Return to the USA

Sorry about the quietness of the blog but somehow there’s less to say when I can say it to your faces. Yesterday I touched back down onto the cold grey streets. I watched Willy Wonka on the plane and felt duly unsettled. Then the captain said he had good news and bad news about the weather in the city. I forget the good news. I was gasping and reaching for jumpers with the rest of the passengers, repeating the words minus nine and minus twelve and many miles of winds and feeling much colder than that. Out of the window, there was the flat orange light of another winter sunset and a grey sheen of sky with darker splotches, but nothing too menacing. There were those little stubby trucks racing over the tarmacs and boarding corridors suddenly stopped with nowhere to go, in order words, no crisis.

In the airport I heard the first twangs, the first New York noises and got shuffled along in line with the rest of the visitors. On the TV screen above our heads, CNN quietly screamed that there were only 3 days to go before the Iowa caucus, The First Democratic Primary! And that they, oh my friends would they, be there, behind the scenes, in the scenes, on the scenes, making scenes, ten five four three two one, cue…. White House…. 2004! It’s set to run this one, only 10 months of campaign to go. Then the same woman as last time, tall, scraggy, long legged and sharp eyed, directing her lines of tourists to be checked and stamped, showed me to my customs agent. The Customs woman cracked a big smile which stayed for a second before disappearing. Then she took my fingerprints – the prints of my two innocent, terror free index fingers (for some reason I thought she was going to ask for thumbs) and a little digital snap, which she took with a pod-like camera.

After her and my welcome home I helped myself to some luggage and got into a taxi driven by a Mr Konstantinou and shared with a young woman from Peru who was going to Soho as well. She worked in a studio in East London helping Rachel Whiteread do her Trafalgar plinth of all things and she was taking some sort of Tang / Tung Dynasty ceramic horse to her father in Peru where she wanted to make comic book of the life of Dina Paucar, mountain runaway turned Lima folk popstar. Outside it was dark but I could see there was a nip. It wasn’t until I helped the Peruvian with her luggage that I stumbled into a frozen heap of snow and heard the squeaks and whistles of the freezing streets that I started to realize.

My god. I slid on the steps of my building and got a guy to throw some grit onto it. He was chirpy with a leather pilot’s hat yanked down over his ears. He was doing the same for Birthday Suit, our next door, though not most local, sex shop. He said I had to give him something, so I gave him a couple of dollars and he skipped up the steps yelling: “I don’t do things for nothing you got to pay me something then I’m doing it I’m working you see I’m a working man that’s right you see this I’m a working man,” and he smashed the snow off the marble-looking steps and generally screamed his condition to the street and I yanked my bags upstairs. Giving that guy some money, getting the steps swept off – an everyday transaction that I can’t picture happening in London, it’s too urban, it’s too quick and loose somehow – made me feel like I was back.

In the flat, Mark was in bed. “Oh” he said, when I popped my head round the door, “It’s Knight.” And so I was welcomed. “Anything happened while I was gone?” “Not much.” I ran out into the cold again to see Sue and have some food and the walk was a death march. I couldn’t help thinking that people were dying in this. The wind and the pure-breed cold climbed up inside my trousers. My legs were divided into bands of pain – my boxer shorts were giving me a precious layer, my knees were begging, my calves were forsaken, trying to die. Elsewhere the wind kept backing round corners and slicing its way across my face. No one told me about this, no one told me that your eyelids can get cold, that you can feel like you’ve dipped your forehead into ice cream, that your ears are in icy bull dog clips. Maybe this is was Scott felt with the Husky Dogs, or what Hillary went through, or what Bullimore felt under his boat, but not in a big city. Somehow I thought they would have solved it by now. Or moved.

On the way back I slid out, my left foot went and I landed with a slapcrack on the pavement on my hip. If I was an old man with a family waiting, it would have been a cracked something. Old man junkie on a lonely street? No Olympics on the telly for me. So I staggered home, hiding in the tube station, pretending to be lost for a minute to get some underground shelter, then out, rushing, legs a-jingle, breath rising around me like a smoke stack.

Then home. And we have a fire. I know. A log burning fire. Matt was sat there in the dark, worshipping this thing, burning some old futon, shoes off, Frank Sinatra on the stereo, wearing a Hawaii T-shirt in some kind of paean, some sort of Spring seance. It was a lovely scene and we had some tea. He had been for an audition as a TV carpenter.