TOWERING INFERNO 2. THE SEQUEL.

The sirens are louder than usual and more persistent. After ten minutes of this racket I go to the window.

Flashbacks to November ’05, only this time there are NINE fire engines parked outside our apartment block and the avenue has been cordoned off three blocks in both directions. A crowd has gathered and is staring up at somewhere that looks alarmingly close to us.



I immediately hear fireman Barry Whybrow’s voice in these situations and go into auto-pilot from years of fire training at the RFH. They were skills I never actually got to use there (which is amazing now that I think about the various drunken escapades I was involved in during that particular period of my life), but need all too often in NY it seems. I check the corridor – a smell of burning but no smoke. In the bedroom however, alongside the smell of burning there is an ominous noise of clanking metal, shouting and banging coming from the direction of 13B on the other side of the wall. Hang on – that’s our ‘love, marriage and relationship Gua’. It can’t burn down! I can’t even begin to imagine what the burning down of an entire Gua means in Feng Shui, but I’m sure it’s not good. This being no wimpy ‘two engine fire’ just a wall away from us, I start shutting windows and doors and get my jacket.

‘I think the fire’s on the other side of our bedroom wall’.
The TH, who has clearly never done one nanosecond of fire training in his life, sits back down on the sofa.
‘What are you doing?!’
‘I’m watching the end of ‘House’.
‘Oh okay – I’ll tell the fire to wait until ‘House’ has finished shall I……’.
‘It’s under control now’.
‘And you know this HOW?’

I vaguely remember being taught about people like the TH in fire training too, and seem to recall that you’re supposed to knock them out. (Or was that life-saving someone who’s drowning?)

A lot of the tenants are in the lobby or collecting underneath the scaffolding outside. It’s rare you get to see the inhabitants of the whole building together like this and the doorman is not finding the fact that the building is on fire during his shift anywhere near as difficult as the fact that all his ‘girlfriends’ are suddenly all together in one place, demanding his usually forthcoming ‘special attention’.



It’s warm outside, but there are miniscule shivering dogs everywhere, because clearly they’re too tiny to maintain any kind of sensible body temperature. I have to concentrate hard not to tread on them.

Most gatherings of more than two people in NY turn into a ‘speed dating’ event sooner or later, and the TH has scored within seconds, as some scantily-clad-twenty-something-yr-old-stranger starts telling him all about her last disastrous relationship, and asks if all men in the UK are ‘nice like him’. Only in New York. I move over and put my arm through his. She looks devastated, and is suddenly not interested in his company and wanders off to order a takeout to be delivered to her ‘on the sidewalk where the fire is’. A couple of apartments are burning down and the neighbours are hitting on each other’s husbands and ordering their dinner. 

Don’t you just love this city.

The fire out, we trudge back up 26 flights of stairs, where it becomes all too apparent who goes to the gym and who doesn't.  On the upside, nobody was injured this time around, and it turns out that the fire wasn't in our relationship Gua. It remains to be seen who or what is......

QI TO THE HIGHWAY

Apologies for the 9 month glitch. No I haven’t had a baby. Actually I’ve no idea what happened, aside from a few months work, but I have to write now because I’ve been introduced to Feng Shui by the ever-helpful T, and one of the fundamental rules is that if I haven’t used something for months then I have to throw it away.

The introduction of Feng Shui into my life was supposed to make things easier, but instead it seems to have thrown up a whole new layer of problems.
For instance – our apartment’s 'Bagua' totally lacks a ‘love, marriage and relationship’ section. It simply doesn’t have one. Our love, marriage and relationship area is actually in apartment 13B. I have no idea who lives in 13B. (Yet...)
‘Perhaps we should find out who lives in apartment 13B. We may find the love of our lives there or something…’ (me to the TH. Half joking. Obviously).
TH, not even looking up from his latest CDO crisis - ‘yes darling, that’s a great idea. I totally agree’.
‘Errrr, did you hear what I said?’
Pause. ‘Errr .. no not really’.
All of which kind of speaks for itself.

Then there is the prosperity, wealth and abundance area. Currently the toilet. Which frankly explains a lot. Short of moving the lavatory or the front door, neither of which would probably be acceptable tenant behaviour, there is very little I can do.
‘You’ll have to move’ T concluded decisively. Actually with our current prosperity, wealth and abundance situation we probably will have to move…..

Aside from these major problems, there is the relatively minor problem of me sleeping directly underneath a beam. This merely means that I have health problems in my whole body. I tried sleeping across the bed, which apparently only creates health problems in the thigh area, but this puts me in the ‘lonely pillow’ position.
Yeah. I’ll say.
Have you ever tried sleeping diagonally across your partner?

And DON’T and I repeat DON’T try this at home - the’ hanging of bamboo flutes from the beam’ solution - because they HURT when they fall on your head.
There is an alternative if we switch the whole room around, but this would mean Qi coming down from the sides of the beam between us, causing ‘separation or divorce’. A no win situation I think you’ll agree.

On the upside, if you're coming to visit, then the guest room is the centre of offspring. You have been warned.

So I have to do what I can, which is the 'clearing of clutter'. Luckily it is Spring in New York now, which usually lasts for about 4 days, so I am spending the week spring cleaning before it gets too hot to do anything other than get on a plane to somewhere else.

As part of this process, the right hand links column of this blog is about to undergo a ruthless cull, so if you want to stay linked you’d better have blogged in the last few months or I'd better have eaten in you. In short, and in the words of Ryan Seacrest, very few of you, aside from my American Idol the Marquis, are 'safe'.
Just sayin’.