Saturday in Brooklyn

I'm here in my room in the middle of the night, and I'm feeling a bit lonely. I managed to contact a couple of people earlier but they're all having a "chilled weekend" or some such. Well, I'm not.

I got... where on earth is my to-do list? It's under this New York Times or somewhere... it's on an envelope... I got through - oh and by the way there is now some loud hip hop blasting through my window - I got through a good deal of my to-do list today. I got laundry done, and I went to Ikea and bought $400 of stuff. The furniture's being delivered tomorrow between 11am and 3pm. Which raises the question, when am I going to get brunch?

Bloody Mary, complete with
olive on stick and
pickled runner bean

Anyway, so I got laundry done and went to Ikea. But before all that, I ate a salad at an extremely hipsterish joint just over the road. To give you an idea of how hipsterish, let me lay the groundwork for you first. Every bar in New York City - and I mean every bar, restaurant, cafe, whatever - gives you water before you order. And in 99% of those bars, restaurants and cafes, they give you recycled jam jars instead of ordinary drinking glasses. That's standard. This place today, just to take it that one step further, had jam jars with proper glass handles stuck on the side, so what I had was more like a jam mug than anything. I had the house salad with a poached egg on top, and it utterly hit the spot. I was craving vegetable matter, and there was beetroot in it. I washed this down with a Bloody Mary, which they had decided to put a pickled runner bean in. They don't call it the Most Advanced Nation on Earth for nothing.

Bolinas salad with poached egg at Bar Bolinas

This was after I'd made a shopping list for Ikea, but before I'd dropped my laundry off at two launderettes, one for the per-pound same-day wash, the other for the wash-and-press of two white shirts.

The insane thing about the buses here is that you have no idea where you are. There are no announcements or LED screens on the buses to tell you which stop is next, or even which stop you are at. Fortunately, Ikea is hardly inconspicuous, so I had no trouble getting off at the right place.

Ikea in Brooklyn is worse than any Ikea I've ever been to. One of the escalators wasn't working, which might have something to do with the fact that they had stuck that silver-grey packing tape all over all of the steps. And despite America being such a big place, I am convinced the walkways in Brooklyn's Ikea are narrower than those in Bristol's. The people, on the other hand, are wider.

To make myself feel better, I decided to buy a pot plant. My original choice was a non-starter, however, since it was just an inch too big for any of the pots on offer, leaving me asking myself whether they sell any of that plant.

I was initially concerned about cost (not of the pot plant, but generally of all the stuff I was buying, including a small bookcase and a set of drawers), but I eventually managed to shake off my uptightness and just buy as much stuff as I thought I wanted, including a pot plant with an appropriately sized pot and a white-and-blue paisley duvet cover.

The calming effect of a pot plant and blue paisley

The duvet cover is now calmingly and invitingly situated to my left as I type, a reward for some sweaty antics earlier in the day, around 6pm to be precise, when the temperature here was still hovering around 28 degrees C.

Having retrieved my laundry and satisfied with my unpacking efforts, I decided to treat myself to a couple of slices of pepperoni pizza from a place a couple of blocks away, and then retired to a nearby bar, mainly frequented by the local black population, where the barman, Joe, already knows me.

I had taken the latest copy of Private Eye with me, which I read while I drank a couple of glasses of the Coney Island brewery's Mermaid Pilsner followed by a Bulleit rye whisky on the rocks. At one point, a woman sitting a couple of stools along from me at the bar started cussing her male companion as he walked away, and her rant seamlessly segued into a perhaps technically mediocre but nevertheless competent and heartfelt ad lib rap.

I settled my tab with Joe around 10pm and bought a bottle of Californian red wine on the way home. No one being at the apartment, I watched an episode of 'Mad Men' on Netflix with my wine and the cat (who had pissed on the bathroom floor, which I cleaned up) before reading a chapter of Claud Cockburn's autobiography.

The chapter in question concerns the journalist's time in a hospital in Ireland, where he was treated for tuberculosis, and makes for interesting reading. For instance, he writes: "The English training manuals counsel nurses to preserve at all times an impersonal attitude towards TB patients. Probably this is sage advice. But it can evidently be exploited to justify an attitude of frozen indifference to the patient. Since the notion of a lot of Irish women maintaining an impersonal attitude to anything or anyone is laughable, the effects of such training were much mitigated - sometimes by laughter and endearments, sometimes by howls of abuse, curses hardly less agreeably warming to the bored victim of the disease."

It's now nearly 1am and still no one's home, so I think it's best I make use of my newly acquired bed linen and restore my strength and energy for the delivery of my 'Billy' bookcase tomorrow.