I am now in a quiet moment before a lecture at 7pm. 7PM! I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. This place keeps going late as well as starting early. And it keeps coming.

The way it works is like this: you choose a neighbourhood – we chose them last week – and you stick to it for the next few months, up until Christmas really – and that’s your beat. You get to know the schools and the cops and community board and the waterfont and the old shops and the people with no teeth and the power stations, priests and bowling alleys. Me neighbourhood is called Sunset Park and it’s in Brooklyn. They give you bum neighbourhoods. Not bum exactly but not the Upper East Side or Central Park or Soho or anything. So Sunset Park. Used to be Norwegian and Finnish and Irish and now its Mexican and Puerto Rican and Chinese and still a bit European, with some Russian and some Polish. Fittingly, maybe, it has New York’s biggest cemetery. The monster Greenwood Cemetery and all its old generals and tax collectors. Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York is buried there. Thank God that’s over. I went there on Saturday night and watched the Wizard of Oz in a chapel there. Quite something with the lights out and the boomy chapel and the happyhappy people that run cultural events like these. Oz was NOT bad though. And the bit where it turns from black and white into colour and Oz is quite something. You see those plastic plants and the little water features and the trippy munchkins for the first time and their wiggly little plant hats. Pretty funny. I had a bit of a cough which was bad because little coughs in that chapel were noisy.

So you cover the neighbourhood and you walk up and down the main drag talking to shopkeepers and family action planners and old madpeople who want to talk to the student journalist with his yellow pad. Tomorrow I’m off to visit Janton Industries to profile a local business. They do construction and design and building maintenance. They recently sacked some people but I don’t think they know I know that. I only know that because I heard it off a guy with almost no teeth at all who lived above a stripjoint. He also said he was diabetic, actually he wasn’t sure because he hadn’t been to a doctor to see, so maybe he was something else. Anyway, tomorrow to Janton. It’s good though, the “nabe” as they call it here. You do trudge up and down and if you get on a bad run of, ‘no thank you’, ‘who the fuck are you’ ‘go away I’m praying’ then you can feel suicidal. I spoke to a street’s worth of ‘nope’ ‘uh huh’ ‘not really’ ‘don’t know’ ‘ ’ types the other day as I walked around a power plant trying to make them say something interesting about the powercut and their daily lives next to this great big hawking facility. But they didn’t. Not a squeak. I had to go and mope around the cemetery after that.