TRAINS, PLANES & AUTOMOBILES

A strange surreal week. I woke this morning to tales of a major power outage on all NY mainline trains for hours and military planes have been flying overhead accompanying jets all day, not to mention the endless police sirens, which haven't stopped since 7am. Unconnected (?) things like that take on a weird significance in a foreign country, especially as I've been living on a diet of painkillers for the last 3 days due to perpetual underlying migraine, and am hence feeling a little surreal anyway. All very odd.

Then there was the shopping trolley incident. Woke on Tuesday with a fridge full of ingredients and a mind full of recipes for dinner for eight. Also woke on Tuesday with a killer headache. Couldn't face cooking, so decided to make use of the gorgeous deli counter at the wonder that is Wholefoods Market and buy up their entire selection of Indian vegetable dishes (the closest thing in the USA to the lovely Indian food it's possible to get in the UK). That way I'd only have to cook rice and poppadums etc. So I painstakingly filled up six large containers with vegetable korma and sag panir etc one by one, taking each one back to my trolley a few feet away as I did so. But when I returned with the seventh, all of them had GONE! Someone had stolen my food from the trolley, leaving only a couple of lemons and a bag of carrots. I did a check of the queue at the checkout to see if I could spot the thief, staring into people's trolleys like a mad person, but no sign, although in such circumstances everybody looks guilty. I asked a store assistant standing nearby if he'd witnessed the theft, to which he replied 'odd things are always happening in here, but yeah, that's pretty odd. Maybe someone was really hungry and didn't care what they ate'. Uh? These are cardboard containers I might add, so nobody would have had any idea what they were stealing, unless they'd just been watching me, because they had decidophobia and couldn't face the choice of picking dinner for themselves. Whatever. Weird bloody country. I had to start all over again, this time keeping the trolley right next to me at all times, much to everyone else's annoyance as they tried to access the counter. 'I'm sorry - I have to have the trolley here because someone is stealing my food!' The looks I received proved that I'm clearly becoming as crazy as everyone else in this city.

Deep down I knew that this was the doing of the God-of-Guilt, who was speaking to me through Indian deli kleptomaniacs, saying 'well that's what you get for cheating and not cooking the meal yourself'. It's the same guy who, when you plan to take a work sickie, makes sure you're actually sick that day, to pay you back for skiving.

Anyhow, the meal was a great success, American Idol was watched, The Eggplants' Myspace site was created, and it only took the band about two hours to decide which three words to use to describe their music style. (Lesson - never create a Myspace site by committee.)

And whilst we're on the subject, JB and I had a very constructive afternoon last week time-tabling his forthcoming album, choosing arrangements, discussing which tracks to use, when to record and which musicians to book. I'm very excited about this project as it's been a long time coming and is now at last really going to happen. JB is a truly talented singer and songwriter and you can hear an out-take and a 'bathrobe session' (a story for another time) right now, at his new Myspace site.

And now I'm back to plane-spotting, taking headache tablets and pondering on the fact that there is a job about to become available in London which I would really like to do....sigh.