left Europe on a ship bound for the then New World. They were fleeing the persecution that they faced in their home countries as a result of their choice in headwear and aggressively large shoe buckles. Having departed from Plymouth, they arrived in Plymouth (much to the less observant among them’s annoyance) and decided to set up shop¹. However they soon encountered a problem.

With their packed lunches exhausted and the final mars bar consumed they quickly realized that their money was not good in any of the local stores. Fortunately, Squanto, a local Native American and a dab hand at growing corn and catching eels taught them how to find food and feed themselves…on corn and eels.

To celebrate they held a great feast for three days to give thanks for their safe passage and the fact that they hadn’t starved.

Then they killed all the Indians (more or less).

And so it is today that Americans remember that happy time by eating approximately 1/5 of a genetically modified super turkey, losing proprioception, and collapsing to watch American Football.

My first experience of this most excellent of holidays occurred at the Stohler household. Justine Stohler is the girlfriend (eeeuuugh yuck) of my increasingly shiny-headed roommate Nate. I was greeted with literally open arms into a marvelously diverse family who proceeded to feed me too much then force me to play backyard football, then watch me dry heave a little, then force me to play again. I feel I represented Britain with some aplomb, complementing Grams on her fine stuffing, throwing one of the two touchdown passes of the day and being suitably excited by a close game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Miami Dolphins.

Bring on Christmas proper.

1 “This looks alright, lets set up shop” A Pilgrim – back in the day

New York (concrete jungle where dreams are made of, if by dreams you mean meeting up with Katie)

Before I begin in earnest (I’m sorry Earnest, but it has to be done), I would like to make two small points:

1. Many people have been to New York. I know this because on the weekend I was there, there were loads of people, more than I could count, and that was just one weekend, so imagine how many people go there in two, three or more (for example seven) weekends. Essentially, for some of you, this will not be news at all, but please humour my naivety.
2. My sojourn in NYC occurred many moons ago and so my retelling may be less than accurate. This does however, grant me extra leeway for artistic license.

I made my trip down to the Big Apple on the last weekend of September. The weather was close, and the train was filled with hoards of Yankee fans heading down to one of their side’s 162 games (I know, fully mentile amount of games) of the regular season. I passed the hour and a half journey reading ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ (still not finished) and trying my hardest to keep eyes front while the neighbouring couple flirted with the edge of convention in their game of ‘hand on thigh’.

On arriving at Grand Central Station I marveled briefly at the famous Vanderbilt Hall and then attempted to contact my close friend and compatriot, Katie Churchill (who is always on hand for alliterative purposes). Katie was in the States on the Cambridge Footlights tour of North America, and I had managed to catch her on the last day of the trip. I say catch, I walked the streets of the city for approximately 7.4 miles attempting to reach her and her companions:

‘Did you have a group of English people in here earlier?’

‘Yep, they left about three hours ago’

‘Thank you kind barista fellow’

It was after many hours of this unremarkable detective work that I eventually found Katie and chums in Greenwich Village, sometimes lazily referred to as simply ‘the village’ (something I feel would anger residents of small agglomerations across our sceptered isle). There we supped diet cokes, ate French fries and tittered beguilingly at the near constant witty back and forth*. We split up, Katie and I with plans to head to the Museum of Natural History and the others with plans that I cannot recall but did not feature myself in any form other than absence.
As expected, the museum was full of bones, stuffed animals and other reminders of a time when the rest of the world was perceived as more of a curiosity shop by the wealthy and adventurous. While I struggled with temperature regulation in the inconsistently air-conditioned halls, Katie busied herself reading labels and deciding which her favourite prehistoric beast was. Often her vocalized thoughts would slice through the hubbub, keen blades of insight:

‘Dinosaurs are so big’

‘This one looks like its wearing a hat’

‘Brain the size of a walnut, well I never, the size of a walnut’

Having not seen ‘Night at the Museum’ and thus being unsure of Ben Stiller’s eventual fate, we chose to obey the closing time announcements and headed out into the balmy evening. We wiled an hour away outside a bar, discussing the sheer density of the city. I don’t think I’ve ever seen urbanized intent on similar scale anywhere else in the world. With the waters of the Hudson River and the Long Island Sound firmly determining the boundaries of Manhattan, man’s endeavour to inhabit this 13 mile island is clearly demonstrated by the towering structures that surround you on every street. The experience of exploring these man-made canyons is something quite unfamiliar to me.

Another thing that remains entirely alien to my foreign sensibilities is the US service industry. I managed to cause something more than hoo-hah but less than a kerfuffle when I ordered my drinks from the bar where we last left Paddy and Katie. The fixed grin, struggling to hold back the torrent of hatred, worn by the waitress who, having been cheated out of my tip, pointedly told me that my trip was unnecessary, is something I have witnessed more than once before (shit me, clearly not a fan of simple sentence structure [ed]).

Katie and I rejoined the footlights team for a dinner of Thai food and high brow conversation** before saying our fond farewells.

And thus the second half of my weekend began. First I met up with Nate (flatmate, colleague and loser of hair) before we headed to an apartment in the Upper West Side in which we found:

James Brunswick: Resident of aforementioned apartment, friend of Nate’s from university, enjoys baseball, spending time on the roof and snuggling with Nate.

Kevin Yamazaki: Resident of Los Angeles (Spanish – ‘The Angels’) California, friend of Nate’s from university, has chosen not to fulfill any stereotypes by owning a car from Fast and the Furious and being extremely acrobatic.

James’ Mother: Mother of James (see above)

We supped beers from the roof of James apartment marveling at the vista before us (Nate being particularly enamored by the phenomena of reflections, to an almost Neanderthal extent). What followed was a night of debauchery and revelry that does not bear repeating in text (we went to a bar, stole a ping pong ball, met a nice African American lady called Asia and were disappointed that Kevin was not around to be introduced as our friend ‘Africa’, ate omlettes at 04:00 in the morning, discovered Jame’s fish had died and went to bed).

On the morrow, we held a brief service for Wally (aforementioned fish), ate Indian pancakes, went to the cinema (Moneyball, good film) and generally faffed around waiting for Nate’s Dad to pick us up and drive us back up the coast. This he did with great aplomb.


* Here is an excellent example of the aforementioned artistic license. In reality, I spent most of my time giggling like a school girl, reminding myself that I am not in fact a school girl but rather an idiot, and thus, grinning like an idiot.
** See above.

List I

The aisle marked 'Inspiration' in the supermarket of my mind was bare this week so instead I have compiled a list. This is a list of words that I have been exposed to in the US world of business. I will admit to having used some of them. Yes, I am going to hell:

1) Super [adverb/adjective] - used to mean 'very' as in 'I'm super pumped...'

2) Pumped [adjective] - used to mean excited as in 'We are super (see 1) pumped about this deal'

3) In sync [noun] - to be in agreement with a younger Justin Timberlake

4) Action [verb] - to do......

5) Leverage [verb] - to help...... (note how the last two are one syllable longer than their more commonly found synonyms)

6) Associate [noun] - essentially means person e.g. 'Recruiting Associate' = 'Recruiting Person' or 'Recruiter'

7) Bucket [noun] - meaning group or collection (I like to visualise a 'bucket of candidates' when it is mentioned in meetings)

8) Reach out [verb] - to contact, but with an unintended (I assume) hint of desperation

9) Todd [noun] - a silly name often held by a man

10) OOO [acronym] - this quite sensibly means 'Out Of Office' but before I knew this I thought my colleagues were demonstrating surprise

Finally (there are more but these immediately spring to mind) we come to 11) Explode. I'm not entirely sure what this means but I have seen it used as follows:

' Thank you for your interest but my offer with Goldman recently exploded'.

I have not heard from Todd since.

Work

Work

I have a job now. A job is like being a student except that you get paid and sometimes a big American man called Cliff makes you appear to have the mental capacity of a toddler in a meeting in front of some people that you don’t know very well and some that you don’t know at all*.

In my office there are at least five different companies at work. They are all run by a group of guys which is smaller than the number of companies. Thus, you will deduce that some of them are involved in more than one of the companies. If you imagine that there are six pies you are confusing matters by the introduction of baked goods. That was entirely unnecessary. Anyhow, this means that the hierarchy, rather than following the traditional pyramid structure, looks more like a spider web woven by a badger.

Despite this, everything seems to function rather well and it means that I get to do all sorts of different things with all sorts of different people and businesses. At the moment, I am principally working for a recruiting firm placing people in permanent roles mainly in finance. Nate (whose hair continues its retreat) also works with me on this. We also work with Alex, Christian, Marcos and Gianmarco who are in South America. We talk to these guys on Skype, sending them emoticons and links to videos of an agoraphobic cat. The boss man (not related to my vacuum) is Mike, who begins answers to all questions with ‘good question’, I like to think that I ask him silly questions to make him say it’s a good question but I don’t, because that would be silly.

Recruiting for me, centres around looking at peoples resumes (which in the US does not mean begins again but CV) and then calling them and asking them all sorts of challenging questions. This is actually quite fun and I enjoy talking to people. I also ask people at the end of our discussions if I could have done anything to make the interview better. They always say nice things because they want to be my friend, lover or get a job.

I have also been placed in charge of setting up a tutoring business in the northern New York Metro area using Yale postgraduate students. This is brainchild of David, who of all people, is at the top of Leonard’s (I forgot to mention the Badger is called Leondard) web. This is really cool because I essentially get to try starting up a business from scratch with someone else’s money. If it works out, it will look pretty pimpin’ on my CV/resume and if it doesn’t I will blame the market and it will look mildly pimpin’.

So all in all, the office life is actually pretty grand. Me and Nate often throw stuff at each other and no one really complains. Everyone is very relaxed about working hours which means that I often take work home with me. And whilst I have not fully acclimatized, I am growing increasingly used to fist bumping, being ‘super pumped’ about new clients and using exclamation marks in emails to make me look excited about stuff.

*The incident I am referring to occurred during a meeting on my first on site visit to our biggest client. I said something that was in fairness a little silly, fell into the old ‘just answer the question so someone in the room says something’ trap, and he responded as follows (I can’t remember his exact words but I shall attempt to give the overall impression):

‘Hey, stupid face! Yer, you, the one with the jacket. Why are you wearing a jacket? No one else in the room is wearing a jacket except for Kerry and she’s a girl. Are you a girl piss for balls? I thought not, because you’re a cretin. You have that dank towel smell that cretins have. Also the thing you said was really stupid’

But then he saw the bright red lining of my jacket and now we are BFFs.