Before my return to the UK, I'm staying in New York for a few days. Not this New York; the picture is of New York New York, a landmark of this great fake city, a place of the imagination, like Julian Barnes's England England.
It was a fab week in Vegas: seeing Cara and the rest of my family, making iced coffee, flipping round in flip-flops, wearing thick, good Queen Bess-style layers of factor 50 sun screen, trying on baseball caps, watching baseball at Cashman Field (the Las Vegas 51s lost to the Nashville Sound, but at least we had burgers 'n' beer), having barbecued chicken, walking in the warm, dry Henderson evening, eating banana bread with loads of butter, practising my golf swing in the merciless midday sun, seeing art at the Bellagio (American Modernists, including Georgia O'Keeffe and Max Weber), and eating and eating and eating and eating so that I'm beginnign to look American, from ziti (a sort of big macaroni) to Japanese-treated beef and from Louisiana belly pork to... well, everything, really. It's America.
New York, then, next: halfway back to Europe.
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