Lovely day in lovely New York

I spend most days writing & staring out of the window. When I emerge, blinking like a particularly squiffy, cross owl, to actually do something, I am astonished at how much I can achieve in a day if I put my mind to it, especially when serendipity comes into play.

I’m very good at rising to a challenge, so when I got an email at 915am asking if I could pop in to Manhattan for a meeting today, I begged darling Y to drive me to the station, looked in the mirror, shrieked in horror, trowelled on an inch of slap, pulled on my thousand league suede boots and was off to the railway station within twenty minutes.

At Penn Station an hour later I nearly expired, knocked for six by the unlucky combination of mass humanity and unseasonally warm weather. Beetling down to Soho House in Meatpacking to pick up my post, I stripped off my leather gloves and abbreviated Batman cape, untwined five foot of cashmere scarf from around my neck and raised my face to the sky. There really is nothing like Manhattan on a sunny day.

There’s a handy public Mac in the drawing room of SH, so (as my Blackberry is kaput) I popped upstairs to check my email & Twitter. There was a DM waiting for me from an online friend suggesting tea at SH if I was in the city. I looked up and, sitting working with his back to me, was my friend, easily recognisable from his Twitter profile. Kismet.

He did look a bit taken aback when a random woman approached him, smiling like a loon and saying his name. I remembered then that of course not only do I use a nom de plume on Twitter but I’ve posted an unrecognizable portrait of me too.

Once he’d realised I was me,(it’s quite odd introducing myself as Liberty), and not a crazed stalker, we had a lovely pot of tea and talked about ships & sealing wax and cabbages & kings.

Twitter is a funny animal, but one thing has become evident to me over the past year: Twitter requires an ability to distill thoughts into 140 characters. If the contraction still lets personality shine through, then that person is bound to be fascinating in real life.

More of my NY day later.