Last night I took the dog to Peaks Island for a nighttime walk. The ferry was cold and I didn’t wear quite enough layers – perfect for the walk, but the wind coming across Casco Bay, combined with the perky pace of the Machigonne II car ferry, meant I was chilled to the bone when I got back to the mainland. I put the dog in the back of the car – after a three hour walk he curled up and immediately fell asleep – and I popped into a bar for a quick whisky to warm up. The woman next to me struck up a conversation when her husband excused himself to use the loo. She was from northern Vermont, she and her husband owned a craft brewery, and they had engineered a few days holiday in Portland around a “business tour” of a couple of breweries in town.
Your own private Idaho
I lived in London for three and a half years, but looking back on it now, I’m aware of the fact that I never really made it my own. Indeed, having now spent the last week in east London – at a couple of grim Airbnb flats in Whitechapel – and while bouncing around between meetings and dinners and events in Shoreditch and Hackney and the City of London, it’s become apparent that I did not, in fact, really live in that London which people think of and attracts foreigners and British outlanders alike in their millions. I lived in Greenwich, and spent lovely days and evenings and weekends traipsing through the parks and suburbs of the southeast – but there was a sort of endless suburban feel to it. I think the fact that I often rented a Zipcar and did errands by car sort of sums it up: London, proper, is a city of the tube and black taxis and walking shoes. My time in there allowed me to have a quick commute to Canary Wharf, and while Greenwich had an amazing sort of village feel to it which definitely made it an English experience, it wasn’t really London.