Category Archives: Travel

Busy, busy: Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Singapore, Denmark, Paris, Berlin, London… and over twenty visits to New York City.

March of Science Report No. 445

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food-tray-liner
Ages ago airlines used to place a sheet of grey-blue plasticised paper on their food trays, a kind of “sticky” layer that prevented cups of coffee etc from sliding all over the place. Now they don’t need to use the paper: the “sticky” layer is a quality of the surface of the tray itself. Less waste, less litter. Why, things get better every day!

Ferretería

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Ferreteria-Atocha
I was surprised to see a Ferretería store in New York City recently. Here’s a photo of an old-fashioned Ferretería in Madrid, in the suburb of Atocha. Alas, I discovered that a Ferretería is not a store where you buy ferrets, but an ironmonger’s shop, where you buy electric saws and nuts and bolts. Oh well.

Below, a black-footed Ferret, an American endangered species. They live off prairie dogs which they hunt at night — a ferret may eat more than a hundred prairie dogs in one year, provided they are available — but over the last hundred years, farmers killed off most of the prairie dogs, so American ferrets almost became extinct. Teeth like needles.
ferret

Bluebells?

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bluebells
These little flowers, appearing in New York City in Spring, have tiny blue bells, but are they really bluebells? No, according to poet John Latta, who kindly informed me that in the US, they are called grape hyacinths. Nice name, though I don’t think T.S. Eliot would have liked it:
He: “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;”
She: “They called me the hyacinth girl.”
He: –Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
She: “Honestly!… do you go like that every time you have sex? Catatonic?”

Bolton’s Literary Empire

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boltons-3After a pleasant lunch in Adelaide in March with poets Ken Bolton and Cath Kenneally, it was a surprise to come across a distant outpost of his literary empire on 57th Street in New York City. Ken hadn’t mentioned anything about expanding the reach of his literary pursuits… I had mentioned his Upper East Side store back in 2005, on a sequence of photos I posted here, but this new store took me by suprise. I guess I’m sometimes just out of the loop.
boltons-1