Let's not make this even more of a rich man's world.

With my job, I get to travel around a lot. From Minneapolis to Heidelberg, New York to Nice, I've enjoyed the ability to visit countries and cities with a frequency that I otherwise would not have been able to afford. The main activity of these trips is work related, be it presenting at a conference, having meetings or carrying out lab experiments. However, every single academic would be lying if they tried to say with any conviction that they haven't made use of such trips for a bit of pleasure.

A typical oversees conference (of which there are several each year) will cost around £1000 to attend. This includes the registration fees of the conference (several £100s depending on the conference), the accommodation (usually for more than 3 nights), flights, local transport, and any dinners needed outside the onslaught of free conference food. I'm not sure about you, but I can't really justify spending £1000 on a holiday for myself and my wife each year let alone several times a year in order to full-fill the conditions of my employment.

Naturally, you are not obliged to go to conferences, but missing out on attending means that you isolate yourself from the academic community of your field. Your name doesn't get out there, and you find it difficult to form the collaborations needed to bring in more funding for more work (and conferences).

So, why am I bringing this all up now? Well, I recently returned from a conference in the south of France where the dinner table turned to politics. There was a general dislike of politicians from the PhD students (and a couple of eminent professors) rising from the expenses scandal. Even outside the academic field, this is a major complaint for politicians.

Let me make this clear: We were sitting in a fancy restaurant in Nice, eating fine food, listening to people complain about Expenses being Exploited by Politicians, all before collecting our receipts so that we could claim back the dinner later!

Did any of these academics order a side salad with a side of water? Of course not. The amount we are allowed to spend on our per-day food costs isn't infinite, but it is enough that trips for work are comfortable enough that discussions can be held away from the screaming kids of a Burger King.

I'm not a rich man from working in Academia (I'd be in industry if I wanted that), but also, I am not an academic because I'm a rich man. If the expenses weren't there, most of the scientists working in the UK universities wouldn't be able to afford to do their job. This would ultimately close off the job to the upper echelons of our society (would a shallow gene pool really give us the best science? Prince Phillip, PhD etc?!).  It could also lead to increased intervention by companies, privately funding science and guiding it and its results towards their own ends*.

So, back to politicians:

Let's look at it the other way, let's cut every single politician off from the 'gravy train' of expenses. Let's make an MP for Inverness attend parliament and meetings in London on their own cash. Let's have the MP for the Highlands and Islands (Is that a constituency?) travel between London to Mull to London to Bute and back again under their own funds. What kind of people would be able to do this kind of job? Rich people. People with massive amounts of disposable income that they can use to fly around the place.

Is this the type of person that we want to restrict the job of running our country to?

Or, do we want to have a system in place such that the MP for the most northern parts of Scotland, or the MP for the most rural parts of Wales, to have the same ability to do their job as their South of England counterparts? I'm not saying that the current system is perfect, I believe that the amount of expenses available should be based on distance of travel. However, it absolutely should not be scrapped altogether because of a few bad eggs.

Ranting about a politician claiming £1.50 for a bottle of Irn Bru? No matter how much of an absolute, scheming, bastard that politician is, it only serves to divert attention away from more important matters (see also: politicians picking on a Glasgow Bar's sense of humour, or new politician's younger self's Twitter feed).

So, next time I'm at a conference, I will be on expenses, but because I want to keep my job (and I don't have the luxury of the public voting me in and out), I will play the game and have a sandwich and a bottle of Irn Bru rather than the caviar, foi gras and gold ice cream.

*Some of my work has been funded, in part, by a private company, but I have never been pressurised to or compensated for, guiding the results towards the companies manifesto. Science is Science, and if it doens't say what the company want's, then that's still what the company gets.

If I'm so Left, why does the Left Wing Twitterati piss me off?

I associate myself with Left wing politics, I love the welfare system which we enjoy in the UK providing stuff such as the NHS and Child benefits. However, when I'm on the internet, I sometimes feel that my other love, that of rational thought, gets in the way of being truly 'Left'. Either with us or against us is the rallying cry when a small dissenting view might tweet in to view.

I felt my left wing credentials being called in to check (by only myself, I might add, but silence can speak louder than words or JSON) today when I brought up my twitter time-line and was presented with this lovely succinct image.

Left Wing Twitteratti caption: "This is the problem with catching tax avoiding companies".

Go on, look at it, let it make you hate, let the pixels contained allow your Red blood to boil until your heart explodes and tears itself from your sleeve. "This may help to explain things" cried Rupert Myers, "Can these figures really be true!?..If so the people at HMRC and DWP need a calculator for Christmas!!" asserted Susan Indy. "Learn to read a graph properly" declared my internal thought processes.

We are taught that as a business increases its profits, the tax it pays should increase proportionally to its income. Small businesses pay small tax, big businesses pay big tax, and HUGE companies pay small tax. Wait, hang on. So, the £70bn+ tax that has been evaded must surely come from HUGE companies? How many of them can there be?

There's Vodaphone, I've heard Laurie Penny talk about them (sometimes about tax, other times about her phone bill). There's Google, I use them. Oh, Starbucks! That's another. Jazzy's newsagent on Netherhill Road? Probably doesn't produce big enough profits, or despite being the classic Left enemy of a capitalist (well, why else would sell things for money?) a tax avoider.

So, we can assume for ourselves that the number of HUGE businesses avoiding tax to the level of £70bn is perhaps in the upper tens, if breeching the 100 mark at all.

Let's move on to benefit fraud, despite it's rather vague description. Is this all fraud from the DWP? or just Housing benefit fraud but no Child benefit fraud? Let's assume that it is over the same time period as the business figures, less we throw another parameter in to this graph (I'll get to that in a moment). In the UK for May 2014 there were 5.2 million claiming benefits. Most of these (99.3%) are claimed correctly and without fraud. Leaving 0.7% of 5.2M people apparently committing benefit fraud, that's 36,400 people. A tiny bit more than our estimate for the companies.

Right, so back to the graph. 300 people investigating around 100 companies gives no more than 3 people to a company, and 3250 investigating 36,400 people giving each investigator around 10 people to look at. However, and here's a difference: A company consists of many people, say one CEO and a board of directors. This would have the effect of, in some cases, rounding out the numbers such that both workforces were perfectly adequate for the task ahead.

A two dimensional graph, like the one above which shows two axis (amount of money and number of workers) represents a linear equation. To be an accurate graph, there should be changing variable except what the axis represent. In theory, this graph should actually be a 3 axis surface plot of money, workers and number of people under investigation. Until then, it's just a pointless exercise in the whole "those who shout loudest are the truth of the internet".

The best way to fix tax avoidance? Don't use Vodaphone. Don't buy coffee at Starbucks. Don't use Goog... in fact, I quite like my chromebook, android phone and android watch. Does this make me less of a left-winger?

No, I still vote for the party that I think will bring the better society rather than the ones that will dismantle it.

Freedom of Speech and Santa Claus.

This is more a ramble than an article. Even more so, it's an argument with myself as I try to work out logic in the face of faith. Last week good guy* Pope stated that there should be limits on Freedom of Speech** and that Religion should be protected from Satire. It started my brain thinking about how this boils down to a greater respect for people to have religion being protected than the respect for people to not have religion.

Why do we protect Religion? What is it about a belief in God that elevates it to such a protected status that it is inadvisable for the thoughts of a dissenting person to be aired in public or written down.

There is the common atheist argument that "Babies have no religion", and that religion is emblazoned on them by their parent's beliefs (much like Veganism, I guess). This, in itself, can set aside religion from race in arguing its validity in Freedom of Speech. People leave the womb with a race and a skin colour. In an equal society this doesn't matter, because an equal society sees the person beyond characteristic stereotypes. Of course, we are unfortunately yet to find ourselves in this equal society.

Religion on the other hand will never, ever, achieve an equal society for the sole reason that it demarcates all people based on their ability to conform to a common belief in a God, currently void of evidence either way. Not even God per-sé, but a vision or representation of God written by historians (you can start to see a whole other hypocrisy here) in ancients tomes and scriptures. Naturally, I accept that if we had never had religion, we wouldn't have our society as it is today (from Churches came schools, universities, laws). However, it is my belief that if you solely remove God then you have community, keep it and you have a religion protected from Free Speech.

We see a similar trait in the parents of small children and the paternalistic deception of Santa Claus. The majority of people visiting relatives with small children will have their Freedom of Speech curtailed of any fact pertaining to the fiction of Santa Claus. Yet, we put up with it for the Sake of the Children. It may surprise you to know that I am perfectly happy to allow my niece and nephew to believe in a mythical present-bearing man that sneaks chimney to chimney delivering gifts once a year.

Why do I allow myself this, but not feel OK with the protection of religion?

Children are, basically, the uneducated/undeveloped form of the adult. They are learning how to be an adult, and as yet the world is full of a wonder that is ripe for learning. They learn about societal customs and expectations from their parents and surroundings until they are old enough to make up their own mind. Thus, you are more likely to ask a person "How did you find out that Santa didn't exist?" than "When did your parents tell you Santa didn't exist?". For some people, this happened early due to increased rational thought, for others it comes later (perhaps from finding letters addressed to the North Pole tucked behind a 'magic radiator instead of a fireplace). Perhaps the Santa Claus deception started out as a test for rational thought, with the hypothesis lost to the commercialisation of the season?

Growing up, we are taught to think for ourselves, to gather evidence and make the world our own. We don't burn our hands on the kettle because we've learnt that touching a hot metal is painful, we don't jump off a cliff and expect to fly, we don't expect the stranger we've found in our house at 3am in Winter to be a friendly gift barer. Compare this to the bare-bones of religion, and God, and see a form of thought that evades logic and developmental growth from childhood through to adulthood and death.

Yes, talking ill of religion will cause offence to those practising religion. However, to elevate it to protected expression status above evidence and rational thinking is to loose the crux of Freedom of Speech***. In terms of hurting peoples feelings, I don't disrespect religious people on a day to day basis on the same level that I don't phone my toddler relatives each day to tell them Santa doesn't exist. I sit back through respect for them having their own beliefs, and hopefully let them learn for themselves through experience and evidence. This is, perhaps, where Richard Dawkins and I differ.

Thus, if I am expected to allow religious beliefs to be free from critical thinking, I expect that my own beliefs are allowed the same (it would be fucking amazing to be a scientist in the absence of critical thinking - peer review would be a skoosh). Only then do we have full freedom of speech. Hey, I've not even touched on the ranges of Mr Pope's limits on Freedom of Speech on other religions (will he protect those with more than one God against those with none?).

Do onto others as you expect for yourself, yeah?

*based on the lower public knowledge of evil-ness relative to his predecessor.
** I have found myself capitalising this expression in much the same way as I do the word God. Strange, perhaps hypocritically.
*** When I first heard the Pope saying "There should be Freedom of Speech, but with limits regarding to Religion", my first thought was "yeah, there should be no speed limit on the motorway, but everyone should be above 50Mph". Limits go both ways.

Charlie Hebdo, Barbara Streisand, and provocative retaliation.

Yesterday, shortly after finishing my baked potato and cheese, I felt a queasiness in my stomach. My twitter feed broke the news of the shooting at Charlie Hebdo's offices. For the next hour or two, or three, and more, I was transfixed by the rolling Live News coverage that has became normality. The whole idea of actually taking someone's life (let alone thirteen) because they used their artistic talents to ridicule a belief system is so alien and incomprehensible to me that it started to hurt.

Until lunchtime yesterday, I doubt if more that 5% of my friends would have heard about Charlie Hebdo. Here is the French equivalent of Private Eye, only with more cartoons and, crucially, bravery. While Private Eye might be seen as the satirical outpost of the UK media, compared to Hebdo, it is all rather tame and constricted by the British stiff upper lip. Carry On Politics compared to Chaplin's The Dictator.

After lunchtime, however, the Barbara Streisand effect was in full swing. The perpetrators committed their brutal acts as a method of silencing. "If you don't stop printing that which we don't agree with, we will stop you doing so". As expected, the opposite occurred. Retweeting, blogging, Facebooking, and newspaper printing of the cartoons, were all used as a show of defiance in the face of censorship.

Make no mistake, this attack on Charlie Hebdo's offices was an act of Censorship

And that's where I, for all my support for Freedom of Speech, started to become a bit queasy again. At the start, the reprinting of Hebdo cartoons showed for everyone to see, the wide ranging aim and scope of their satire, from politicians, to bankers, to authors, and of course to mutiple religions (including the major ones of the 'west'). However, a sense of retaliation started to build. A sense of 'us' versus 'them' with every 'I'm going to draw cartoons of Mohammed every day' or the mocking and public flogging of any media outlet that dared to censor or outright block publication of Hebdo's cartoons.

Front cover of Charlie Hebdo showing Michael Houellebecq, a noted author who has been accused in the past of being Islamophobic. Cover mocks him as a 'mystic' saying he'll lose his teeth in 2015, and practice Ramadan by 2022.

Where as the original Charlie Hebdo cartoons were printed in the context of lack of context: Everyone, absolutely everyone, was a target of the cartoonist's truth, we are now assigning a malicious context to them. We tell ourselves that the radicalised perpetrators aren't a true indicator of Muslims or Islam, but then use a staple of Islam (Aniconism) to attack them, to provoke them, to retaliate.

Freedom of Speech allows you to do this, and I am not for a moment saying that it doesn't. I am merely saying that respect as Human Beings should make you wonder if you are, in the quest to taunt the perpetrators, censuring people's Freedom to Religion?

If we get caught up in using cartoon depictions of Mohammed as the weapon of choice against these murderers, we are in essence declaring war on Islam. If we want to declare war on the perpretrators (and their radicalised ideas), then we should satirise yesterday's murderers and their horrific acts.

I am not brave enough to do that, and for that reason, I am not Charlie and chances are, neither are you.

What did the author mean?

I spent an infuriating half an hour in the car listening to the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2. Mr Vine was chairing a discussion about a blog post for the British Medical Journal, written by previous BMJ editor Richard Smith. In this fairly poetic blog, Smith breaks down a choice of four deaths (ignoring suicide) on their effect on family and friends. Depression, as he perfectly describes " the most awful as you are slowly erased", perhaps long before the body is ready to shut down. A sudden death on the other hand leaves relationships in a frozen state that may or may not be positive, leading to tragedy, guilt and regret.

Cancer, Smith proclaims, allows a period of contemplation and action. Allowing the terminal patient to, hopefully, bid farewell to family and friends and leave all loose ends tied up nicely. Smith, then ends with a flippant line about the wastage of research funds on cancer. Which, brings me to my frustration.

Vine repeatedly re-introduced the discussion along the lines of "Is cancer the best death?" and "Should we cut funding for cancer research as an editor of the British Medical Journal suggests?". This was followed by many callers voicing their disapproval of the premise; "Cancer's awful" "I watched my dad die from cancer" etc. To be fair, he did have a guest who was into her last months of terminal cancer and who agreed with the premise.

The whole discussion was infuriating because it reminded me of a meme that gets passed around the internet from time to time.  This meme, below, relates to literature teachers trying to teach students how to think about what the author means when they write "The curtains were blue", with the response being that "the curtains were fucking blue" and any other description is superfluous. Perhaps the sentence before the introduction of the curtains informed the reader of the curtain'owners cat passing away, or he is a retired ship captain longing for the sea. Both of these would change the motive for the author to tell you the colour of the curtains in his house.

To go through life believing that the "curtains were fucking blue", and I am in no doubt that they had that colour, is to completely forget how to read beyond the physical ink on paper/pixels on screen words that appear. Context is lost, and while an instruction manual may need the reader to take the words as unequivocal truth less the instructions can't be followed, other forms of writing and literature require the reader to question the meaning beyond the words.  

While trying to formulate this blog post, I was trying to think of an example of songwriter where a simple lyric on the page can see throwaway but with context opens up a whole world of interpretation. That line is taken from Bruce Springsteen's Cautious Man:

"He got dressed in the moonlight and down to the highway he strode , when he got there he didn't find nothing but road" 

Here, we have a guy standing on the road at night and nothing else. In the meme above, that is what the author fucking meant. That however loses all the power of what songwriting and literature in general sets out to do. In the context of the song, here is a man who is burdened with regret and longing, who is looking for an easy way out, symbolized by the highway but then finds that it can't solve his problems. The song comes in the middle of Springsteen's break up album, Tunnel Of Love, giving even more credence to the redundancy of the escape in the context of an adult relationship. Then, outside the context of the album, you have the author, Mr Car's and Girls, Mr Born To Run, writing about the highway being 'nothing but road?'. Sheesh, there's a whole autobiography in two lines of simple songwriting. 

To bring this back to the BMJ blog, Richard Smith uses poetic language and imagery to talk about the taboo subject of death. He does this to remain respectful of the whole topic of death and those facing readers who are facing it themselves or in their family, and at the same time to allow those not imminently facing it to understand it. The image of depression 'erasing a person' is one that will stay with me for a long time. The final line about research funding has a change of tone and style that allows it to come across as a punchline in the context of the text as a whole. 

It is this change in tone that Jeremy Vine missed in his chairing of the discussion, reducing the whole poetic piece to nothing more than words on a screen to push an agenda. Had he taken two or three minutes to merely recite the blog piece then his listeners would appreciate the beauty of the author's argument. 

By trying to reduce every small set of words to "what the author fucking meant" is to reduce our language and lose meaning, we will have static facts and data but no humour, empathy or allusion. 

So, next time you read a blog or listen to a song, please don't take two sentences which you don't agree with out of the sum of their parts and get angry. Instead, take it as a whole and try to understand what the author really meant and work out for yourself if you still agree.

Then, if it calls for it, get angry and phone in to the Jeremy Vine show.

Currently listening to: Megan Trainor, All About The Bass.

Day 7: Singing and Sarazin

I think that the blog posts I write during the week will be pretty brief, or bundled together in to multi-day posts when nothing really happens. As a breather from the lengthy weekend posts a few days ago, this will be brief and more serve as a sales-pitch for a friend, and a message of "I'm still alive" to those who may ask.

I've settled nicely in to the work routine, leaving the flat around 08:00 to catch the subway in to Manhattan. Some days it is hectic and busy, other days it is dead. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme nor reason to this but I'm not complaining. I worry when it's too quiet that I've missed the last stop, or a bomb warning, or a madman on the loose or anything really. And then I worry when its too busy that I'm going to suffocate, or not be able to get off at my stop, or even be able to see if it's my stop, or that someones' going through my back-pack, or anything really. It's nice that the universe mixes it up for me.

The work day came to an early finish yesterday when the top floors of the building (8th till 13th, I'm on 9th) lost power and was running on batteries. I had plans for the evening, so this was a welcome disruption as it meant that I could get home, check in with people back home, and get some dinner before heading out.

I mentioned a few days ago that I  ended up at Pete's Candy Shop two days too early for the Robert Sarazin Blake gig. No such problems last night, although, a crap sense of direction on my part helped me lose my way to the bar. I eventually got there around half an hour before Robert was going to play, so I sat at the bar (checking with the bar man that he was definitely playing tonight) and had a drink.

I've played a good number of shows with Robert back in Scotland, with some of my earliest favourite gigs being at the TransEurope Cafe in Glasgow with him. Pete's Candy Shop isn't actually all that different in style to the TransEurope, except with a better bar and a PA for the minuscule stage. I heard the door open and in he walked, immediately recognising me and coming over to say hi. After pleasantries were exchanged, and the usual explanation of why I find myself in the States, he introduced me to Thomas who would be playing Trumpet and Saxaphone during his set. Not at the same time, I might add.

We went through to the venue area to watch the support act who was just about to start her set. The venue as a whole listed as having a capacity of 90, but in reality the small stage area has a capacity of around 30 and the main, seperate, bar area closer to 60. The style throughout the venue is 1940s, with fabric wall paper, a heavy pine bar and wooden bar stools. The lighting is dark but warm, and the drinks are affordable compared to Manhattan.

The support act didn't do much for me, who was a typical singer-songwriter of songs of love, and love songs. I finished my beer to early during her set, but out of politeness couldn't get up to go and get another. Finally, there was a short break while Robert and Thomas set up and so I could make a hidden trip to the bar.

They brought with them a small crowd of around 20 people, making the venue area feel very busy for the gig. Robert has just finished recording a new album in Brooklyn, and the audience was made up of a few friends and musicians who played on it. He started off his set with three new tracks from this record, the first being a tribute to getting old but remaining to be an independent, but respected, artist despite the lack of 'fame'. It was a barnstomper, with Robert on hollow-bodied electric and Thomas on saxaphone. Some moments were quite jazzy, then kicking it up to a Jungleland like solo towards an almost whispered middle section before a final chorus. It was amazing.

He only had a forty minute set, which didn't give much time for many songs. When he plays, it sometimes feels like he's making the songs up as he goes, with spoken intros given over finger picked guitars before he's segued in to the first verse of a song. The middle section of his set was full of older material, with Thomas switched on to muted trumpet.

For his final song, he had two of his audience members (who played on the album) get up and join Thomas and him for a last, unplugged song. I've grown a bit tired of acoustic acts unplugging for their last song, but this had a completely different feel. It sounded like music that was written in a barn, or around a camp fire with no audience in mind. Or, if there was an audience, it was written in the distant years gone by such that everyone knew it but hadn't learnt it. Like "This land is your land", or "Wild Rover" or, well, you get the idea.

The two of them had played a folk festival the previous night alongside Pete Seeger, and this inspired this sing-a-long to close the proceedings. The chorus is simple, and a good place to end this post too.

"Isn't it amazing what they're doing with plastic, I could have sworn it was made out of wood.
The world is changing, I know that it scares you, and I know that you'd change it,

If only you could"

Day 6: Walking and Williamsburg

I'm having a day of resting in my apartment today. I have a blister the size of a marble on one foot, and a smaller one on the other foot. I'll get to the cause of these in a moment. Today is spent watching as much Parks and Recreation as possible. I'm a relative newcomer to the series, and I have access to American Netflix here, so the moons have aligned.

Yesterday was a day of exploring, mostly on foot, a small portion of the city. I left my apartment at 11am and took a slightly elongated route through the neighbourhood that I'm living in towards the subway station to catch the J train towards Manhattan.

The J train runs on an elevated train track from Jamaica Centre to Manhattan, taking around 35 minutes from my stop (Crescent St) to my work stop (Fulton St). From my bedroom window, I can see the silver, usually graffiti'd, trains making their way above the roof tops of the neighbourhood. The tracks run along, and 40foot above, the main road roads of their routes, on rusty iron supports. When you are sitting next to a window as the train takes a sharp turn, it is very much like being on a Wild Mouse roller coaster ride.

Trains are usually busy, due to the route being one of the main ways to get from JFK Airport to Manhattan. The areas that I see as I travel to work, excluding Manhattan, range from beatdown to, well, not-so beat down. The fun fact regarding the J train (and the express Z) is that the rapper JayZ took his name from them because he grew up near Marcy Avenue. This is the second last stop before crossing the Williamsburg bridge in to Manhattan.

My original plan was to get off at Marcy and walk up to the Williamsburg bridge then over in to Manhattan, get food and then the train back to Williamsburg for a drink in the evening. I must have been travelling on auto-pilot because I, as I do when going to work, switched from the J train to the A train at Broadway Junction. This is a time saver I use when commuting because the A train is, mostly, an express service. I left the subway at the Hoyt station, checked a map and found that I was miles south of where I wanted to be, so, I started walking north.

I passed through Livingston Street, filled with shoppers and many recognisable shops (Gap, Starbucks, Macys) and several cheaper shops selling hats, shoes and toys. It could really have been any metropolitan street in any city around the world, such is globalisation. As I kept walking, I passed the NYC College of Technology and found myself at a small park at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. Checking my map, I gave up any hope of being able to walk to Williamsburg, and decided to change my plans for the day.

Manhattan bridge is a very long bridge, perhaps equalling that of the Erskine Bridge back in Scotland. There are all modes of transport using the bridge. There is a foot andcycle path either side of the central section which has sections for cars and other motor vehicles, and the J/Z subway line. It's a very noisy walk, filled with car horns, engines, police sirens, and subway trains clacketing away slowly.  When I was half way across the bridge, paramedics were dealing with a motorcyclist who had been hit by a taxi. It didn't look good for the guy, and the taxi driver had an ashen face as he stood by his vehicle alone.

It took me around 20 minutes to walk the length of the bridge, arriving in the China Town area of Manhattan on the east side. By this time it was getting to 1pm and the temperatures were reaching their peaks. My choice of flatcap and checked shirt over a t-shirt was starting to be a bit silly, but truth be told, I thought I was going to Williamsburg and wanted to fit in. Nonetheless, I decided to walk north along Bowery with a view to getting to the Willamsburg Bridge to cross back in to Brooklyn.

I was distracted by the sheer crazyness of the city on a Saturday and missed Delaney St, which passes over the bridge. I ended up in the Lower East Side, in parkland next to the East river. The bridge towered above me, kids were playing softball and the pathway was filled with joggers and cyclists. I sat on a bench for a moment, sweat pouring out of me and hunger starting to call for lunch. I had walked past a few Diners on my route, including the world famous Katz's Deli from When Harry Met Sally, and so, I decided to walk back over that area to get something to eat.

East Houston St has a large number of diners and deli's on offer. Katz deli is a run down, sixties building, crowded by 40 year old Nora Ephron fans and tourists. Knowing that this wouldn't be my scene,  I wandered to the next block and found a classical looking American diner. I was eating on my own, so the waitress gave me a seat at the counter and poured me a glass of water. After checking the large options on offer in the menu, I ordered a coke, and a burger with blue cheese and mushrooms.

I had two american men sitting either side of me, one chatting away loudly on his mobile phone, then other chatting up the waitress. The general noise and decor of the diner added to the all American experience. I don't think I've heard the phrase "Thank You VERY Much" as often as I did in the hour I spent in this diner. After leaving the diner, with a very full stomach due to huge portion sizes, I decided to wander around the Lower East Side for a while.

The Lower east side is quite similar to the West Village, but with a lower class, more friendly feel to it. There are many more dive bars and ale houses (including one called McSorely's), gig venues and food places here. It's definitely an area that I'll start to return to after work for a beer and something to eat.  I guess it has very strong parallels with Camden in London, but also reminded me quite a bit of Byres Road and Partick in Glasgow.

My feet were starting to really hurt by this time, and with it approaching four o'clock, I decided to get the Subway back to the apartment to rest for a few hours. My evening plans was to go to a bar on Lorimer St in Williamsburg to see an old friend, Robert Sarazin Blake, play a gig in Pete's Candy Store. This turns out to be a bar, and not a candy store venue hybrid.

There's a Lorimer St station on the J line, which made me think that this would be an easy enough trip to the bar and back. Arriving at Lorimer St, the first thing I notice is that it is set amongst some New York City housing association high rises, and that it's getting dark. Pete's is at 709 Lorimer St, so I start walking. And walking. The subway that I got off at is roughly 200 Lorimer St. As I walk up the street, I pass a few 7Elevens and a couple of bars. All in all it is a very quite and run down street with few people hanging around. Until I see, down one of the side streets, a proper NYC block party in full swing.

There was a proper stage, lighting rig, loud PA rig and perhaps 500 people enjoying themselves to a backdrop of heavy rap music. Rather than impressing them with my dancing, I continued up Lorimer St and found another Lorimer St Subway station, for the L line. It's starting to make sense now, and I find the bar on the next block.

On arriving at the bar, there is an acoustic gig going on in the back room with a small audience of around 30 people. I pull up a seat at the bar, order a Brooklyn Lager (very nice) and chat with the barman. It turns out Blake is playing on Monday rather than Saturday, I'll return for that. I got chatting with a guy at the bar who was from Philadelphia but staying in Brooklyn for work, and who was a fan of Franz Nicolay and sure that he'd encountered Mischief Brew.

This was most definitely a hipster bar in Williamsburg. The guy's all wore thick rimmed glasses, checked shirts, cut-off jeans, sensible shoes and discussed the merits of Weezers early albums compared with the careers of various members of the Smiths. On my other side at the bar, there was a girl trying to write into a leather note book. She was a writer (although she works in an office during the day) for various blogs and also freelances for a few reputable newspapers. I think I had found the Brooklyn equivalent of one of my close friends back home, and that helped.

Once I had finished my daily budget, I walked out in to the night and caught the L train to the J train back to my apartment and collapsed, with sore feet and blisters, in to my bed.

Right, back to Parks and Recreation.