Thursday

It’s often most quiet when everything is changing. Here’s a little update. So I finished Columbia last week, it was a Wednesday, raining in the morning, settled and bluish in the afternoon. You can scroll the photos of journalism school faces here if you like, some from a boat ride we all took. I’m in one or two. (Top right page 5 are Ryan, Justin and the famous Steven Chen, I’m on page 3 with Ryan). I stood by the side in a large new hall and went up a few steps when my name was called, stepped across the stage under yellow lights with a blue screen background, shook a few hands and took hold of my degree. My degree is large and rectangular on a nice hard piece of card. It is a masters of science which I am not, so I know where to take my maths questions, my questions of velocity.

That was Wednesday. I had to nip out to make a few calls and follow the back-stab intrigue, don’t-look-now-or-they-shall-sue, bitchy little story I wrote for NYTimes last weekend. And then ate with Coco’s parents in a dun-coloured exquisite restaurant a few steps above some cobbles on Bond Street in Soho. Sea-bass baby, carpaccio I don’t know, sake dry light, nigiri every time. It was a powerful evening.

One two three days more and I started work at the London Times on Monday which is where I sit now, light starting to slide down the ever-so-now grubby windows which look out over the West Side Highway. The office is on the lower floors of a spangled faux glorious apartment block by Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan. The word is primo. I answer my phone when it rings and service, as Jeeves-ly as possible, the two correspondents who work covering Wall Street, swearing and laughing and the stuff. They are PROS and just a little on their game to notice my grub-like hopes. But they talk to me and ask me to join them for tea and could you fix the fax machine, stuff like that. I have to learn to wiggle a little, make some space for me and come up with good ideas. There are no handouts. Oh no. But it’s my first days, and I had a little story about mobile phones in the paper the other day.

Mmm. Coco to Japan at the end of next week for three hard months, and the quietness of a hot summmer, jobbed up, at least for the time being, in the great NYSeee. New chapters to do and write.