What a time to be so silent when here there’s been nothing but noise. Sorry to be have been out of touch but myword it has been something. Everything is new: new apartment, new phone, new university, new bank, new people, new city, new weather, new padlock for new locker in new building with new swipe cards and new currency and new way of talking. It feels so new I sometimes look down and see my old shoes or catch a glimpse of a reflection showing my English face and my English clothes and wonder what the hell they can be doing here where I’m starting over on this different subway with this different food. It can be so tiring. I’m so tired now. Funny things are tired. My mouth is tired from talking and saying words like London and Cambridge and the UK and all my life and yes.

But it’s good.

We had a barbecue last week in a park outside new york and us international types (25orso) all stood up and talked about where we were from etc. It took about 3 hours. Up until then, just in the morning, I had met most people and they seemed polite and interesting and nervous or whatever. They did not seem like press officers from the British embassy in Addis Abba, or like Colombians who had fled Colombia and broadcast radio shows twice a day from their home in florida, or like Argentinians who had set up tv stations or Germans who had written about concentration camps in Chile, Chinese journalists with journalism prizes, Indians from the Calcutta courts, New Zealanders from Vietnam, Koreans from Chile, Pakistanis from Citibank, Sicilian movie writers, Glaswegian Glaswegians. Just a knockout. And, grandfatherly looking on, was our professor, Josh Friedman, who picked up his Pulitzer for his coverage of the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s and other coverage of ‘complex-humanitarian-emergencies.’ They told us most people feel a rush of inferiority in their first few weeks / months. My friends that’s where I am right now, juddering around, locking myself out of my apartment, walking too far and forgetting things, desperately trying to stay alive, falling asleep whenever I can and knowing that oh so soon it’s going to change and I’ll be doing all that and trying to write and keep up.

They tried to give me a room that was deathly. I optimistically went to look at it the first day I arrived in the Promised Land and swanked up Riverside Drive, a great wide road on the Side of the River on the Upper West Side, to number 362. 362 does not cover it I can tell you that. This was a monster block, a huge ministry of housing, a termite mountain of graduatesandundergraduates teeming around and wriggling into their damp holes, eyes useless in the dark, feeling their way with noses and cheeks pressed against the bodies around them crawling all feral for gobs of gloop. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. But after sitting trying to be positive on one of those grey mothmunched sofas that sit in the halls of these places and on which no one has ever sat, I was shown upstairs by a big woman who slid around jangling her keys like a jailer. (I’m not going to get on the proverbial wagon / ass of United States O-BESITY but sometimes you do catch a rude full sight of one of the larger creatures they keep here and it can stop you, well it can stop me straight in the street, because you have to watch them make their way like overloaded caravans, swaying and tipping down the street or up some stairs under the hot sun with the wetness of their sweatness reaching out across the bottom of their backs and showing on their chests. We saw some at the zoo, young ones with white chubby ankles squeezed into shoes that they just seemed to burst upwards and outwards from, just packing it in, gobbling their curly fries and heaving on their pepsi familysuperdrinks which had plastic animal heads slapped garishly on top). The jailer showed me up to what I thought was a sort of apple-pie room: deliberately, comically shortened and topped off with a heavily grilled window which looked suddenly out on to a brick wall. She turned on the light (it was about 1:30 on bright July afternoon) to reveal the bed and cupboard and the dust and wires sticking out of the walls and the relics of some suicided international student from last year – a new york transit map forlornly on the regulation pinboard and an old lava lamp, disconnected, dusty and stagnant on the windowsill of despair. The choice was reflex. I’m not even sure it went through my head. Maybe it was one of those decisions that your body takes when it needs to survive or when the doctor knocks you on the knee – zipzip nerves rush to your spine and don’t even bother to ask before they breathe / run / jump / close your eyes / raise your knee – it was like that. She showed the big communal bathroom with its rotting undersized doors and more wires as a kind of knockout blow but I was already running.

Running to flathunting in Manhattan, a gory task which, if you’re feeling fresh and inquisitive and not desperate about finding a place to live, can be a rich way to spend a few days. I was feeling ok, sort of anxious but not bench in the park anxious, so I enjoyed my fifteen or twenty house calls and the faces that popped round the doors and the places they invited me to see. I saw a basement in Harlem and the living hell of a life with Randy the catering entrepreneur and his pugdog who slid around wetly on the floor. I saw Owen the quiet and camp older man and his red apartment full of deathly dusty objects near the park and where he doesn’t have so many visitors maybe once or twice a month but does smoke a bit of pot and by the way what’s your star sign? There was the cardplaying couple from Idaho who encouraged their roommates to stay in their room and watch their tvs and sit basking by their air conditioning, Bart the thoroughly thoroughly normal real estate man who slept in the small living room of his one bedroom apartment but was quite happy for me to move into the bedroom bedroom, dinosaur museum workers from LA looking for their new best friend, Larry who was extremely busy with his divorce and who sat their in his pajamas taking notes on his knee in his grey living room shuttered from the light and surrounded by symptoms of his lost wealth / job / family: great big 1980s tvs, the first computers, dying plants and family snaps with the colours turning wild in the gloom of his dustwrapped flat. Etetetectc.

And then the place I moved into with a guy called Matt who is 23 and does construction / decorating and is full of moneymaking schemes. He’s from Texas. And then there’s Mark who is (unbelievably) about 40 and a photographer, he’s a gay black guy from Queens. But they’re normal and they eat normal food and it has white wooden floors and a good shower and windows and it’s in the West Village so I feel fine. Nervous and not quite relaxed there yet. But fine.

Maybe more soon. Things are happening fast here.