Tuesday 1st December 2009 - The Annie Hall Moment

          My plan for today was to spend most of it in the Historical Society Library.  I started with a longish walk to the nearest subway station, so I might buy a weekly season ticket for the subway and buses.

          I took the subway to City Hall, where the station was clearly designed by muggers with a view to maximising privacy.  When I found my way to the surface I was quite relieved.

          I had memorised the address, so I strode off vigorously for another long walk.  When I got there, I found I was outside Bookbinders restaurant.  Not only had I memorised the wrong address, I was now two miles from the right one.  But it did solve one problem:  Bookbinders is another victim of the times.

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          I hadn't quite the energy to walk the two miles back, and the library was closing early, so I looked round for a bar to rest in.  Up popped the City Tavern, which is a quaint tourist trap (well, I'm a tourist), an 18th century copy, complete with liveried flunkeys.  The local brewery makes four 'revolutionary' ales for them, from recipes used by Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Hamilton.  The tavern sells a "sampler" of all four. 

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          I hoped Franklin's would be best, given that he is credited with saying that beer was "proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy", but I expected Jefferson's would be pretty good too, being as he was pretty good at everything.  Naturally, I thought that, being a soldier, Washington's would be worst, which, conveniently, valued them in the same order as they appear on banknotes. 

          Just for the record, I was wrong again: to my taste, Washington's was best, and Franklin's, by a long way, the worst.

 

          Later that night, having done a lot of walking round the city, I found myself in an Irish Bar.  A young lady insisted on talking to me.  Apparently her phone wasn't working properly, kept switching itself off.  I suggested it might be trying to help her, by stopping her saying the silly things she was saying.  I said she would get better as she got older, and she said she intended to stay young forever.

          I reminded her of my favorite quote from Shakespeare, "Thou should't have been wise before thou hadst been old".  "It's from his greatest play, 'King Lear'", I said.  And, blow me down, the woman on the next stool produced a copy of 'King Lear' from her purse (now what's the chances of that?).  When we found it (Act I, scene 5), it turned out what he actually wrote was "Thou shoulds't not have been old till thou hadst been wise".  I felt much like the man in the cinema queue in "Annie Hall".