January 24, 2003
New York: I don’t know about you boys, I’m getting me some donuts by Ted Dave
Here in New York we’re staying in Brooklyn, just under the Williamsburg Bridge, a testament to Victorian construction; albeit the work of American Victorians. Built as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the bridge seems to be undergoing one of those Forth Bridge exercises, a rolling programme of repairs augmented by an encroaching substructure of red girders reaching out from Manhattan, across the East River, to form the additional lanes upon which traffic and the silver subway will straddle.
And I can assure you that work is going well, for the jack-hammers kick off at around about seven, spot on time to disturb our return to slumber having lain in the July heat for a couple of hours wrestling with the jetlag that always punishes me for daring to leave the old country.
This is now my sixth visit to the Windy Apple and it finally seems like home. I don’t have the feeling of being an outsider, rather just another Brit at large. I find my New Yorker argot with ease, the casual Americanisms that pepper our language, the swarf from the friction of so much mediated modern day colonial excess on tee-vee, the movies et bleeding cetera, now firmly embedded in my speech.
I clutch the familiar patterns of speech, my atrocious melding of an American English to English - English that embraces the very worst of The Simpsons, Friends and the genius of the Bill and Ted movies. Fortunately, I usually notice this within a few days and then perform a very rapid about turn, seeking to prove my very Englishness, adjusting my speech patterns, subsuming my diction to a sound not heard since Her Majesty’s Xmas day speech. Identity is a funny old thing. I should blame Sting really for glamourising the notion of being Old World other in this odd town, but if I had to think of a tune, it’d be Richard Ashcroft’s eponymous paean to New York.