It’s bloody FREEZING! I think we must have brought the cold weather home with us. After dragging my jet-lagged body out of bed this morning, I was greeted with arctic gales and frosty temperatures, a real change after the very mild winter we’ve had so far. To make matters worse, I was running late and didn’t have time to grab my normal cup of coffee before jumping on the train. It’s a rough way to start the week.

Back to New York. We arrived late on Thursday night, delayed an hour because the pilots had trouble getting to the airport. We had severe winds on Thursday night, downing trees and power lines across the country, and generally making travel of all sorts difficult. The strong headwind also meant that our flight took longer – we eventually arrived in New York around midnight, and got to our hotel around 1am. New York roads are as bad as ever, and I saw my life flash before my eyes several times on the cab journey from the airport.

Lobby of the Sheraton New York. I was upgraded to a nice suite, but Anne Laure and Neil were “upgraded” to a handicapped room, where everything was designed for someone 3ft tall.

We were up early on Friday morning and decided to hit the city. I wanted to hit B&H Photo – closed on Friday afternoons and Saturdays because it’s run by Orthodox Jews – so that was the first order of business. I ended up with a 50mm lens for my camera and a new camera bag. And I talked Neil into buying one as well (…and so starts the addiction!).

Matthew tries to decide which lens he wants.

Neil was giving me a hard time about buying a lot of stuff — until we saw this guy. He must have bought every accessory in the store! He dumped everything out on the floor and packed it into his new camera bag.

We stopped off for a Mexican lunch, then headed to the International Photography Center, where we saw the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition I had wanted to see in Paris. I thought it was fitting to see his photos, a sort of “tribute” to a 50mm lens, in light of my new purchase.

Friday evening we met up with my friend Peter and his girlfriend for a few drinks at the W Hotel at Times Square, then headed out to dinner at Les Halles, Anthony Bourdin’s original NY restaurant, where Aude and I split a piece of steak just slightly larger than my head.

At the Whiskey Bar, beneath the W Hotel in Times Square. (Photo courtesy of Peter)

MG rode up from her home-away-from-home in New Jersey on Saturday – her first trip to New York. We picked her up at Penn Station and went straight into Macy’s – start as you meant to continue. On a tip from Peter’s girlfriend, we all met for lunch at Golden Bridge in Chinatown for dim sum – and were pretty much the only white people there.

Dim sum with everyone at the Golden Bridge restaurant in Chinatown. (Photo courtesy of Peter)

After gorging ourselves, we spent the afternoon exploring the city – Times Square, Fifth Avenue, the World Trade Centre site – then onto the real New York landmark – Century 21! Famished after hours of shopping, we headed to Little Italy for dinner. We had some fantastic veal, then went around the corner to Ferrara’s bakery for some dessert. After trying unsuccessfully to hail a cab, I managed to blag a ride home in a passing limo.

We were up like clockwork on Sunday morning, Neil’s stomach calling out for food. There was no avoiding it – we needed breakfast at a Jewish deli. We went into Carnegie Deli on 7th Ave and had a traditional deli breakfast with all the trimmings – including a waitress who looked like she’d been working there since the turn of the century. The nineteenth century.

The gang at the Carnegie Deli, shortly before being abused by the pre-historic waitress.

Clearly unimpressed with our unfamiliarity with deli procedure, she served us cheerlessly with her patented “service without a smile.” Still, it could be worse. She yelled at the retired travellers behind us for ordering a side-order of cream cheese, complaining that she had to walk all the way back to the kitchen. Funny, that’s what I thought her job was.

She added a 20% gratuity to our bill.

I got to thinking – if she keeps her tips ($14 on our $70 bill) and serves ten tables an hour, she’s clearing $140 an hour in tips. Assuming she works a 4-hour shift, five days a week, that’s $140K a year – a significant portion of which, I assume, does not get reported to the tax man. It’s easy to look at a 70+ year old woman and feel sorry that she has to work as a waitress. But then I did the arithmetic and my sympathy was tempered somewhat. She’s laughing all the way to the bank.

Some completely mad people running a half-marathon in Central Park in the middle of winter.

Laden with food, we headed up to Central Park, where we caught the tail end of the half-marathon that Peter was running in. We didn’t manage to catch him (he was too quick for us) but we did get a chance to see some of his slower competitors bringing up the rear.

Skaters in Rockefeller Center.

Neil finds heaven on Fifth Avenue.

Heaven, like God himself, takes many forms. For MG, it comes in the form of Prada.

After discovering that all the shops on Fifth don’t open until 11am on a Saturday, we headed town to the Staten Island Ferry.

Neil is, frankly, a little skeptical of my subway navigation skills.

Aude, on the other hand, is totally unimpressed and threatens to leave me for one of the rats that run down the tracks!

The New York subway.

In their wisdom, someone put me in charge of navigating the Metro. I learned a number of embarrassing lessons about riding the New York subway.

1. You can only swipe four people through on a Metro card. Which means that, if you’re the fifth guy, you look like jackass when you then try to swipe yourself through, instead getting impaled on the barrier.
2. Colours and lines do not correspond 1-to-1. Which helps explain why it took four separate trains to get from 50th to the South Ferry.
3. If ever your swipe card doesn’t work, wrapping it with a dollar bill to clean the sensors is a surprising effective trick.
4. Trains are infuriatingly infrequent on a Sunday. Particularly if you need to change four times because your map-reader doesn’t quite understand the subway system.
5. If you’re going less than 20 blocks, take a cab. It’s just as cheap, and a damn sight quicker and more convenient.

After a ride on nearly every subway line, we finally reached the Staten Island Ferry.

Anne Laure and Neil on the Staten Island Ferry.

Matt and Neil enjoy a New York delicacy – a hot pretzel with mustard.

After the Staten Island Ferry and the Statue of Liberty, it was back to 5th Ave for some more shopping. We worked our way down until we eventually ended up at Macy’s again – MG was jealous of the cheap cashmere sweaters I had found and wasn’t going to leave Manhattan until she had some of her own.

We reconvened with Anne Laure and Neil on Sunday night – a low key dinner at Sushiden (fantastic sushi and very accommodating waitresses, endlessly entertained by Neil’s “sake bombs” but not terribly fluent in English. When asked what something was, our waitress helpfully informed us that she “knew the name in Japanese”.) Early to bed, we were up at 5am for our trip back to JFK.

So there you have it – three days in New York. It actually felt much longer. We hit all the big sights, did our bit for the US economy, grabbed a few bargains, and ate enough to feed an army. Best £200 I’ve spent in a long time.

Celebrity sightings while in NY:

1. Richard Wilkins – Australian TV presenter and recent winner of “Australia’s Worst Show Biz TV Reporter” in the 2006 Fugly Awards.” Staying at our hotel.
2. Jean-Baptiste Requien, Gordon Ramsay’s right-hand man, at Ramsay’s restaurant in New York. Anne-Laure tried to sweet-talk her way into a table, but no dice.
3. Crazy “I Surrender” Guy – clearly a man who has spent quite a while in incarceration. Spotted walking off the Staten Island Ferry, hands in the air, trying to surrender to anyone in a uniform – Transit Police, dock operators, and the hotdog vendor. Could have been a relative of Henry Earl.
4. “Dances With Cats” – spotted on the Staten Island Ferry with a curiously noisy shopping bag.
5. Fat “Shouts at Passers-By” Guy, spotted shouting at passers-by at the corner of 44th and 5th.
6. Mr Rhetorical Questions, spotted countless examples of these fellows (and ladies) who speak endlessly to themselves.

Another one of New York’s colourful characters!

Seems like the perfect character to set off the one above!

Still, it wouldn’t be New York without characters like these.

The rest of the trip was very much a combination of revisiting my old student haunts and celebrating our engagement. I’d put my organisational skills to work and the hotel were ready for us with a big suite, a plate of smoked salmon, and champagne on ice.

Our suite at the Old Course hotel, St Andrews

Champagne and smoked salmon

The bathroom sink was worthy of a photograph

Chromotherapy Jacuzzi. Or a fancy way of saying “Jacuzzi with coloured lights”, which proved important. The water in Scotland is brown because of all the peat in the soil, so you need the coloured lights to disguise it!

Aude, overlooking the Old Course

The final hole of the Old Course, with Hamilton Hall in the background

The Old Course

The Old Course

My legendary organisational skills were let down somewhat by dinner. Having failed to secure a reservation at the new seafood restaurant in St Andrews, I decided that I would wing it on the night. St Andrews in November – surely it wouldn’t be too busy?

Students must have more money than in my day – because the concierge at our five-star hotel couldn’t managed to get a table anywhere at all in St Andrews. We ended up eating at the hotel, which was actually a blessing in disguise. Aude had a superb piece of Scottish lamb and I had some wonderful venison, overlooking the Old Course.

We headed out onto the town and confirmed my thoughts – students definitely have more money than in my day. All of the bars have gone upmarket, wine-bar chic, which defeats the point. I can find that in London. St Andrews used to have loads of cozy bars with big fireplaces, but those are almost all gone. One or two remain, but they’re the exception rather than the norm. After a swift half pint in a couple of my old haunts, and a few aborted attempted at other old haunts which were now crap bars, we headed back to the hotel. We sat in the bar and drank single malt Scotch in front of a roaring fire. Just the way to end the night.

The DeVere Grand Hotel, Brighton

My room, appropriately “old-school” five-star chic

Bathroom, which was bigger than my bedroom at home

Well, it was one heck of a party – I understand the bill was around £120,000, or about £600 per person.

Apparently, I won the “award” for being the best-dressed, as I was the only one who was wearing patent shoes and one of the very few who knew how to tie a bow-tie. Consequently, I was on bow-tying duty for much of the early evening.

Matt demonstrates his knowledge of bow-tying

It was the first big corporate evening I’ve been out to with the complete team, and it turned up being a very boozy evening. It was great – all the real gossip comes out on these sorts of nights. I now know who’s perceived as being strong on the team, who’s perceived as being weak, where the smart money is on who’ll make partner first, and most importantly, who’s sleeping with whom…

I managed to hit the sack (relatively) early at 1:30am, but a harden core of drinkers continued drinking until 5am. The evening was marked by the sort of carnage that heavy drinking brings on – at one point, one of my colleagues fell sound asleep at the dinner table. Another threatened to dance on the bar and had to be held back. And I went to bed early – there’s no telling what happened as the night went on.

The head of our advisory services practice is a youngish, energetic guy who likes to go jogging each morning. As he headed out of the building at 6:30am, he discovered one of our consultants sound asleep on the couch in the lobby of the hotel – still fully-dressed in black tie.

As you would expect, day two of the conference was largely a write-off. Two-hundred consultants with hangovers operating on three hours of sleep is hardly the recipe for success. There was more than one person sleeping during the presentations, and I was feeling quite smug for having been so diligent about heading to bed at a reasonable hour.

One of our corporate values is that we challenge and debate as ‘ferocious friends’. To help foster this environment, we had a two-hour session dedicated to debate, with each group given a debate topic to prepare. I’m not sure whether my topic was lucky or was the short straw, but it was the most interesting: “Are partners paid too much?”

I was arguing on the “Yes” side – and among other team members, there were seven partners on my team. All of whom had to argue that yes, in fact, they were paid too much – and preparing the arguments to justify their statements. We won the debate in the end. We were issued with our prize and the partners were issued with instructions to “please leave their wallets by the door on the way out!”

Ms Squeaky update: In an unrelated piece of news, I have surrendered my seat in the first carriage of the train, and now sit in carriage four. I’m delighted to report that it’s as tranquil and quiet as a church.

Apparently, it’s British Sausage Week. They’ve gone a bit mad in our canteen, offering fifteen different varieties of sausage over the course of the week, along with a bit of a marketing campaign (for example, sausages are the most popular barbeque food in the UK (49% of BBQs), followed by beef burgers (38%) and poultry (37%). Despite average partnership profits of £686K per partner this year, it does seem like we’re wasting good money here.

After two weeks of peace and quiet, Ms. Squeaky made her return to the train. She declared herself victorious to the entire carriage and then proceeded to (yep, you guessed it) call all of her friends to let them know her news. I’ve just about given up, and am debating whether to buy a cell-phone jammer (illegal but satisfying) or whether I should simply move to another carriage. L’enfer, c’est les autres indeed!

Off to a swanky 5-star hotel in Brighton for a corporate piss-up tonight — black tie event with loads of champagne. They’ve got a spa as well, so I’m thinking about sneaking off for an hour for a massage. Tomorrow’s a day of team-building. Sometimes I’m amazed I get paid to do all this. At the risk of repeating myself, despite average partnership profits of £686K per partner this year, it does seem like we’re wasting good money here.

Still, I like champagne. Who am I to question the wisdom of the partners?

When we were in Orbec, we stayed at the Manoir de l’Engagiste, a wonderful property that Aude’s mother recommended. It’s recently been transformed into a guesthouse by a lovely couple who we assume were Parisians escaping from the city. The property itself is in two halves – one dating from the fifteenth century and the other dating from the seventeenth century.

Manoir de l’Engagiste

Manoir de l’Engagiste

Guest room at the Manoir de l’Engagiste

Guest room at the Manoir de l’Engagiste

Guest room at the Manoir de l’Engagiste

The proprietor came to greet us in the morning. Detecting my accent, he told us a wonderful story about some previous American guests:

Some years ago, there was an important society wedding in Orbec. Guests from around the world had been invited, including a family from Houston. The Texan had called ahead to the Manoir and reserved rooms for himself, his wife and his two daughters. Several weeks later, they arrived in France and got in a cab, asking to be taken to the Manoir in Orbec.

There was a problem, of course. The taxi driver wasn’t familiar with Orbec and dropped them off at the only Manoir he knew – which happened to be the City Museum! You can imagine the surprise of the custodian when he was presented with four travel-weary Texans on one of the hottest days of the summer, laden with luggage in the way that only Americans can manage, demanding his room.

When it finally transpired what had happened, the Texans were pointed towards the right Manoir. There were no taxis to be found, so the family had no choice but to make the trek up the hill to the right Manoir. Dripping with sweat in the hot summer sun, they were greeted by our host and offered their rooms. Not speaking much English, he said to them “J’ai un ami avec une piscine” and made the universal “swimming” gesture.

The things that get lost in translation…

Ten minutes later, the entire family appeared in the lobby dressed in their bathing suits, sunglasses and towels underarm, ready for their swim. They’d misunderstood – the proprietor meant that he had a friend across town who had a pool where they could cool off – but the Texans assumed that the pool was at the Manoir itself.

When life gives you lemons… The proprietor decided to make the best of a bad situation. He got out the hose and spent twenty minutes hosing down the Texans in the courtyard!

I’ve got a training course tomorrow morning that they’ve insisted on starting at 8:30am, which is too early for the first train. It’s a mixed blessing, though — it means I can grab a drink with Jerome tonight, and it means that I get a chance to stay in the brand new Hilton next to my office which just opened this week.

My first impressions are that it’s a great property — very well located, with a modern interior style that feels a little like a ‘W’ without the pretention. If you’ve ever stayed at the Hilton Trafalgar, you’d feel right at home here. They’re very much cut from the same cloth, and I think that my sentiment is shifting: I think that Hilton have created a better “mass boutique” hotel than Starwood.

The Hilton opens onto both Tooley Street and More London Place. This is the Tooley Street entrance.

The More London Place entrance

My room on the 8th floor

Main lobby and bar area

More private lounge area off the main lounge

I think the hotel looks great inside — they’ve got the decor just right, and it feels modern without feeling overdesigned. But then I would say that — apparently, I’m one of a whole generation that spends too much time in hotels, therefore idealising the principles of design and recreating them at home. The Invasion of the Suites maintains that relentless business travel has turned hotel chic into an ideal, says The Times.