(Not so) trusty Italian boots

I got off to a slow start yesterday as I got stuck in one of my boots. Tell me how it’s possible that my right leg fattened overnight? But it happened. Left leg? No visible changes and the boot slid off like satin from a hooker’s bed after I decided against wearing said boots. Then the trouble started.

I haven’t once felt scared in this city but hopping about Caro’s apartment cursing an Italian boot-maker I was overcome by fear. Questions started percolating at an astounding rate – would I have to hop out into the street and enlist the help of locals? (Harlem being one of the friendliest places I’ve ever stayed, fear was induced by the thought of looking like a Celtic turnip in one black boot and bright pink socks when it seems like everyone else is so laid back), call the NY Fire Dept or just scream? Caro was in a meeting with her boss who is, oh, only Salman freaking Rushdie and neither would appreciate a distressed call from me held hostage in a boot. For that matter, would anyone?

I had things to do, places to go, undiscovered aspects of my personality to find for god’s sake – I’m in NY for a limited time and I’m stuck in a boot in Harlem?

Ah, thank goodness for those yogis I love at ‘The Ashram’ as I remembered one of their tips for collecting one’s thoughts in times of crisis. Closing my eyes and humming with my hands over my ears I stood like I was trying to balance on a hobby horse in the lounge. Ridiculous, yes, but then came an epiphany – a trusty bobby pin, bathed in light.

My fingers were raw from trying to move the insubordinate zip but I hooked the pin through it and after a little yank – FREEDOM! I celebrated by wearing my new strawberry coloured wedges (tripping on cobbles frequently) and cursed those damn boots as I periodically flexed my calves in a futile attempt to tone them.

So here are some pics I took walking around Greenwich Village and Meatpacker’s District. I’ll write about both areas later, the recounting of the boot episode has taken it out of me for now.

A pair of lemons refresh the building

Tile for America

Hail the trusty strawberry wedge

The glamorous Pastis

The cleaners with a great font

More Louboutin 'take me to bed or loose me forever shoes'...easy to get on and if it appears - imagine?

Louboutin, darling

This chandelier was swinging in the breeze

Village drinking hole

Vera Wang's boutique, women standing outside 'licking the windows' (as they say in France, which would make it far more seductive diversion)

Yet another adorable dog

Subway tales

It took me a week to really get the hang of the subway which isn’t too surprising, especially for the geographically challenged. For the first few days I felt like a mole popping my head out when I got to the top of the steps, generally clueless about my location. But now that I have finally worked out which direction I’m going in, I love it.

So much life happens below the pavements of this city – little vignettes are played out in each carriage as trains rattle through a tapestry of lines that connect the city.

Rush hour on 42nd

Father and child in the land of nod

Enlightenment?

Pink & plum ripple

Here she comes

The orange family & bike

Woman & bag made of roof installation...she'll apparently make me one if I like

Our late night carriage home

Coyotes and a Soho loft

I learned a new trick in the park today. Some stretches are like the Tour de France and though I’m not delusional enough to join the peloton I am considerably faster than some of the hire bikes. The real cyclists shout ‘coming left, coming right’ as they blow your hair back at 100 miles an hour. I don’t know what you call an insubordinate pack of Italians on wheels but I encountered one and found myself calling out, first quietly before yelling to save us all from an almighty pile up. My god it felt good.

Caro took me to a pretty fabulous dinner in a Soho loft last night with some highly decorated writers. I think being a former under 16s disco dancing champion of the Highlands provided me with just enough credibility to be there.

The elevator dropped us in the dining room (my eyes widened, I managed not to gasp and stayed cool, on the outside at least) to reveal a vast, episodic home – every few metres was like a chapter from the 50s and 60s. The host told me that he had bought all the furniture in Miami in the 80s from thrift stores and had it reupholstered. The art didn’t look like it was from thrift shops and I liked my paper napkin so much I took it home. I wish I could have taken pictures but it’s simply felt too rude (and naff!) to be tourist at a swanky dinner party.

I was talking to the host’s wife, Ali, about Central Park and a story I read years ago in The New Yorker about a guy who takes kids on tours to forage for food in the park. It’s not like there are many farms in NY so I thought a good lesson about the origins of food, though I won’t be serving beetles on a bed of nettles for lunch. Ali told me about some coyotes who found their way into the park this year. Coyotes Got Talent?…this one is on ice: New York Times. I love to think that those coyotes have made the park their home though won’t be bothering one if our paths cross.

And while I’m focused on canines, I don’t know if this picture of the guide dogs being trained in the park translates but it was lovely to watch them go through their routines. My Nana had a golden lab called Kerry whom the whole family adored – labs are such gentle, beautiful animals, who always make me cry.

Beautiful guide dogs

Renegade Italians

Make a wish

Yes, I really did take a picture of my napkin...

Cycling in Central Park

I have been cycling around Central Park in the mornings on Caro’s too big for me bike. I suppose I look like a circus act but it feels so good.

The park is in full bloom – in the time I’ve been here the cherry blossoms have exploded like pink sherbet all over the park, the tulips are standing to attention like the soldiers of spring and there are snowdrops which speckle the grass under each tree. But that’s enough of the flowery superlatives.

New Yorkers love their park. It hosts joggers in all sorts of spandex concoctions, disco dancing rollerbladers, mothers with Starbucks as big as their babies, hobos carting their lives about in shopping trolleys, pillowy skinned grey men jogging and egging each other not to give up and baseball coaches who yell ‘hey, how you honey?’ as I schwoom past. Today took the biscuit as I cycled with a man in his 70s who was rollerblading before stopping to listen to these jazzers.

My hour round trip takes in the smart upper west apartments, the Met and the Guggenheim before getting back to Harlem. The first time I clocked that I was cycling past the Guggenheim almost ended in a spectacular fall it felt so surreal. Central Park is a far cry from all the cycling I did around the Highlands when I was growing up but, for now, she’s the urban queen to my highland king.

Primary coloured jogging

Jazzers in the park

Spring's soldiers

Sun glints and winks on the upper west

sherbet blossoms

Laps of the Great Lake

Loafing in Soho

A woman asked me for directions in Soho today – she looked at me at me incredulously and barked ‘what do you mean you have no idea, you look so assured’. Yeah, right. We talked for a while and she hadn’t been in Soho for 20 years and wanted to relive some memories, ‘yes, involving sex’. I left her to it.

I seem to have mastered the art of looking like I know where I’m going when, generally, I am clueless and wholly reliant on serendipity.

Soho is great fun – lots of dogs in bags, men wearing loafers with no socks and pencil pants (this look is drenching NY, RIP socks), models on fag breaks with rollers in their hair, lots of thick rimmed glasses, preppy college kids channeling Tom Wolfe, cravats and the faint smell of perfumed French cigarettes, expensive boutiques, kooky bakeries and exorbitantly priced art. There are also lots of people just like me, but they aren’t making quite as much colour.

Cabbies on a fag break

I wanted to be behind that door...

pretty lampost bondage

pieces of eight

the great escape

liberty and cookies

hits of the past

Ooh la la

Veusuvio Bakery

ouves and olive bread

Once upon a tart...

black poloneck & pooches

Campton Gallery

a crown of eggs

Travels around a cake tin

I don’t go all gooey over eating cake but I love to make them -  it’s all about starting with a vision and then, in many cases, ending up with something completely different!

But New York, now it is a cake kind of town. Since I’ve been here I’ve made two cakes which I’ve found to be a perversely thrilling achievement. I’ve witnessed many New Yorkers shovel them into their mouths with fervor and joined them by falling in love with tiramasu which, not strictly cake, has changed my life albeit in a small way.

I’m no Julia Child and normally when I make this cake it’s referred to as chocolate soup – deceptively solid on the outside but sloppy when you get to the heart of the matter. My first invite to a NY dinner party with Caro and the sun shone on us as we walked through Central Park with this little ‘solid in the middle for the first time ever’ triumph.

And for dinner party #2 there was the ill-fated lemon drizzle cake. Ill-fated as we don’t have an electric mixer and that cake needs a lot of whisk to bring on those stiff white peaks. My right arm gave it all the gumption it had but the lemon drizzle just didn’t reach the heights it deserved, living up to its name. But I had a chat to it mid-bake and, though a little bit of a slow starter that looked nothing like the picture – Jamie - it turned out to be delicious.

The fruit provided the fibre...

Deflated but delicious lemon drizzle cake

Tiramasu, I love you

Daisy the - possibly radioactive - cupcake