The Bryant Park Hotel

Source: TripAdvisor

A weekend Facebook post from the Bryant Park Hotel in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, words to the effect that their staff had not worked and that the hotel had no guests, made me realise that I'd not written the positive review of this hotel that I'd meant to pull together after our stay in April of this year.

My wife and two daughters (5 and 4) spent a week at the Bryant Park Hotel after a fortnight enjoying theme parks in Orlando. The original intention of the stay in New York was to be a week spent enjoying the city, doing more 'adult' things after two weeks of the comparative unreality of Florida. As it happens, our two girls enjoyed endlessly walking round Manhattan and Brooklyn every bit as much as we did. Their prior knowledge of New York's unique topography has been informed by the number of pictures, prints and books about the city in our house and from seeing landmarks in films. But one of the things that made their enjoyment of New York so strong was the hotel itself.

The Bryant Park Suite we had overlooking Bryant Park in the former American Radiator Building was modern, clean, spacious and functional without feeling too minimal. My eldest daughter slept on the day bed in the window of the lounge while my youngest slept on a foldaway bed a good few feet away. Despite the lounge being converted into a kids' bedroom, it remained spacious and uncluttered throughout our stay, and we made good use of the sofas and dining table, including one night eating take-out pizza from John's at Times Square, and occasional breakfast pastries from Pret or the patisserie across the other side of the park. Every morning and evening the kids would rush to the window to look out at the huddled skyscrapers of Midtown, the changing colours of the spire of the Bank of America tower, the deep canyon of Fifth Avenue and the people sitting .at tables in the park or at the long benches visible through the windows at the rear of the Library. To say they were enthralled by New York's vibrancy would be a gross understatement, and we would all go to sleep at night with the city's buzz pleasantly in our ears.

If the suite was perfect enough, our stay was made all the better by the staff at the hotel. When we arrived at the hotel from JFK, we were greeted at the door by Ryan, with whom we spoke every day, talking about what we were going to be doing that day and his readiness for and apprehension over the birth of his daughter; at the desk we were checked in by Chase, a really friendly guy who went out of his way to greet us with a smile and a massive good morning every day we saw him; and then there was Sarah at guest services who my youngest daughter struck up a friendship with and who she would rush to see whenever we passed through reception, Sarah on the last day fussing over the American Girl dolls my two girls had twisted my arm to buy. These three people were among the friendliest we've ever encountered as a family, and the fact that I still remember them so fondly six months on is testament to that. I can't thank them enough for how welcoming and friendly they were - particularly in a trendy hotel that's not necessarily best-known as a destination for families with two small and very excited children.

The Bryant Park is not a cheap hotel, but then again nowhere is in New York. Nevertheless, its location right in the centre of Midtown, effortless stylishness and general atmosphere are worth paying for. I took one trip to the basement bar and the crowd on a midweek evening was a cool mix of office workers and über-hip young adults; one evening we came back from a long day's schlepping round the streets to find a huge queue at the door of the hotel. After skipping right past the line thanks to being residents, we asked what was going on. The security guard, an intimidating but cheerful guy, told me there were two events that evening, an NFL Draft party and a private fashion show up in the penthouse. At the time it seemed perfectly normal, both for New York and for the Bryant Park, but looking back now it seems otherworldly.

Staying a week in New York is, it seems, relatively uncommon. People tend to spend a weekend or a few days and strike the main landmarks off the 'must-do' list. After our week-long stay and our return to the UK, we resolved to go back again, feeling like we had what we've described as 'unfinished business' in the city, and will be heading back to Manhattan again next May. For us it would be unimaginable not to stay at the faultless Bryant Park Hotel again, and so that's exactly where we will be heading to next year. It cannot come soon enough.

Once again, my thanks to the staff mentioned above for making our stay so enjoyable.

A Chance Encounter (c1996 - 2011)

A Chance Encounter is a short story that I have been writing and rewriting on and off for about sixteen years, but which I never quite finished. While I was at university I decided that I wanted to write, and set about pulling together short stories, recording my dreams and noting down ideas. Sadly, I don't think that any of those inchoate scribbles exist today, but one idea did make it through, which was the notion for A Chance Encounter. Unusually, I've never changed the title despite how long I've been writing it for (normally the original title and the final title are quite different), and the concept itself is - with a few minor exceptions - not that different from the first, incomplete draft that I still have knocking about on my hard drive. This is the third or fourth - and definitely final - version of this story, and the only one that I've completed.

A Chance Encounter describes an unexpected meeting between an angel and a victim of a horrific train crash. I can no longer recall what inspired this originally, but in the final version I wrote from scratch this year, there's a degree of cynicism about bureaucracy which may or may be a reflection of having been working for thirteen of the sixteen years that have elapsed since I started this.

You can read A Chance Encounter by clicking here.

A Canary Wharf Sunday

Source: MJA Smith

Above ground, Canary Wharf's spires of commerce are a thing to behold. The cluster of tall office and residential buildings on London's former docks has a Stateside feel, evoking the design of a more clinically utopian take on Manhattan's Financial District - though the buildings are far, far smaller. Unlike the City, just around the bend in the Thames, the streets and buildings of Canary Wharf are resolutely planned; the City, in contrast, is confusing to me even after ten years of working there, the street pattern having evolved into a seemingly random and inexplicable web of alleys, short dead-end streets and passageways over many centuries. The City's architecture is more austere, mostly stone; the newer glass and steel structures provide jagged aspects of juxtaposed modernity, taller structures nestled up against older buildings, sometimes conspicuously, sometimes comfortably.

Around Canary Wharf, old architecture is hard to find, and fast disappearing. Beneath the shade of the State Street building at Churchill Place, the old Fulton umbrella warehouse is now a pile of part-demolished, twisted metal. In a neighbouring street to where we were staying at New Providence Wharf, we found a row of three of four old workers' cottages, common to nearby Poplar or Greenwich, but against the backdrop of the Ontario Tower and the emerging Swan Streamlight they just looked like vestigial appendages, long since abandoned by architectural evolution and ambition. Billingsgate Market, with its spindly spider's legs cradling the main market hall, looks dated and threatened by the bulk of the nearby HSBC tower, itself one of the few buildings at Canary Wharf with curves rather than sharp, precise edges.

Below ground, Canary Wharf is a confusing web of malls and subterranean access points to the office buildings above. Escalators, elevators and passageways are the principal means of movement here. Doors open automatically into service tunnels and further below still a network of car parks extend far under the waterline. Everything is bathed in fluorescent light and after a while you wonder what natural daylight looks like.

There are two sets of shopping malls at Canary Wharf – Cabot Square and Jubilee Place. Both have the slightly surreal effect of making you feel like you're in a vast airport departure lounge, and the shops are dominated by the upmarket brands that proliferate and thrive at international terminals. I spent some time with Daughter#2 here one Sunday in January; we were in London for the weekend, and on that day Mrs S and Daughter#1 went off to the O2 to watch Strictly Come Dancing. Faced with what turned out to be nearly four hours walking round those glistening corporate catacombs, we took the DLR and headed over to Greenwich instead, providing a welcome relief from tunnel living.

On that particular cold, damp Sunday, the main draw of Greenwich was its vast Royal Park, which I always find more interesting than Hyde Park over in the west, thanks to its rolling hills and the predominance of the imposing Observatory, to which Daughter#2 and I ascended. In this there is a beautiful irony – you escape Canary Wharf's clinical atmosphere only to purposefully take in the breathtaking view of the vast corporate palaces and sleek apartment buildings from the summit of the Observatory hill. Somewhere beneath those towers, I reflected to myself, are those malls and boutiques I'd chosen to escape from that weekend. You'd never believe they could really be there.

There is a great kids' playground in the park, which Daughter#2 thoroughly enjoyed to the point of I-don't-want-to-leave-yet-daddy-waaaaaaahhhhh tantrums that only precocious, unselfconscious two year old girls can produce. Writing this it occurs to me that Canary Wharf is almost entirely denuded of things that would appeal to children, with the possible exception of Wagamama. Heading back to the retail malls when being outdoors got too cold, and before I spent too much money at the Greenwich branch of Music & Video Exchange, we found ourselves sitting in the Jubilee Place branch of Waterstone's where their small stock of books for children distracted Daughter#2 from the abject boredom of pottering around shops we had no intention of buying anything from.

Josh & Laura

Christmas is, in many ways, all about tradition. There are traditions the majority of us observe, and still others that we choose – at a family level, or on a personal level – to follow.

I wrote last year about one of mine, which is always reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in the run-up to Christmas; that book never fails to evoke warm, positively affirming feelings in me and stops me from developing a colder heart. This year we bought a heavily abridged children's' version for our two daughters - who knows, them reading A Christmas Carol might become a tradition for them too. Other traditions in our house may prove to be temporary until the girls grow up. One is watching the Sesame Street film Elmo's Christmas Countdown (with Ben Stiller as a hapless elf) with my daughters; I try not to think of a time when they will no longer be enthusiastic about these films, try not to think that I will find it difficult to indulge my love of all things Muppet when they've grown up and moved onto boy bands, boyfriends and the like.

A tradition I started last year is to write an annual Christmas short story. Last year's – Christmas, etc – will have passed you by, mainly because I didn't tell anyone, beyond a handful of followers on Twitter, about it. You can read it here.

This year's describes a night of optimism and promise shared between two students at an end of term Christmas party, set mostly on the streets of London that I love so much. You can read Josh & Laura here. I guess you could call it a Christmas love story.

Thanks to everyone who has either voluntarily chosen to follow (or who I have coerced into following) my sporadic thoughts and musings over the past year. Have an excellent Christmas and New Year, and expect more of the same in 2011.

Žižkov Television Tower

Talk of the festive season, Christmas markets and the sharp drop in temperatures always makes me think of Prague. In our relatively carefree, childless days, Mrs S and our friends Tina and Steve took a trip to Prague just before Christmas in 2003 and it was everything that I hoped it would be, and more; that city has subsequently become indivisible from my thoughts of the Christmas season.

I soaked up the festive atmosphere, the Gothic architecture and the quintessentially Eastern European modernist design of the subway platforms with unbridled enthusiasm. So what if we also had to spend a night in the airport when heavy snowfall – initially beautifully and silently draped across the city – later brought everything unexpectedly to a standstill, including all fights; so what if the tensions of queuing all night for replacement flights meant I got into a spat with a similarly-disgruntled Latvian in the early hours of the morning; so what if it was the holiday where I may or may not have drunkenly pissed in a dustbin in the hotel toilets (after taking the opportunity to gorge on the free drinks in the executive lounge all the details thereafter became a little sketchy, though I still maintain it was someone else).

The point is that whenever I think of Christmas, I think of the wintry chill and icy splendour of Prague. Whenever I visit an ersatz Christmas market in this country I think of the infinitely more authentic market we visited in Staré Město; whenever the biting cold in late December makes me crave hot chocolate, I think of the small café we four huddled in on the other side of the Charles Bridge (Karlův most) at the base of the steps leading up to the majestic Hradčany palace complex. I understand that Prague is beautiful in the summer, but that wouldn't be the Prague I would want to remember.

Much as I loved the impressive antediluvian squares, bridges, spires and buildings, my favourite structure in Prague lies some way out from the main tourist centre. Taking the subway out to Žižkov, a mostly residential area not frequented by mainstream tourist footfall and certainly not gentrified like other areas of the city; well at least it wasn't in 2003. The central reason for visiting this relatively unassuming urban area, apart from seeing rusty old Ladas and run-down apartment buildings is the Žižkov Television Tower.

The Žižkov Television Tower has a simplistic design that evokes classic Communist post-War attempts at some sort of futuristic modernity; all told, with its double layer of curved-edge rectangular pods in the top third of the main tower, and its trio of cylindrical legs (one containing the tiny lift that takes visitors to the top), it looks like something that Hanna-Barbera would have conceived for The Jetsons. Of course it looks dated now, like it no doubt did at the time of its construction between 1985 and 1992, and it certainly wasn't at all popular with Prague purists when it opened, given its imposing, high position above the city and the fact that they built the tower on an old Jewish cemetery. I like to think of it as being a bit like our dear old BT Tower, just a whole lot funkier.

The views from certain angles in the viewing galleries afford, in many senses, the best views of Prague. Tourists may well elect to view the city at close quarters from, say, the Malá Strana bridge tower or Old Town Hall in Staré Město, but for me the Žižkov Television Tower gives a greater context and long-range perspective on this city.

If you recall the Saturday evening British TV sci-fi series The Tripods, you'd be forgiven for getting a slightly fearful sensation at the sight of the external profile of the building, a feeling which is altogether heightened by David Černý's permanent Miminka art installation from 2001 – ascending upward on the legs of the tower are several statues of crawling babies. It's quirky and not altogether right, but once you transcend the oddness (and recollections of a certain withdrawal scene from Trainspotting) it's fun.

As I've said here before, tall buildings are divisive, much more so in a city where the only other tall buildings are sacred and centuries-old religious structures, but whichever way you look at it, the Žižkov Television Tower is delightfully contrarian and wonderfully strange; a perverse thing of otherworldly elegance in a city with abundant charm already.

A Snowy London Thursday

Source: MJA Smith

I've never liked snow. I hated it as a kid, though I'm sure I must occasionally have had some fun at some point. Chiefly I associate snow with having to wear wellington boots, which I detested; detested so much that during the bleak snow-filled winters we seemed to have every year in England in the early to mid-Eighties I'd occasionally find myself choosing to be one of the kids who didn't have wellies with them, thus being forced to spend breaktime and lunchtime in the classroom with the kids who had colds or ear infections, or who were being punished, rather than pelting my school friends with snowballs. That and the memory of the trek up the road to my school with my mother, past gutters from which foot-long stalactites of icicles would dangle; a sort of weird Narnia in the heart of the Midlands, past the old man's house with a different Meccano model in the window every day like some sort of out of place Lapland toymaker.

It's snowing in London today. I'm passing through Barbican Underground and there is something peaceful about the undisturbed snow on the disused platform; however everywhere else the snow is already becoming dirty as progressive commuters tramp their cold way to work. That I'm even on a Tube seems mildly amusing – checking the TFL website on the way to Euston, the Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines that I rely on to get me to the office are all suffering with severe delays, though I somehow managed to catch a half empty Met Line service no had than I stepped on to the platform at Euston Square.

I spoke to a native New Yorker this week who couldn't believe how poorly Britain copes with extremes of weather, and it is true. A colleague who lives near Horsham hasn't been able to get in to London the past two days as train services into London Bridge have all been cancelled. He and I were both supposed to be in Edinburgh from Tuesday to Thursday, but Edinburgh Airport has been closed most of the week. The New York guy said that in Manhattan life just goes on as it did before. The Lithuanian guy who works in our building's Starbucks concession also said that back home snow just doesn't bother them, their tyres having chains to prevent slippage. Here, it's complete chaos. News reports tell you how much a day of snow costs the economy, yet nothing changes. Roads go ungritted. Electricity supplies get cut. Intake of hot chocolate increases. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose as they say.

Somehow I managed to get to the office and home both days I've been into London this week, travelling from one of those serendipitously placed corridors north of London where business has carried on reasonably as usual. That said, I could have done with not looking like a complete tit wearing a beanie hat I picked up at some outward bound course somewhere in darkest Surrey a few years back.

Still, there's always the excitement etched on the faces of my two little girls to warm my cantankerous attitude towards the snow. We had the barest dusting of snow at the weekend – literally a millimetre at a stretch – and they were bouncing off the walls with joy, asking to make snowmen and have snowball fights, lying on the carpets and making snow angels. They don't mind wearing wellies either, so no chance of them being the grumpy kid choosing to sit with the naughty and sick kids in the classroom at lunchtime.

As I was trudging across the brown slushy mess that adorned the pavement, I began to wonder why I was even bothering going into the office, given that I only had a bunch of conference calls that I could very well have done from home; then I got to my floor in our office building and took a look outside, and when I saw the City spreading out in front of me covered in a delicate blanket of white snow, I realised that's why I bothered.

Dirk Benedict

Dirk Benedict is appearing in the Milton Keynes Theatre panto production of Dick Whittington this year, alongside Joanna Page (from Gavin & Stacey). Originally it was going to be Jason Priestley from Beverly Hills 90210, but he pulled out and therefore the aforementioned Benedict heroically took on the part.

I'm not going, mainly because the very thought of pantomimes fill me with the sort of abject dread that I used to feel whenever Christopher Biggins appeared on TV, or when my mum announced she'd bought tickets for the local amateur dramatic society's annual production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. There is also a secondary reason, which is that Amy Winehouse may be in the audience; the irrepressible chanteuse was gracelessly thrown out of the Milton Keynes panto last year after hurling cursewords and abuse both at the stage and the theatre manager. Then again, she's probably still banned. I'll therefore leave it to Mrs S and Daughter#1 to go this year and I'll find another decent excuse this time next year.

Benedict last appeared on our screens in one of the many long-winded series of Celebrity Big Brother, rarely without a cigar in his mouth. With the addition of the passing of time, this made him look more like Hannibal than Face, his character in the A-Team.

Face was always my favourite character in the A-Team, for two reasons. First, he had a really cool car. It was a white Corvette with a red stripe and it was way cooler than BA's chunky black van. I don't know much about cars, but when you're ten years old and you have a choice between a sports car and a van, which one are you going to choose? Exactly. The sports car wins every time.



The second reason is because Face was rarely without some stunning pneumatic blonde model in the passenger seat of the aforementioned Corvette; whereas Murdock was known for being mad as a box of spanners and BA renowned for raw meat-headed aggression and a fear of flying, Face was the guy who always – always – got the girl. And I liked that – I had my first crush on a girl the when I was ten, and Face's antics thus made it seem perfectly normal; remember that up to that sort of age girls were odd, alien creatures, best avoided in the playground for fear of contracting a love of dolls or My Little Pony.

My classmates, who had over the years given me plenty of stick, mostly for my head of ginger hair, thought otherwise. I thought having a crush on a girl would somehow mark me out as mature and they'd somehow respect me more for my reasons for liking Face the best in the A-Team (surprisingly deep thoughts for a ten year old come to think of it). Alas, boys can be unpredictable and cruel, and instead they branded me as 'gay' for fancying girls. That's right, as a boy, I was branded gay, for fancying girls. What's that all about?

Anyway, I'm not, Face is still my favourite character in the A-Team, and I still occasionally think wistfully about that girl I first had a crush on (for the record, it wasn't reciprocated and I won't be tracking her down on Facebook). So perhaps that's the deep underlying psychological reason for not wanting to go to this year's panto.