Sunday, May 29, 2016
Almost on our way
Heading off to New York, Boston, London, Cork, Edinburgh, Banchory, Oban, Glasgow, back to London and then to San Francisco. I' tired already!
Thursday, January 08, 2015
Sissy's story
This isn't about trips and it isn't Rob writing, but I wanted to put Sissy's story up and I have just returned from a trip and so I'm hijacking Rob's blog.
Sissy's time with us. March 2001 - January 2015
Sissy, the most passive of cats, never asked for much, a place to snuggle, many morsels a day, a constant door opening slave and someone to curl
into in the chill of the night.
We don’t know where she came from but think she saw, on the
‘invisible to humans’ notice at the bottom of our garden in Burrage Road, that
there would soon be a vacancy. She moved into the conservatory and kept the
beloved Boz company in his last weeks. They would curl up together and sleep
the days away.
Did we know she was to be with us the rest of her life? Not
at all. ‘She’s pregnant, we can’t have her in the house’, Rob said. And in any
case she was unapproachable, hissing if you looked at her, walked near her,
offered her food. We called her Hissy. She was not allowed in the house.
In the week after Boz died she offered such comfort. No
hissing, approachable, there to be stroked. Not to be cuddled, not to sit on a
lap, but to lean into you, sit by you. The vet said she was not pregnant but
could not tell if she had been spayed. We called her Sissy.
Sissy had been in residence for three months when Daisy arrived and took being chased out of the house, as Daisy’s first homecoming activity, with surprisingly good grace.
While Daisy never quite surrendered herself
to the friendship they would comfortably share a bed, a plane to New Zealand
and compete for who got to the food bowls first. Sissy was always a gracious
loser. But got her own back by sidling up and rubbing along Daisy’s coat – this
is my dog; or moving Daisy on by inching her way across the floor in sinuous
slides and rolls ending in a reach of a paw to Daisy’s nose. She also stole every bed that Daisy ever had, but both used to walk out together for their evening stroll in Hornsea.
.
Sissy never had kittens, never became less fat – despite
being on ‘diet’ biscuits most of her life – gave up killing animals smaller
than herself once she realised they were valued too. She was easily spooked and treated the garden as a jungle with all the dangers she imagined were there. An ant could send her leaping backwards in alarm at great speed.
She was a good learner too and after Daisy died she took over the practice of nudging you gently – or firmly if you didn't pay attention – while you worked to get, well whatever it was she wanted, food, a stroke, a door opening … She also disliked humans arguing and I learned to conduct disagreements in a more temperate manner. She wanted a quiet peaceful life.
She was a good learner too and after Daisy died she took over the practice of nudging you gently – or firmly if you didn't pay attention – while you worked to get, well whatever it was she wanted, food, a stroke, a door opening … She also disliked humans arguing and I learned to conduct disagreements in a more temperate manner. She wanted a quiet peaceful life.
Never did she scratch, bite, lash out – apart from if you
were a person who had to feed her overnight if we were gone. I heard tales of
bitten ankles as the visitor tried to leave the house. She was sociable and
loved and needed company and we eventually realised house-sitter not house-visitors
suited her best.
She never asked for much but loved to just be there and for us to
be there with her.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
The LAF (Lost and Found) Award
My previous postings on the subject of
being Lost and Found focussed, unfairly it would seem, on the subway as a major
cause of visitor disorientation in New York. My apologies to the Metropolitan
Transit Authority (MTA). We have discovered two worthy competitors. The first
is Macy’s. Undoubtedly a great shop. However, it wins the award for Getting the Allens Lost in their Search for
Winter Socks for Ann. It is a tribute to their imagination that they
provided six possible destinations for the purchase of socks requiring three
lifts, four escalators, a redefinition of the word hosiery, a coffee break, one
domestic dispute, five enquiries of helpful, but uninformed, assistants, and a
trip to the Christmas Store before we found the (excellent and very warm) socks.
But this challenging, near traumatic experience was easily surpassed by a day
out in Queens.
So Ann and I have just left Agnanti’s,
a great Greek restaurant sitting next to Astoria Park by the river. Astoria, is
part of Queens, New York’s most ethnically diverse borough. It includes 20,000
Greeks and has North America’s largest Greek supermarket. The lunch has been
excellent, better than any we ate in Athens last year, and everything that
Greek food can be. We decide to follow it up by finding this ‘largest Greek
supermarket in North America’ and head off down 23rd Avenue looking
for 31st Avenue (remember that number 31). That suggests we should
be about eight blocks away. A somewhat conceptual looking map advises us to
turn right at 23rd Street. It’s a lovely day, and we are very
relaxed and two 23rds in a row do not raise an eyebrow. We do not
wonder as we then pass 23rd Road, but start to worry at 23rd
Drive and panic at 23rd Terrace. It is not helped by realising that
if we had turned right at 29th Street instead of 23rd Street
we would also have found a quite different 23rd Road (Concentrate).
Fortunately, a new number appears (we suppose they ran out of words to go with
23rd) and we pass by 24th Avenue, quickly followed by 24th
Road. If you’ve been using your fingers, you will have worked out that we have
already covered eight blocks and have only moved from 23 to 24. Success,
however, no Terraces or Drives for 24 and we hit 25 and then wonderfully a
street with a name. We have concluded that Streets with names are a better bet,
there can only be one. Not so in Queens. Hoyt Avenue turns out to be both Hoyt
Avenue North and then Hoyt Avenue South. A bonus, the map seems to suggest that
there is no 26th Street. Sadly, not only is there one, but there are three, one
heading West, one North West and the other approximately South by South West.
We avoid the temptation of choosing and keep on in a straight line. There is only
one 27th, 28th and 29th, and here we are
heading into the thirties with two 30s and three 31s. You don’t have enough fingers
to know that the eight blocks have turned into 20. Our excellent lunch and my earlier
advice to believe that, in New York, you are never lost, only looking to be
found, have served us well and we have retained our good humour. At last we
reach 31st Avenue where we have been advised to turn left. We are almost, we assume, at our destination.
The smell of a Greek supermarket in our minds, we head left and find ourselves
at 24th street. What?! Have we gone backwards, in a circle, into
another meta-world? We plod on through 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31 Streets.
Eventually we arrive at our luscious destination.
Before I go any further, here's a test. You find your way!
A Greek restaurant at one end and a
Greek supermarket at the other end have made our journey ultimately a fruitful
one, and have just about allowed us to avoid despair or to rail at the mental
capacity of urban planners. We acquire some very Greeky treats and head back
home to 50th Avenue, which helpfully if unusually sits between 51st
Avenue and 49th Avenue. But this is a rare outbreak of rational
thinking. Not far away from us is 47th Road and Avenue, 46th Road,
Drive and Avenue, 45th……. So, congratulations to the bureaucrats of Queens. You
are a worthy competitor to the MTA. The Lifetime Award for helping Rob find
himself is yours.
Filthy Lucre
I love this picture that Ann took as
we walked up Wall Street towards Broadway and Trinity Church. Dwarfed by the
incarnations of western capitalism – the Stock Exchange, banks, finance houses
– the church glimmers assertively. Trinity Church used to be the largest building
in New York, the centre of Christianity in the city, and has survived all the
subsequent development and destruction, apparently a bastion of morality vs
Mammon. Or so it would seem. Except for the following recent newspaper
headline: Trinity Church Rector Gets Pay Cut…. Well, we know that the Church
struggles and many have closed. But the newspaper then went on to explain that
the pay cut was from $352k a year to a mere $339k. Not only that but the
Reverend James Cooper’s total pay package was $1.2 million once his church-owned
Soho town house, (valued at $8.2 million), and a $118,675 housing allowance for
his Florida condo were taken into account.
It seems that the church reflects its’ environment. It has assets of
$2bn, and an income of nearly $200m a year. It owns large chunks of the land on
which those Wall St. banks and finance houses sit. It is a property developer.
It is Wall Street incarnate. Rather late in the day perhaps, the parishioners
have noticed this curious ambiguity and many turned on the incumbent Rector claiming
that he seemed more intent on finance and capital than his flock, philanthropy
or the problems of the world. He has now moved back to his condo in Florida.
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