High life | 4 June 2011

Taki lives the High life

New York

Summertime and, as the song tells us, ‘the livin’ is easy’. The temperature is in the nineties, girls’ dresses are at their flimsiest, love is in the air, and sex is everywhere, so what else can one wish for? This is my last week in the Bagel, and as always I am reluctant to leave. I’ve trained diligently, played less hard than usual, read a lot and even managed to identify cedars, poplars, willows and cherry trees during my daily walks in the park.

When it gets very hot, the city takes on a celluloid air, with old movies about the place playing again and again, like a rondo, in my memory. James Stewart in Rear Window, Fred and Ginger in white tie and tiara dancing away on a glamorous roof top, Woody Allen romancing someone far too young for him down by the East River. The title Manhattan Melodrama tells the whole New York story in two words.

One of the pleasures of my life is not owning an iPod, a BlackBerry, a Kindle or any contraption that has anything to do with Facebook or Twitter. I own a mobile telephone that I use only when on board my boat, otherwise I am mercifully free from these ghastly inventions that are turning modern life into a technological nightmare. Can you imagine flirting with a girl by text-ing her? Or by emailing her that you love her, or that you no longer love her, for that matter? Not to mention the morons that zig-zag down our streets, their eyes riveted to the ghastly gimmick in their hands, oblivious to their surroundings, slaves to a technological god that has turned the dumb into robots and the unimaginative into zombies.