Cities to live in...

This week I made a flying visit to New York (city - for all you Americans who don't automatically assume I mean city, unlike the English who barely know there is a NY state). A friend of mine who works for BA had a stop-over there so I spent 5 mind-numbing can't-believe-the-girl-next-to-me-isn't-sticking-to-the-arm-rest-territory-limits hours on a bus there to spend under 24 hours with her and then 6 desperate rush-hour-and-raining hours back.

(Which basically means I spent a day playing Tetris on my phone this week)

I've never navigated NYC on my own before. Normally I'm with seasoned NYers, or at least a more competent nonNYer - and it's been a good 5 months since I last ploughed through London rush-hour. So when I arrived at Penn station in the pouring rain at 5.30pm and attempted to get down and across town via Grand Central, it is fair to say I was overwhelmed.

New York is like London on crack. In a fight, New York would kick London's ass all the way back to Samuel Pepys and beyond. Not because it's cooler or more fun but because it's hardcore and seems to have unfathomable reserves of strength and rage. New York rush hour left me in no doubt that I could ever live there and marveling with a mixture of awe and dread at the breed of human that can and does.

So when I arrived back in Boston, where 'rush hour' equals more than one train every 10 minutes, where there are pigeons rather than rats on the platforms and where people actually chat to each-other on the trains (not me, mind you - I'm English after all), I was washed with a wave of fondness for this city.

Because if New York is London's evil twin (a lot of fun to visit and party with but not gonna be invited home to meet the parents any time soon), Boston is its unassuming country cousin. In fact if it wasn't for volunteering at the hospital and seeing its grimmer 'city' side, I would need convincing that Boston even qualifies to be called a city at all. And that's just why I like it - love it, even. Boston, with its profusion of fairy lights and enchanting steaming grates, its pride in all things Irish and its love of chowder, is a city I could live in, a city I could learn to love.

All that remains to be done is to either cause a massive land-shift, resulting in England being attached to America again, or bamboozle friends and family into moving here too. Oh and to speed up global warming enough that Boston isn't buried in 10 feet of snow come December. Simple.