Back from New York, Boston and Tiverton, and I almost don't want to write about it, because sometimes when One does, the words take over from the reality. Same with photos.
Paddy and I walked all over NY, even in the blazing heat, many stops for coffee and we saw everything we had planned, including Frick and Met, Muji and ABC. We were in Hotel 17 by Union Square and quickly mastered the subway -well, we lived in London! and we just had fun, lunch in Brooklyn with Katherine, dinner at Battery Park with Maryna, lunch in Brooklyn with Maryna and two of her clients, not-coincidentally young men, then amazingly we all met up with Patricia Donovan who was over to see her daughter graduate from Princeton and to visit her son.
There wasn't a lot we could do in Minty's beautiful and enormous house in Boston even though we were there to help, just some lifting and carrying things to the basement, and I stabilised some of her beautiful rugs, so we just walked and talked and ate and had some girlie fun. Minty had a book about Ten Ways to Look Ten Years Younger, so we tried them. Then we went through her wardrobe throwing out fat clothes, and sad, tired clothes, and Lumberjack and weird clothes. We spent the weekend in beautiful Tiverton, and Katherine brought the cats down too, and I wolfed as many books as I could from the overflowing bookshelves, including I Capture the Castle which I loved and had never read, Dodie Smith.
This blog has so Not Captured the East Coast Jaunt, I am shamed. Maybe if I had taken a laptop with me, then I'd have written at the time about our scouring of Broadway, all the helpful kind people we met, the slightly strange men who stopped to chat to us, the wonderful buzz of a city again. Or maybe I shall recall it in tranquillity.
