John Walker's Electronic House

Boston is excellent. It comes second to Chicago in the Giant Competition To Be John’s Favourite US City, but that’s no bad position. Managing a similar sense of being a city designed for people to live in, rather than one which appears to find its citizens something of an inconvenience (see: every British city there is), it’s somewhere you can really sit down. So many cities, and in my experience pretty much all of them in the UK, seem to treat people as guests they really regret having invited, and now wish they would just leave. “Oh dear, they’re here now. Well, look, let’s close the shops at 5pm, and perhaps they’ll get the hint.” Boston seems to want you there.

Adventures with horrid mad ladies were not restricted to the plane. We were dragged us into the sodding Cheers bar – for goodness sake, it was a photograph of some steps, and then a set. These steps do not lead to a magical portal that takes us into the world of Cheers. They in fact lead to a dreadful poky little bar with nowhere to sit because of so many other cretins so stupid as to go there, or be dragged there. It’s the bar where no one knows your name, and certainly doesn’t care.

I think I might have spoilt it for everyone else. I’m not sure my face was alive with joy as we stood in the corridor, pressed up against walls as waitstaff and customers squeezed past us constantly. So leaving after one drink, we went in search of more comfortable surroundings.

Oh, what delight overwhelmed me when we chose an ‘Irish pub’. If there’s one international certainty, it’s that an ‘Irish pub’ in any country in the world that isn’t Ireland, is going to be utterly awful. Guess what. So of course the walls are lined with shite, and the stereo is playing a peculiar mixture of appalling music, seemingly from any country other than America, only occasionally fluking Ireland. I skipped eagerly to the bar. Behind it stood a woman who must have been over 800 years old. Retirement was a memory from her youthful past. People ordered drinks. Guiness, Guiness, Sam Adams, Guiness, and for me? (I swear that the following is true, as best as I can remember it, and as verified by repeated playing out in our conversation for the rest of the trip. Please ensure you hear the woman’s replies in the incredulous tones that only the very stupidest humans can generate).

“What soft drinks do you have?”

“What?”

“Do you have any soft drinks?”

“WHAT?”

“What sodas do you have?”

“WHAT?”

“WHAT SODAS DO YOU HAVE?”

“Cider?”

“No. SODA. What SODA do you have?”

“Gin? You want GIN?!”

At which point I wasn’t going to waste another second of my painfully short life attempting communication with this sub-slug mind.