A Fairy Tale From New York (Manhattan)

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Manhattan

''Please mind the gap between the train and the platform when exiting,' booms a comforting automated announcement on the New York subway system. The deep, rich Mid-Atlantic tones resound with authority in your ear; it sounds like the kind of voice that should be narrating a newsreel from the 1950s.

It’s a stark contrast to the sharp, stern: 'MIND THE GAP,' bellowed by the terrifying Goddess of the London Underground.

New York reminds me a lot of London, really. It’s a huge urban melting pot, full of street food, indie art, and little lives going on between looming towers.

But New York’s towers are bigger. Its melting pot feels hotter (currently at a steamy summer 31 degrees). And it’s announcements are just that tiny bit more calculatedly reassuring.

It’s like London’s all grown up, with extra glass.

***

Time Square. Not quite the iconic shot I planned on taking.

If a cynical person were trying to sum up all the bad parts of the American character, they might point to Time Square; that heaving monument to capitalism, filled with flaring advertisements, fractured across a hundred different billboards. A teeming neon scrap of pavement cracking under a relentless flood of tourists with their cameras (yes, including me). A hunting ground for tacky gift-sellers, steaming hot-dog vendors and a scattered selection of plump men in superhero costumes, looking for marks to pose with.

And amid all this, just off the middle of Time Square, stands a US Armed Forces recruiting station, entreating patriots to join up. America’s industrious military complex; an invitation to war, standing amid glittering monuments to money.

It’s such a good metaphor, it can’t possibly be true

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Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown

***

You should never judge a place by its tourist traps.

And it would be easy to pretend that’s all Manhattan is--a dense concrete jungle made up of Empire States and Grand Centrals and Chrysler Buildings. A whole island of things to photograph, with nobody living there except the touts and bartenders.

But that’s the eye of an outsider with a camera, who only sees the shine and glitz. Just like London, between the tourist traps, there are washing lines and public brawls and families paying bills. There are so many ugly apartment blocks poking between the glass towers, like edges of real life intruding on the Sex in the City gloss.

The danger of the traveller, the real tourist trap, is accidentally substituting actual places for fairy tales--stories that are easy to swallow--because you spend too much time fixating the famous bits, or comparing what you find to what you know back home. 

There’s an army recruitment station in Time Square, and that sums up all the worst aspects of America.

That isn’t true at all.

It’s just a fairy tale from New York.

Bohemia In Brooklyn

Brooklyn

When JFK contacted me to say they’d found my luggage, I was up there like a shot.

Losing your backpack is a huge blow, especially when it's your own fault. Flushed with jet-leg and New York excitement, I'd accidentally taken the wrong bag home from the airport (I know), and it had been up to the staff at Norwegian airlines to save the day. 

It took a day and a night for my bag to be found, leaving me to contemplate life without a toothbrush or clean underwear. When my bag was finally unearthed, it meant a midnight expedition to the airport to retrieve it. 

Riding back from the airport in a taxi, clinging to my salvaged baggage, I realised that my New York taxi driver had--despite his protests otherwise--become very, very lost. This was not the neighbourhood of my hostel. We were driving in circles through a dark mess of shuttered shops and squat apartments, somewhere near Brooklyn. There was a gas station on the corner, splashed with red and white lights. Police cars were crowding under the gas station's neon roof. A circle of officers huddled around a man lying prone on the tarmac, in a puddle of dark liquid.

'Oh shit,' said the taxi driver, in broken English. 'There’s been a shooting there.'

***

Street art in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn

***

Apparently, the neighbourhood I'm staying in used to have a lot of crime.

Not anymore. I'm in a hostel in East Williamsburg--one of the trendiest, most up-and-coming parts of Brooklyn. By day, the area looks off-puttingly like industrial district. It's filled with squat warehouses, loud with the patter of construction, crowded by cement trucks lumbering along wide streets in small herds.

But look carefully amid the noise, and you'll find plenty of colour. The whole neighbourhood is filled with graffiti, fresh art dripping from the walls. By Morgan Avenue, the local subway station, people are selling second-hand books and VHS videos, piled on little stalls. Unassuming doors in the graffitied walls lead into trendy cafes, crowded with young people sipping on ice tea.

Come night, the industrial district gives way completely. The cement trucks slink away, and bars and restaurants open. Amid empty warehouses, little canopies unfurl, thick with fairy lights and coloured bulbs. Artists spill out of basement galleries, chatting on the sidewalk. A van on a street corner sells vintage clothes well into the night.  The New York hipster crowd comes ambling out to play.

Bohemian is the word, I think.

***

Hipsters love their vinyl records.

***

‘In the late 90s, early 2000s, this place was desolate,' a man named Mike told me, on my first day in the neighbourhood. Mike was a big guy with a belly lounging in its vest, wearing a frazzled beard and a necklace heavy with glittering trinkets--fragments of rock and metal. He was an artist, and a pretty good one at that. ‘Drugs, crack, hookers, everything,' he added, recalling the old version of East Williamsburg. 

We sat together in a street-corner park, watching kids play in the sweltering sun; basketballs bouncing between groups of teenagers, predominately black. 'Now it’s the place to be,' Mike mused, 'it has an energy, you can feel it go when you leave the area--it’s spiritual.'

Nearby, a friend of Mike's was darting around the park, wrestling with the multiple cameras around his neck. Named John Isaac, he was once a photojournalist for the United Nations (not to mention a personal photographer for Michael Jackson). Now retired, John has found he can't stop taking photos of New York city streets.

'My wife is always saying to me,' John told me confessionally, between snaps, 'you're 73 fucking years old, you're not a young man anymore.' But John can't help it; everywhere he goes, he sees new photos that need taking.

John Isaac, unstoppable photographer.

Mike and John share an art studio together in Yonkers; another once-rough neighbourhood that’s slowly creeping into vogue, with old factories and warehouses becoming studio apartments for artists. East Williamsberg is a little further along the same evolution; it's well into courting gentrification, but still feels abuzz with underground energy. It's the perfect place for people like Mike and John to come for urban inspiration.

They were friendly conversationalists, perfectly willing to start chatting with a perfect stranger like myself. But then, it's that kind of area. 

A little later in our talk, Mike drifted away from the topic of the neighbourhood and started explaining how evolution didn't happen, and how the world is secretly run by a shady cabal of shadowy figures, intent on stymieing human spiritual potential. He lit a cigarette that wasn't filled with tobacco, and became impassioned on the subject.

I found that part of the conversation a little hard to track.  Nearby, John Isaac shook his head ever so slightly, and began earnestly advocating for evolution; a gentle debate pinging back and forth between them.

That's the thing about Bohemia, I guess.

You're hear all sorts of things.

Just Like In The Movies (New York)

It's quite hard to take pictures from inside a landing plane. 

I know how this part is supposed to go.

A fragment of rainbow passes by the window, as the plane descends through cloud. On the screen in front of me, my in-flight movie (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) has been paused. Instead, the screen is now showing a comically large cartoon aeroplane passing over a comically small cartoon map of America, while the pilot chirps over the intercom about preparing to land at JFK.

You’ll notice I said the window, not my window.

I am sitting in the middle isle on the starboard side of the airplane; there is another person between me and the nearest window. She is a lovely, friendly Canadian artist travelling to America to put some work in a gallery. She has sharp eyes and raven hair, and right now I hate her with the fire of a thousand suns.

I know how this part is supposed to go. If this was a movie (if it were my movie, as we are all occasionally guilty of wishing), I would be sitting by the window, watching New York come into sight with wistful awe. Instead, I am left fidgeting for glimpses as the plane tilts and dips and drops toward its destination.

Clouds resolve into grey ocean. There is a distant black blotch on the horizon; a boat fading into view, followed by another, followed by another; the granite sea suddenly crowded with dark shapes. I strain toward the window as best I can, and see an orange band rip across the slate coloured sky.

Shafts of gentle flame are falling through the clouds, raking over the coast below--lighting up a city that’s sprawled across islands. Most of the islands are crowded with houses, with tower blocks standing up between the tiny homes like upright Lego bricks. Bridges spring between the islands, busy with lines of roving traffic.

The skyline has become the looming metropolis of Manhattan--a platoon of skyscrapers set dark against their orange backlight, divas showing off. 

The plane skates down, touching the runaway. It turns to find a berth, and my view is replaced by the tarmac of the airport. No longer in the sky, reality must assert.

Everything looks better from above. It can't be like that on the ground.

That was New York.

Just like in the movies.

The Town At The End Of Humanity

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I come from a town called Luton.

It isn’t very nice.  

Luton is a sprawl of houses dropped across a valley in the East of England, along the meandering River Lea. It's home to about 210,962 people, and it occasionally makes the headlines because a lot of those people aren’t white. 

Whenever there's an editorial, list or poll ranking the worst places in the UK, Luton invariably shows up somewhere near the rancid top. It has a high crime rate, an ugly look, and a tendency to be used as a lens for discussions on the failure of multiculturalism. After all, it's a working class town with a high migrant population, notorious for birthing religious radicals and extremist hate-groups like the English Defence League. 

A recent article in The Sun went so far as to dub Luton: "The Town At the End Of Humanity," based on the studious musings of a reddit thread.

Which, if you ask me, is a waste of a perfectly good book title. 

***

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***

Luton is famous for its international airport.

The local economy used to be based around manufacturing straw hats, and after that trade died off, around a Vauxhall car factory. But now the straw hats are gone, and while Vauxhall's head office remains in town, the factory has closed. Luton touts its a raucous annual carnival and a university popular with foreign students (possibly because they don't know the town's reputation), but the airport is what it's known for.

Pointedly, the airport is called London/Luton Airport, emphasis on the London. Tourists don't come to visit Luton; they pass through it on their way to other points. 

A cruel joke about Luton is this:

The town's primary export is people who are desperate to be somewhere else.

***

***

It's the little things you remember.

I'm sixteen years old and covered in spots, talking to a pair of Muslim girls in Luton's Arndale Shopping Centre. They're each cradling an enormous tub of Pick-N-Mix. It's Ramadan, they explain to me, the time of fasting. They're saving the sweets for sunset, at which point they will scoff them all for a gigantic sugar rush. Quick relief from the fast.

I'm thirteen, and sitting in a high school classroom that stinks of deodorant and apathy. A substitute Maths teacher is trying to keep things in order, but the kids have deliberately decided to find his name unpronounceable. Balls of screwed-up paper are flying from desk to desk. Occasionally someone will mock the teacher's thick South African accent.

I'm twenty-two and home from university. A handful of Polish supermarkets have opened in the town, thanks to a recent wave of new arrivals from Eastern Europe. I'm standing in one, staring blankly at boxes of breakfast cereal, wondering if I might find pierogi elsewhere in the store. I've been to Poland, I think to myself. I ought to recognize more of these words. 

Luton's multiculturalism is a complicated thing; a diverse population in a poor area inevitably leads to tensions and conflicts. But it also exposes young people like myself to a greater variety of worldviews than they might otherwise get. Without it, my home town would be even less remarkable; just poverty and luggage rushing to the airport. Instead, I grew up in a seething mess of different peoples, jostling together and apart. Colour on the brick and concrete--for, I hope, more good than ill. 

I've always been surrounded by different cultures. I've never been allowed to think of mine as the only one.  I've always wanted to go out and see more. 

It may be The Town At The End Of Humanity.

But it at least gave me a place to start. 

EXTRA BITS:

For anyone curious, here's a breakdown of the town's demography. Luton has a 54.6% white majority, though that includes both the town's Irish population (3%) and White Others (7%).

Overall, Luton considered a White-British minority town; one of three in the UK, including Leicester and Slough. Nevertheless, 81% of the population identifies as British regardless of ethnic background--so it can still be safely described as overwhelmingly British, if not overwhelmingly white.

...Though as someone who has to tick the "Any Other/Mixed," box on forms, I'm a little wary of these kind of statistics. They always make me feel like I'm some kind of ethnic cocktail. 

What's The Big Bang Good For?

Let's talk about The Big Bang.

No, not that one. I mean The Big Bang Young Scientists & Engineers Fair – one of the largest science celebrations in the UK. 

Held in the Birmingham NEC – a cavernous space that resembles a cross between an aircraft hangar and a shopping mall – it’s an explosive cavalcade of technology, science, maths and engineering.

Every year, thousands of children from all over Great Britain come crashing through the Fair, dragging tired teachers behind them, jumping up and down as they sample exhibition stalls covered with robots, magnets, VR helmets, and all sorts of other shiny toys to play with.

As one of many volunteers who helped run the 2016 Big Bang Fair, I have to say, I found the swarming children rather inconvenient.

I wanted to play with the robots.

***

***

The word “scientist” was first coined in the year 1834 by William Whewell – reverend, philosopher and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. After agonising for some time over what to call folk of scientific inquiry (hitherto known as “natural philosophers,”) he chose “scientist” as a logical extension of the word “artist.”

If a person who does art is an artist, Whewall reasoned, then a person who does science must be a scientist (the word “science” is actually much older than “scientist,” dating back to the 14th century).

It’s appropriate, I think, that the word “scientist” derives from “artist.” After all, no matter how rigorous the scientific process applied, things always start with a creative spark.

***

***

The main draw of The Big Bang Fair is its awards.

Children from age 11 to 18 are invited to bring their own personal science projects to the fair, where they’re examined by judges. A lucky few will win prized titles like UK Young Scientist of the Year.

While waiting for the robots to free up, I perused a few of these projects.

I met a group of teenage boys who had designed a disability-friendly hot rod, then built it by themselves from scratch.

I spoke to a teenage girl who had made an oil-based UV sun-blocker, and turned her phone into an improvised UV-light to demonstrate it.

I was awed by a 15 year-old prodigy named Krtin Nithiyanandam, who had taken some time out from being a teenager to create a new early-stage detection method for Alzheimer’s.

Never mind creative sparks. Kids like that have wildfire talent. 

***

***

Unfortunately, in the current austerity climate, events like The Big Bang Fair are increasingly in danger of being regarded as expendable luxuries. They’re not. They’re essential, and not just because they provide lots of shiny toys to play with.

They’re where tomorrow’s scientists come from. More crucially, they’re where tomorrow’s scientists discover that imagination gets results. That science thrives on creativity as well as solid process. And that sometimes, it pays to be able to redesign the box.

They’re where the future learns to happen.

And most importantly, they’re where I get to play with robots.

EXTRA BITS:

>The first use of the word "scientist" was in Whewell's 1834 review of a book by Scottish science writer and polymath Mary Sommerville. In this review, Whewell makes a vaguely progressive if rather muddled attempt to talk about women in science, calling Sommerville "One of the brightest ornaments in England."

>Meanwhile, in the 21st century, this year's Big Bang Fair seemed gratifyingly interested in tackling the issue of women in STEM fields, with with groups like the STEMettes roving the floor. 

>I got the opportunity to volunteer at The Big Bang Fair because I'm on the mailing list of the British Science Association. Check them out; they do good work.

>For more information on The Big Bang Fair, see here.

Brussels

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The Botanical Garden of Brussels - which looks suspiciously like something out of Logan's Run. 

Brussels is a mix.

Parts of the city are old and beautiful—full of baroque balconies and gothic towers and quaint little cafes, with charming graffiti on the walls.

Parts of the city really aren’t—the EU Quarter and the nearby business district, both filled with concrete cubes and jagged glass skyscrapers. In the EU Quarter, the European Parliament sits surrounded by car-clogged roads and construction sites, drawing visitors from all over the world.  

The number of hotels is frankly startling.

I’m spending quite a lot of time in one of them.

***

The European Parliament is a distressingly random collection of shapes. 

***

Brussels is a city of 11.5 million people.  Overall, 30% of Brussels’ inhabitants are foreign residents. There are more foreign ambassadors in Brussels than in Washington DC. There are an estimated 30,000 political lobbyists working in the city, and 1200 accredited journalists (only 200 of whom are from Belgium). 

Think of all those interns, diplomats and reporters, just passing through on business.

***

The wall-art really is fantastic everywhere, though.

***

It’s a nice hotel, of course.

That took some getting used to. My usual travel budget allows for hovels and hostels that sometimes lack luxuries like, say, hot running water.

But I’m here to work, so I get a big bed, a proper shower, and very little time to see the sights.

Looking out my hotel window, I glimpse office blocks and traffic lights, an endless procession of headlights crawling up the Rue de la Loi. Horns blare and engines grumble. It’s funny how the EU Quarter feels so much like a bubble of its own; a vaguely dystopian colony planted in the middle of rococo streets, full of people who are only here on business.

I ought to come back and visit properly one day.

But for now, I’m just passing through.

The almost pretty Boulevard Boutique, a short walk from the EU Quarter. 

EXTRA BITS:

What work am I doing? A freelance gig writing minutes for a financial reporting group, which advises the European Commission. 

Some bits of Brussels I have managed to see, and recommend:

>The Atomium, near Heysel Metro. If you like science, you'll like this.

>The Grand Marketplace, which is just as pretty as it looks on the postcards.

>There's a little stand that sells chips in Place Jourdan. It's called Maison Antoine. It's really worth finding. 

> Why haven't I included a picture of the Rue de la Loi? Because it's just so pretty, I couldn't do it justice.