Late to the Party

Sometimes you don't realise you're late until you turn up.

The first time I arrived in New Orleans, at six o'clock on a Friday night, the party was already in full swing and I was perhaps just a little too sober to feel like I was going to have as much fun as everybody else. Despite my best efforts I remained that little bit too sober throughout the weekend and it only slowly dawned on me, weeks later, that arriving a few hours earlier would not have made any difference: I should have got there fifteen years ago.

It seemed to me to be the place a young man could pleasantly do himself some serious liver damage, if he had the time to spare. The problem was that I was no longer that young man and the gaudy revels of Bourbon Street did not appeal to me any more than the ever-present concoction of scents that followed me along its length: a sickly, putrescent perfume of too-sweet alcohol, vomit and bleach. Stately, prim America, the country that, God help it, had once banned alcohol, seemed to need a place where excessive, outrageous behaviour would be tolerated, where folk could act up and get the craziness out of their system before returning to their respectable day-to-day lives. I come from a country with a strong tradition of weekly binge-drinking, but I saw things in the French Quarter that would have shocked me on a Saturday night after a Wales home game in Cardiff: tourists slumped insensible in doorways at nine o'clock in the evening, vomit plastered across the sidewalk, strip bars open for business in the afternoon sunshine as parents and children sauntered by. I'm no prude, but America surely is - and such sights only made it clearer that New Orleans was somehow culturally beyond the reach of the rest of the United States.

And yet, at the same time, this is just one street. Move one block above or below Bourbon and the licentiousness, the neon, the raucous noise that passes for blues music, it all but disappears. By night, the rest of the Vieux Carré is darkness and quiet, secrets and shadow. Amongst the stream of tourists in sports shirts, there is another crowd, another clientele, as different to them as Oberon to Bottom. The men are tall and greying, immaculate and cool in suit and tie despite the languid heat; the women, beautiful and discretely bejewelled. They slip through the darkened streets, into private courtyards on Dauphine St or Saint Phillip, they drink at the Pelican Club and they leave nothing but their evident sophistication behind them. I admit, I tried to follow but, rather like Bilbo chasing faerie rings in Mirkwood, I stumbled in the darkness as they vanished before me.

It was tantalising. These people, I decided, were a link back into the past, to a long lost zenith because this is, without doubt, a city that was once wonderful. Much like my first view of New Orleans, seemingly floating on the surface of Lake Pontchartrain, it reminded me of Venice - both were once important, wealthy, centres of culture. Now they are largely populated by the people that come to gawp at the remains. Whilst Venice is literally kept afloat by tourism, New Orleans (or at least the French Quarter) seems to be an undead corpse, reanimated by the daily influx of new blood. 

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that not even fifteen years would have made much difference. I should have come to New Orleans two hundred, two hundred and fifty years ago, when the party was at its height. I became worried that I would never be able to enjoy the city, always feeling that I had missed out on either its heyday or my own; forever late to the party.

Needless to say, I went back there just this week and had a completely different experience.

For a start, I took my wife and kids: there wasn't any reason why we should wander the length of Bourbon Street. What's more, the clemency of March is different to the humidity of September - and a cool rainstorm had forced the worst of the drunks and vomit off of the sidewalks the night we arrived. We did different things. We took the street car up towards the zoo, along Charles St and back along Magazine and Camp, through the Garden District and the antebellum houses, which eschew both the colonial stylings of the French Quarter and the dreadful concrete drabness of the modern city. Back in the Vieux Carré, Jackson Square and the cathedral were Disney bright.

We all had a lovely couple of days. We ate good food and enjoyed a drink or two. For my part I think I benefited from lower expectations; but something else happened to me - happens to me - in New Orleans. These two short visits have revealed it to be a place of countless opportunity. There's something about the French Quarter, again it's something that reminds me of Venice: as if historic versions of the same city were piled upon each other through multiple invisible dimensions, intersecting through time, like a boozy French-American Narnia.

It means that it will always be worth coming back, because each time it will be a different experience. The party just rolls along and all we can do is dip in and out.

I feel it keenly throughout this return visit: just as I am seeing the city differently, it is seeing me differently. Multiple versions of me walk these streets beside me, unseen, accompanied by friends and acquaintances, people I've known forever and not yet met. School mates and old girlfriends, colleagues, family, friends, grown-up children, grandchildren of mine, they all link arms and pull me around the unchanging corners of New Orleans. Sometimes we're a crowd, cackling at our own jokes, sometimes just a pair of friends or lovers, hand in hand, threading through the languorous shadows. Whoever you are, whoever we're with, I can see how the city wraps itself about us, mysterious, mischievous, playful, always pregnant with booze.

It could be any time. Satchmo might be playing as we drink; the steamers and showboats might be plying their trade on the river as we wait in line for beignets at Café du Monde; it could be last week, one, two, three hundred years ago, or tomorrow. You and I, we drink, we laugh, we dine. The lights twinkle in the galleries and balconies as we slip amongst the tourists and disappear into secret courtyards on Dauphine St or Saint Phillip, closing shutters against a mortal storm that threatens, but never arrives - always the justification for another drink and never the end of the party.

All right, if you insist on visiting New Orleans in the present day, and without me, book a table at Sylvain before you get there. And when you do, drink their Dominique's Departure cocktail. And then, or some other time, head on over to Frenchman Street and drop by the Three Muses. Eat whatever you like, it's all good.

But that time you and I went there? We drank The Muse - don't laugh, you chose it and I reluctantly agreed that it was perfect. It looked ridiculous, do you remember? But elated, full of food and shining with gin, we stepped outside afterwards into the night, jazz trumpet all around us. The stars glittered in the death-black sky. I looked at you, something profound on my mind, but you just smiled, an insane grin, and I clean forgot what I was going to say.

It's that sort of a place.

New York, New York, New York...

My life is pretty great. Occasionally, for example, I get taken to New York. My wife has to go there for work often enough that I get to tag along, sneaked on as hand baggage, maybe as often as once a year. A perfect storm of air miles, baby-sitters and opera commitments hit last weekend with the upshot that I found myself in Manhattan with a whole Sunday to waste as I saw fit.

The problem, at least for someone who occasionally blogs about travelling, is that the more often I visit somewhere like New York, the less remarkable it is. I'm past the initial shock, but still many years away from Proustian remembrances. I'll never be cool enough to be blasé about Manhattan, but I am beginning to accept that it is a real place that I can walk around and explore. Given one free day by myself, I'm not swamped with the frenzied pressure of a tourist, desperate to see as much as he can before he leaves. It's a nice position to be in. But I wouldn't have thought to write about it: a sign I might be starting to take it for granted.

I began with breakfast with my wife at Doughnut Plant on W 23rd Street. This place must be amazing because I don't even really like doughnuts that much. It was her recommendation and (not unusually) she was very right. At 8am on a Sunday, the place was beautifully quiet and the Meyer Lemon Yeast doughnut was absolutely delicious: the perfect glaze cracked as I took a bite, like paper-thin ice on a half-frozen pond. The dough was light and sweet and, to my relief, I realised it was a 'made with' not a 'made from' situation with regard to the yeast. I'm not the greatest coffee-drinker in the world either, but I was able to gulp down their Valrhona Mocha effortlessly, like it was spring water. Not a bad way to start the day.

And then she had to go to work (oh dear) and I had to while away the day until she would be finished. I had made a rough plan which I quickly threw out of the window. Very slowly I made my way to the USS Intrepid, moored at Pier 86, 12th Avenue and 46th Street. It's a WWII aircraft carrier that served at (possibly) the biggest sea battle ever: Leyte Gulf. Today it houses all sorts of military aircraft, as well as a Concorde and the space shuttle Enterprise. There's also a Cold War submarine, USS Growler, that was armed with nuclear cruise missiles and told to sit off the coast of the USSR. I viewed stopping here as tidying up - my boys had already seen it all without me on a previous visit so I had the perfect excuse to whiz around for an hour by myself.

Aircraft carriers are impressive things but I think I enjoyed the submarine most of all. America is good for subs: we've seen the USS Pampanito in San Francisco, HA.19 in Fredericksburg, and U-505 in Chicago. This one was very good: full of old school dials and switches, things that have been designed to go demonstrably 'clunk' when they are pressed - quite an important feature when one is messing about with nuclear missiles. The thing I really liked about Growler was that it provided a technological snapshot. Intrepid served for decades and was refitted again and again, masking her original capabilities, whereas Growler, commissioned in '58 and out of service by '64, was made obsolete almost immediately by the advent of Polaris missiles.

Enterprise, the first space shuttle (built for atmospheric test flights only) is still under wraps following Hurricane Sandy, but we've seen her already at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) back in 2010. (Washington now has Discovery, whilst Mission Control Houston only gets a dodgy mock up handed down from the Kennedy Space Center, which has Atlantis. Don't get me started.) And then Concorde. I had never seen one up close before. Certainly never flown on one. (Let's be honest, the closest I've got is this.) It's a beautiful machine, surprisingly small and delicate but with incredible, alien-looking sweeps and flourishes. It still looks futuristic, like something Derrick Meddings would have dreamed up for Gerry Anderson. On another day, with more (or less) time to spare, I'd have poked my nose around inside, but I was keen to move on.

I've been around the Metropolitan Museum of Art before. Or at least, I've spent some hours inside it and seen some of the enormous and amazing collection. But I knew I hadn't even scratched the surface. I seized the opportunity of a long afternoon to try and get some more of it under my belt. I'm not going to give you a gallery-by-gallery account of everything I saw, but I spent the time well. Even better, there are still rooms and rooms of stuff to go back and see in the future.

I surprised myself by enjoying the period furniture, mainly because the Met does such a good job of contextualising it. They recreate whole rooms and salons, brilliantly evoking the whole culture and not just showing a table or a chest of drawers. I don't know why this should be, but the experience is rather more pleasant here than it is plodding around actual stately piles in England. Perhaps because there is none of that stuffy resentment of a home being made available for viewings, the peasantry being allowed to gawp at how their betters live. Recreated inside a New York art museum, these spaces are appropriated for an international public and largely shorn of the divisive nature of class. The paintings are good too and, being alone, I was able to zoom along, only bothering with the ones that compelled me to stop and stare, which is by far the best way to deal with an enormous collection.

But when I do eventually bring the kids here, the first room I will take them to is the armoury. It's not an intimidatingly large exhibit, but there are some very nice pieces and, although they have a bloodthirsty purpose, they do qualify as works of art in their own right. If you don't believe me, check out the hilts on the rapiers next time you're passing through because they are as swish as you like.

And then, like always, Henry VIII turns up. Twice.

Henry VIII is unavoidable. He is the gouty uxoricidal axle around which English history spins. Every thing that happens before leads to and is neatly drawn together by his reign; every thing that comes after starts with him. So I wasn't surprised to bump into him in Manhattan at all. He materialised in the form of two suits of armour, each made for him at a different point in his life. Before we look at them, let's just spend a moment exploring a long held theory of mine: Henry VIII has a lot in common with Elvis.

Both kings, obviously, and also musicians: Henry was accomplished with the lute, a 'talented player of the virginals' (Frankie Howerd face) and composed tunes, but probably not 'Greensleeves'. Elvis built Graceland and hung out with Richard Nixon; Henry built Hampton Court and Nonsuch and wrestled with the king of France. But there's more - two beautiful-looking young men, full of talent and vitality who let it all go to their heads and their waistlines and became all fat and rubbish.

So this is essentially Henry VIII's '68 Comeback Special suit of armour:

 

And this is his rhinestone onesie, dead-on-a-toilet suit of armour. 

Not convinced? Here's the clincher: Henry's last words were (allegedly) "Monks, monks, monks!". If that doesn't make you think of this, then I don't know what else to say.

Anyway, I have become rather sidetracked. I started writing this because I wanted to mention how nice it was just to be in New York. Nice to be somewhere full of people, mostly young, mostly impossibly fashionable and beautiful, all going about their Sunday in the winter sunshine, either citizens of the world idly gawping at the skyline or native New Yorkers heads down, pacing purposefully. Nice to be somewhere cold too, with everyone wearing hats and coats. I had forgotten, living in Houston as I do, that there is a simple pleasure to be had sitting in a bar or coffee shop and watching people as they step through the door, their skin red and rosy, their frozen faces breaking into smiles as they see their friends, their eyes alive with the anticipation of warmth and comfort and, just maybe, a Meyer Lemon Yeast doughnut.