We are in New York City for a short city break, staying in an elegant brownstone apartment in Stuyvesant Heights in the uber-trendy suburb of Brooklyn. We return at the weekend to our tiny, humid, scruffy dot in the Caribbean to resume 'normal' life - although it has to be said that this (ie NYC) feels more normal and that (the island) always feels slightly surreal and unwordly, even when living there.
I'm sure like many others, we do not like to feel or be seen as tourists, but as 'temporary residents'. As we play out our small fantasy here, my winter 'Paperwhite' narcissus, acquired at the Union Square Farmer's Market, sit on the windowsill which I'm desperate to flower before we return to the Tropics. We're mastering the subway, eating at local restaurants and did a marathon shop at the new Whole Foods in Gowantus, Brooklyn to stock up for the week. We're loving it.
After another intensely physical year of mothering three growing boys, playing pioneer and co-running an artisanal bakery start-up, I'm happy to be having a rather cerebral time of it here and have basically spent the past 24 hours doing little more than reading the New York Times from cover to cover (even the sports section) and Christopher Hitchen's memoir 'Hitch 22' which I have enjoyed immensely.
My primary new years resolution, apart from all the obvious (gym, wine, ciggies, swearing) is to resume some form of intellectual or intelligent life - that of beyond the day-to-day survival struggle which takes up all our time and energy and renders us myopic with exhaustion by the end of the day. I hope to be able to do some more writing and build yet more frontiers, through both travel and dare I say it, compromises. Well that's the plan anyway.
After a great Christmas Season in our little bakery, we are visiting as many bakeries here in New York as possible, to both 'self assess' ourselves as well as be inspired. It's a new form of market research, which we are enjoying with great alacrity and sense of purpose!
Our Christmas at home was quiet, with a lot of snoozing in amongst the nerf guns and 'lunch' at 6pm, followed almost immediately by bed. It was essentially a 'holding pattern' day as we traveled north shortly afterwards - although we enjoyed our own Christmas tree a lot more than the one at Rockefeller Plaza, which was shared with about 10,000 other 'temporary residents!'
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