Separated by a common language

One of the best days of 2024 started at 5 am on Labor Day in New York. My flight had arrived at JFK at about 10pm the night before, but by the time the Uber got to 31st Street, it was nearly 1 am.

I had decided I would be beating the jet lag by getting up when I woke up, and doing all my work early. So I got up at 5, but the streets were completely deserted, and the sky was full of freshness. I could not miss the opportunity for a loop of Central Park. So I went down the deserted subway, and realised with some surprise that over 10 minutes to wait for a train seems to be a standard service interval for a bank holiday.

I hung around a bit. I took a selfie, which did not look like Marilyn Monroe. Everyone in the office kept saying the subway was dangerous, and obviously at that time of day on a bank holiday, it was not exactly teeming with people, but they all seemed to be normal people going to their jobs, and the guy muttering at a wall was easy enough to avoid.

It is hard not to love New York. It has more energy and a sense of freedom that London seems to have lost. It does also feel a little weird sometimes, like when you walk into a shop and can’t buy shower gel because it’s behind a locked cabinet. And the quality of its hotels at pretty much every price point is jaw dropping in the outrageousness of what is, or is not, provided.

I went on my run, and felt exhilarated by the novelty. It is a completely curated, human-centric patch of nature that nonetheless feels exotic and alien, mainly I think as a result of the huge boulders that apparently long pre-date both the park and the city. It is still a completely urban park, but from a visiting European point of view, seeing a raccoon and a house finch in quick succession is exotic. I initially thought it might be a Red Cardinal, but in looking through some pictures, it was more of a pretty pink than a bright red.

Of course, since I am not young, I did not stop to take a picture – so I only have stock photos to compare. It’s probably the only time I wish I had, but most of the time it drives me a bit nuts going running with younger people who want to stop for random selfies. Yes, we’re running, so can we do that, instead of taking photos? Still, I’ve inserted a few I took at the end of my run.

It was such a good experience so that I left earlier the next day to run another loop, but because I then had an 8am meeting, I felt massive time pressure and timidly ran very small repetitive loops around the south end, which is not as attractive. I was then late for my meeting anyway, because I was staying on 6th avenue, and got confused about the direction of Park Avenue. There are so many awkward snafus I have learnt to smooth over, but it seems to work.

Anyway, as I was running these boring loops on the southern section, I saw one of the many marketing signs that Central Park puts up to encourage fundraising or volunteering for the park.

Central Park is your backyard

So, my kind Americans who may be reading this boring post about your most cosmopolitan city, let me paint you a picture of what a “backyard” conjures up in the minds of most British people.

First of all, let me work on the assumption that when you say “backyard”, you mean what we call a garden. The thing that is indeed usually at the back of your house, although before we all paved them over for parking, we often also had front gardens.

When we hear you say “backyard”, let me just get ChatGPT to help me illustrate what is going through my mind, and I think the vast majority of British ears:

I think maybe ChatGPT went a little bit far, because it could maybe show some poorly maintained grass somewhere off to one side. But it’s pretty close to the instant mental image nearly all of us have of this word.

Perhaps it doesn’t really help that one of the best songs ever, which features the word “yard”, does very little to dispel the idea that a yard is somewhere you go to… get a milkshake? Keeping it clean, so I’ll just leave it at that.