Misssy In the City

"Hey, I'm WALKING Heeere!"

So I said I’d tell you some New York Stories and I realise that I said this over a week ago. Here are a couple of events in a week full of events.

Meeester will be dining out on this for years

As many of you know my husband is in a delightful band called The Lorelei. They can mostly be described as “Where the Wild Things Are” but on stage and with musical instruments. You need to know this before I tell you the story.

After a seven hour flight on Air France with NO BLOODY IN FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT except watching my husband insist on speaking chronic French to the bilingual and extremely patient French air hostess, we arrive in John F Kennedy International Airport. The last time I landed in this airport was when I was twenty one and on my way to New Orleans. I remember Immigration being scary and intimidating, full of unsmiling guys that looked like the Twinkie eating beat cop in Die Hard but without the charisma. Of course this was before the Americans realised the rest of the world was hell bent on their destruction, so I was expecting far worse this time around.

We join a big queue and delight in the fact that out normally queuing-averse French traveling companions are forced to do the same. We are just about at the head of our particular queue when we both notice that a group of people keep looking at us. I am already paranoid about the JFK Immigration Experience and immediately think they know something about us that we don’t. Like some French joker has pinned an “I Heart the Taliban” badge on my back or stuck a note onto Meeester’s back that says “Frisk Me! I’m packing!”. Turns out it’s neither.

“Excuse me, are you the lead singer of the Lorelei?” the chief starer ventures, eventually.

“Ye-ess?” says Meeester to the accompaniment of his wife shrieking with jet-lagged Inflight Entertainment starved manic laughter.

“We’re big fans. Aren’t we?” the lady is excited. Her husband nods reluctantly. Something tells me she’s more keen than he is, but we’ll take what we can get.

So there we are, Meeester gets recognised in US Immigration. OK they were also from Aberdeen as it turns out, and despite pressing she didn’t want her photograph taken with Meeester OR her cleavage signed, but it was a lovely moment nonetheless. And the recent memory of it kept Meeester warm ten minutes later as he was interrogated in a small room for having “too common a name”; American Immigration speak for "You look dodgy".

Recognised in a foreign airport baby! And not from a photofit this time, neither!

Carrie Doesn't Live Here Anymore

This is a photo story.

All you need to know are the following facts:

1. The exterior shots for Sex in the City's Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment are shot in Perry Street in the West Village, NY.

2. Despite the residents probably getting a shedload of cash for this, they are now sick of the apartment being a shrine for fans of the show and have erected a chain across the front steps (or stoop, as they call it) with a sign saying “Keep off the Step”.

Exhibit A

Location: 66, Perry Street, Greenwich Village

Subject: Misssy M

Time: 16.41

Exhibit B

Location: 66, Perry Street, Greenwich Village

Subject: Misssy M and angry resident (not Carrie- she's a puppet!)

Time: 16.42

By the time she could scream “This is private property!” I had legged it down the street and was ordering a cupcake in The Magnolia Bakery confident that Meeester had the snaps.

""He!He!"

Which made me think, “Is disobeying the rules the new sex?”

*****************************

The Missives have been full of breaks in the last few months, which is not usual for this blog, but a result of circumstances outwith my control, blah blah blah. I’m usually a very regular poster. However, I’m about to take another break. I promised myself at the start of the year that I would do the National Novel Writing Month,or NaNoWriMo as it's known, even though I’ve chickened out the last two years when I said I would do it. The question is how someone with a full time job, two kids and a Black Menace can fit writing a 50,000 word (minimum) novel into a month. The answer is stop blogging, stop gadding about on the internet, stop watching telly (luckily Masterchef is finished, whew!)and stop sitting about in dressing gowns with cold flannels on her forehead and gin in her glass pretending to need some personal space. I’ve had a plot idea for a wee while and I’m going to give it a go and see how I get on. See you in December. Let me know if you are doing or have done NaNoWriMo in the comments box. Grateful for any tips, grateful to get to know any others that are doing it too.

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Sometimes Real Life Intervenes

I've just been in New York. That's proof right up there.

New York Stories up soon once I've recovered. Highlights include Meeester getting recognised in JFK, and me getting turfed off Carrie Bradshaw's front step.

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This Sporting Life

I am not a sporty type. Trying to be sporty only ends up in misery for me and has long term repercussions. I am going to outline two examples of this in two posts this week. The first is to make the general point that I should always be let off games, even without a note from my Mum, and the second is directly relevant to events in the past week. Sorry for being so cryptic but I’m on some really hectic painkillers. Due to a sporting injury.

Case One: A few years ago I went to Finland with ten students of mine to visit our Finnish student friends in a student exchange programme. Many things happened on that trip, many bloggable things, but the people concerned are still alive so I have to be careful of lawsuits. However, one event lives with me still in the form of an injury that I imagine I still be complaining about when I’m an old lady grimacing and grunting as she struggles onto her Stenna Stairlift. In short I sprained the muscle attaching my bottom to my legs, I believe the medical term is “groin strain” although they only call it that so that they don’t have to use the phrase “Madam, it appears that you broke your fanny”.

The reason this injury happened is because I’m an idiot. An idiot who when asked to play in a Scotland versus Finland match of what is known in Finland and Sweden as “floor-ball” forgets that she is genetically ill equipped for such exertion. Floorball is actually indoor hockey, but the Finns are a really literal does-what-it-says-on-the-tin kind of bunch, so they like that name better because there’s a floor and a ball involved. Anything other than the name floorball would be fussy and ostentatious, which would be decidedly Un-Finnish.

So as I raced onto the court brandishing my big hockey stick, stopping short of smearing blue woad onto my face, not only had I forgotten that I was a good 20 years older than everyone else in the sportshall, I also neglected the fatal combination of being crap at sports yet still being fiercely and sometimes violently competitive. This common combination is why they invented pub quizzes; so the geeks had an outlet for competitive urges that didn't get them killed.

Despite my brain's protestations the game was on and I ran and I lunged for about an hour. And then I ran and I lunged for about another ten minutes even after someone told us that the little wiry blond beast that may or may not have been male or female and who kept on scoring goals against us was in fact a member of the Swedish national floorball team. The fact that we were getting brutally beaten only made me more competitive and especially determined to cause permanent physical damage to the aforementioned Swedish champion, who despite having been in the small town for two weeks we had never met before. I don’t know what the Finnish for “ringer” is, but the stench of cheating only made me more determined to get a goal against them, or at least send one of them off in a stretcher back onto the boat to Sweden that he had been smuggled in on only a couple of hours earlier.

But never mind goals, in a last ditch attempt to even get a touch of the ball, I lunged with my stick in a direction that the pelvic floor apparently wasn’t designed to go in. I don’t know whether I actually heard the sound of an elastic band pinging, but I felt that I did. It was like one of Barbie's legs coming off. Once the legs start coming off your Barbie, she's never quite the same.

My un-promising floorball career was cut short for want of a working set of pins. I hobbled off wanting to clutch my injury but painfully aware that it was in a indecently unclutchable area, especially in front of near homicidally shy Finns, who yes, may get naked in front of each other at a moment’s notice in a sauna, but recoil in horror if you look them in the eye when saying hello.

Three years on, whatever sinew tore, twanged and snapped during the floorball game is still quite bothersome. And how's this for pathetic and middle aged: it aches when there's wet weather in the post- it's become a flaming anatomical barometer. When there's a storm a comin' I'm hobbling about like Kaiser Soze when he's still pretending to be Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects.*

So that’s my excuse for not gearing up for 2012, what about you?

Next sporting event: I bugger up my teeth playing rounders. A game where you don’t even use your teeth. Well, you shouldn’t, anyway.

*Sorry if I've just ruined the ending of that film for you, but you have had over 10 years to catch up.

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