The Manhattan Transfer

The American sandwich lives in a world unto itself. It's certainly not like anything you'd expect in Europe. The first obvious dif...

Halloween is big business in the USA. Many weeks before the actual event, the shops are full of skeletons, pumpkins, witches, cobwebs and g...

I went to see England's very own Billy Bragg in concert in New York last night. He played a wonderful set of oldies, Woody Guthrie numbe...

Manhattan is a busy place. It seems that no matter what time of day, or where you are, there will be a crowd of people purposefully striding...

On the way home from work tonight I passed a homeless man who was propped up against a shop window. Nothing too unusual. Then I noticed a s...

Now that I've taken a few internal flights in the USA I've started to spot a pattern. The passengers like to reward the pilot with a...

Continuing our predilection for off-beat entertainment we went to the third annual New York Street Vendor Awards last night (affectionately...

I went to buy some clams on the way home from work tonight. I had a vision of linguine alle vongole that I needed to realise. I popped int...

There's a rather unpleasant habit amongst Americans who own portable electronic devices: they insist on wearing them on their belts for ...

For the "long" flight from London to Las Vegas we decided to splash out on a slightly better class of cabin. It turned out that t...

Having just returned from Las Vegas, I'm glad to report that the town is the same town that I visited about four or five years ago. Sam...

I recently undertook a slightly aggressive travel schedule that required me to fly from New York to London to Las Vegas to New York in the ...

I've been wanting to get a bespoke suit made for a number of years now, and I've finally decided to engage the skills of a good tail...

Some of you may have detected a distinct "air guitar" theme in our lives. We went to the national finals in the UK last year, and ...

We went for a curry last night. The restaurant is a single block from our apartment and we've walked past it many times, but never gone...

Once you start to notice them, they're everywhere. The streets of New York are covered in literally millions of small black marks where...

New York is a city that is never quite "finished", it's always undergoing repairs of one sort or another. I spotted an open ma...

I am fortunate enough that I can walk to work. I manage to do this about 90% of the time, with the odd subway ride mandated by inclement wea...

Some of you may have read about an explosion that happened in midtown a couple of weeks ago. First indications were that a generator had blo...

We lost our Internet and telephone service for 48 hours last week. It's very weird how dependent I seem to have become on the electronic...

On my way to work the other morning I saw something that made me shudder. We live in an apartment block that has a 24 hour McDonald's o...

Preserving the theme that an Englishman can always talk about the weather, I am pleased to report that it's hot. Damned hot. Forget all...

The 4 th of July seems to be quite a big deal in the United States. I was just looking forward to the day off work, but ended up being imp...

We had dinner at Gordon Ramsay's first New York venture, a restaurant called Maze at the London Hotel. Large fluttering Union Jack flag...

New York City has a remarkable number of opportunistic salespeople. I often see clusters of men selling surprisingly realistic fake handba...

The weather in New York appears to be remarkably predictable. When the man in the radio tells me that it will rain in the early afternoon, ...

I took a domestic flight this weekend from New York to Portland. The thing that amazed me most about the procedure was the length of time i...

Having enjoyed the UK Air Guitar Championships in London last year, it didn't take much encouragement for me to think about attending th...

It looks like I've finally managed to secure a credit card in the United States. I applied shortly after I got here, and because, to a l...

I took a couple of pairs of shoes to the local cobbler this week. I'm a big fan of owning a good shoe, and having it repaired as approp...

Last Saturday we went to a street fair just outside the apartment. $40 bought us a ticket to the Taste Of Tribeca festival where 60 neighbo...