In which I'll have the big salad

 
I’m going to New York! Strike up the marching band! Bring on the dancing sailors! Pour me a root beer and put a bagel in my face! Start spreading the news, give my regards to Broadway, and show me the way to the Staten Island ferry so I can ride across the river with the wind in my perm, like at the beginning of Working Girl.

In fact by the time you read this, taxis and baggage restrictions and giant duty-free Toblerones willing, I’ll be in New York. I’ve never been before, can you tell?  I’ve never been to America, in fact. I’ve only got as close as Canada, which as telly would have you believe is about as close as going to Luton airport and saying you’ve seen Big Ben.

So because I’ve been waiting a full quarter century of my life to finally take a bite from the Big Apple (and by ‘apple’ I mean ‘baked goods’, and by ‘big’ I mean, “is that a doughnut or a dinghy? Oh well too late I ate it.”), I’m putting a lot of pressure on my week’s holiday to fulfill every expectation that TV and films have impressed on me.

Not the exciting things though, you understand. Because my taste in telly is sitcoms where not much happen, and my taste in films is comedies where even less happens, my hopes for the concrete jungle where dreams are made consists  mainly of sitting in coffee shops, getting almost run over by a taxi and eating a really big pretzel.

But I want to do those things EXACTLY like they did them on Seinfeld, and Friends, and Annie Hall, and When Harry Met Sally, and How I Met Your Mother, and Elf. I want to go to a deli, order a whole heap of incongruous ingredients “on rye”, then fail to eat them because I’m too engrossed in a neurotic anecdote about a dinner party (I will make up the neurotic anecdote; it’s not important). 

I’d quite like to master the art of tipping correctly, coolly, casually, without flailing like a sweaty-palmed fool, then come home and apply that skill on my visits to the hairdresser. I want to find out for definite what a Twinkie is.

I reckon the closest I’ll get to Sex and the City is probably being splashed by a big puddle, but that’s a-ok by me.