Always be a Town in my Eyes

So the football team is no longer a misnomer, it now is Chelmsford City.

Whoop.

But hang on a minute, something doesn't sit quite right. Doesn't this increase in the number of cities there are devalue city status, more than it bigs up bland, suburban nowhereville?

Chelmsford, like Preston before it, is a town. No two ways about it. It's a medium-sized market town with a small, ill-equipped centre, acting as a commuter base for a nearby metropolis. That's not something to be celebrated. It's like putting an ornamental nameplate on a garden shed, it just serves to make ornamental name plates seem tacky.

Pleasant? Yes. Safe? Yes. Somewhere you would want to raise a family? Undoubtedly. A City? Nope. Not a chance. I appreciate that Chelmsford is marginally more city-esque than some of the other "cities", St Asaph and St David's spring to mind, but that doesn't justify anything, except maybe that we've already got too many cities. If I had my way I would reduce it to a manageable number - ten maybe - and only include cities that are actually cities: big urban areas where things happen.

Obviously if you're not from Chelmsford and try to say it doesn't deserve city status then you are categorically wrong, it does - it's got a Cathedral,a Crown Court, a Prison, a University and a whole heap of history - but it's my prerogative to slate my hometown. Illogical, but fact. So there.

Till the End

Lately I've been getting annoyed with till receipts. I just seem to end up with so many of them balled up in coat pockets / tucked inside my wallet. Surely in an increasingly green world there is no need for a small piece of paper to exist saying that when I bought a pint of milk I received 6p change. It's littering my person.

Speaking of littering. Virgin Media seem to be doing their best to litter inside of my house, they seem to send me at least one offer of cable tv a month, normally more. Not sure how many they need to send before it counts as fly-tipping or harassment. I'm going to do my best never to buy another Virgin product.

In other news, I went to the theatre last night - Bingo with Professor X. Didn't really get the play, it was a bit too, erm, cerebral for me (given how excited I am about the Hunger Games at the moment, that's not saying much - incidentally, did you read Gary Ross's splendid denial of how much HG is like Battle Royale? Quote "I promise you, the main character in Battle Royale didn't end up in a revolution and become a Joan of Arc leading an uprising." I'm not sure I like how casually this man breaks his promises). Highlight for definite was the older lady in front of me falling asleep then waking herself up by projectile vomiting on the row in front. The chunky arc looked beautiful in the theatrical lighting.

Concrete Jungle That Dreams Are Made Of

New York, New York - so good they named it twice. Only one thing to do with that kind of hype - a one-day smash-and-grab of Philadelphia. In your face you over-sized, pomacious metropolis.

Philadelphian highlight? Was it the Liberty Bell? Was it the birthplace of America? Of course not, down in the boho ghetto a crazy man has turned his house into a mosaic - Philadelphia Magic Garden, down on South Street - and whilst you're down on South Street you can get yourself a Philly cheesesteak. Or not bother, because it's just a hard to eat sandwich. Overrated.

Speaking of which, one of the big things I was aiming at whilst in the States was to eat as many of the local dishes as was viable. So here goes the Traveller Cliche guide to the cuisine of Louisiana - remember I eat these things so you don't have to:

Biscuits and Gravy
Biscuits and gravy? Get right in my face you. Oh no, wait, you're not what I was expecting at all - you're flavourless bits of dough in a boring white sauce. How mundane? I was expecting chocolate hobnobs in beefstock - at least that would've provoked a reaction of more than an ambivalent shrug.

Crawfish Etoufee
What is the fuss about. People go crazy for this and I don't understand. It's not unpleasant - well the taste isn't unpleasant, the smells fairly bad and the texture / look reminds you just how crawfish live - but it's not something I'd go voodoo for.

Grits
Feels a bit like you're eating an ants' nest. Taste's alright though.

Gumbo
Watered-down curry.

Shrimp Po'boy
Right, shrimp bo-boy sounds really quite exotic whereas a scampi sandwich sounds a bit Kerri Katona. They're the same thing.

Oysters
If you deep-fry stuff in breadcrumbs it tastes of chicken - why would you do that to the poor little oysters?

Jambalaya
Jambalaya=good

Fat Tuesday

I don't get Mardi Gras.

Actually, that's not true. I completely get Fat Tuesday itself - a day of indulgence where everyone wears fancy dress and gets so drunk that they can't stand up and uses the parade as their preferred method of transport (got to get to Rampart and Dumaine? Gonna need at least a trombone for that kind of journey).

What I don't get are the proper parades. What we'd call carnivals. You stand in the cold for up to twelve hours at a time, whilst people on lorries throw stuff at you. A drive-by beading if you will. And people seem to take the accumulation of beads seriously - the locals all go out with step ladders and massive beachbags to put the beads in. I just don't get it in anyway - and it goes on for five days. Five days of people throwing tacky plastic beads at your face. Five days.

Me? I lasted about twenty minutes.

The Big Easy

So, I made it to New Orleans.

New Orleans is just about everything I expected it to be - a hotchpotch of old houses and spicy food. The whole city is limbering up for the big one, which makes the whole place seem a bit more, erm, Jersey Shore than I was expecting (for the record, I'm not really sure what Jersey Shore is, but I imagine it to be a lot like Bourbon Street is at the moment. i.e. A lot of drunk Americans whooping - if Jersey Shore isn't like that, then please imagine I used the word frat party instead).

Weirdest thing I've eaten since I've been here - 'gator jerky.

What happened there then?

Funny how things turn out. Originally I tried to book this trip via Chicago but it was going to be really expensive, so I didn't bother. Now, due to a series of clerical errors by United Airlines I appear to be getting paid to be in Chicago. Which is nice.

I've already had a cheeky smash and grab just been up the Willis (nee Sears) Tower - it's impressively full of pro-Willis Tower propaganda - I was reliably informed that it was the tallest building in the Northern Hemisphere by one of the attendants. Maybe she's trapped in 1986?

Seen Anish Kapoor's shiny bean thing too - now that was ace. I might even post a photo of that.

Chicago's been my third city in three days. Yesterday I had a cheeky smash and grab of Baltimore, wandered around for the day pretending to be Stringer Bell. Ate crab cakes in Lexington Market - they were as good as the hype.

One of the downsides of this predicaent is that my bag is a couple of thousand miles away, which means I need to get me some clean pants. I'm on a road called the Magnificent Mile - there's a Tiffany and a Gucci opposite - I'm not sure I'm in the best place, wish me luck...

A Washington Post

I can't convey quite how unreflective the reflecting pool was. I always thought it worked quite well in a double kind of way: it was made out of water so it physically reflected stuff; it was all peaceful so allowed you to do some metaphorical reflecting. It was nether. It had been drained and was being dug up. There was a lot of plant there. And to add to the noise, there was a fleet of helicopters shipping dignatories in to the White House.

Apart from that Washington had a very impressive world-famous-stuff-what-I-saw to photos-what-I-took ratio. I saw loads of really famous stuff off the telly - The Capitol; the White House; the Lincoln Memorial; the Washington Monument - and didnn't take photos of any of it.