Monday 7th August 2023
I’m writing this from my hotel room in Manhattan. It’s just started pissing it down outside and there are rumours of Thunder and Lightning overnight.
Max and my Dad are in the adjoining room from Anna and I — behind two locked doors. Max will knock on the door at 7:30 am at the latest to be let in here and announce to us that he’s eaten all his snacks and is quite literally starving.
I arrived in Boston a week ago with my Dad and Max and I’ve threatened to sit down and write every night. But it’s been nice to have time away from the regular things I do, and I’ve felt like I haven’t had an awful lot to say since I last wrote anyway. A little writer’s block. A little busy time. A little not been arsed to sit and think and write.
But here I am, back again.
I have actually been writing. Since I arrived I’ve kept a little photo journal, photos printed on my little HP printer with some accompanying notes. I might give it to someone when I get back, or I might keep it.
I read some essays by Fran Lebowitz and listened to Lou Reed on the bus to New York in preparation for the flying visit. I am in the spirit. I saw the Ghostbusters Firehouse today and Max counted Yellow Cabs. I’m a New Yorker now.
‘Hey, I’m walking here…’
Do you see?
I have two things on my mind, and that I wanted to get out of my mind this evening before I go to sleep.
Firstly, the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film is the nostalgic blast that I didn’t know I needed but did need. As a child, I wanted to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Yesterday I listened to a Tribe Called Quest on Spotify on a ferry to Brooklyn and then ate coal-fired pizza. That’s as close as I’ve ever been to being Michelangelo and I’m ticking that off my bucket list.
Secondly, the walk from the ferry to Juliana’s in Dumbo was a revelation. The walk — 20 minutes along the waterfront and facing Manhattan — is taken through a mixture of waterfront parks, piers that have been re-adapted for people to play and sit and eat and relax and cook barbeque food and small independent food vendors. It was Sunday evening and it was bustling.
I had a similar feeling walking along the High Line in Manhattan today. I began the walk in the Meatpacking District feeling tired and jaded from a long walk on a hot day from Lower Manhattan and 5-minutes in and walking through thriving trees and plants I felt utterly rejuvenated.
For all of the good things that I’ve seen and done here in the past 36 hours, the things that made me feel the best have been those two walks in new-ish green spaces.
Why did I feel the urge to write about this tonight?
Unsure. Maybe to lock it into my brain for when I invariably have a conversation at home about the city I live in and love not having the money to spend on parks and greenspaces, or when someone tells me that we need to get rid of this or that green space to make way for this or that development.
More on this when I get back to Boston and wander the Emerald Necklace next week.
This is part of a series that I’m writing over the next year, documenting the Year of Action campaign, and some of the things I’m doing to take action in 2023. #2023yearofaction
