Sunday

Realising that I was leaving, the temperature dropped sharply and it rained all day. When I went up to McDonald's for breakfast, I got soaked, particularly in the feet (those holes in the shoes are a bit of an inconvenience, I realise whenever it's wet). A very fat man was berating two people carrying goods into a shop for working on a Sunday. I did a bit of last-minute sightseeing before having to check out of the hotel, came back and let James interview me at length about memory and film me memorising a pack, then turned back fully into a tourist rather than a semi-celebrity. Tomorrow, of course, I've got to turn back into an accountant, which is a much worse thing to be.

I went up to Grand Central Station to admire the architecture (not really - to get lunch and go to Midtown Comics which is right next to it). The pizza there was delicious - for some reason they're all named after movie characters and celebrities, I had a Mr Pink, which is basically garlic chicken and tomatoes. Maybe there is something in this New York pizza idea after all. At the comic shop I got Squadron Supreme: Death Of A Universe, the new trade paperback collection, which I've been looking for for a while. It reprints the Death Of A Universe story first published as a graphic novel in 1989 and for some reason never reprinted, Mark Gruenwald's sequel to his acclaimed original Squadron Supreme series, and his last SS work before he died. It's a classic that I've really resented not being able to read, over the years, and I'm delighted to have got it now. Also included in the new collection are a smattering of other comics featuring the Squadron - the absolutely awful Thor #280, which should have been left to gather dust in limbo somewhere; the excellent Kurt Busiek issues of Avengers starring the Squadron; the less excellent sequel to those stories from the Avengers annual in 1999, which involves the mass ranks of the two superhero teams joining forces to act monumentally stupidly and fail to beat a single, non-super-powered man; and the Squadron Supreme: New World Order one-shot by Len Kaminski, which I criticised very harshly when it first came out and never re-read, but now find to have actually been rather good. My main complaint - that it very contrivedly regresses the Squadron to a straight copy of the JLA - is still entirely valid, but the writing is in fact very nice, and it's a good story if you overlook that detail.

By that time, it was about time to head back to the airport (or, as I called it in conversation with James earlier, the... plane... station... what's it called... airport. Probably dented my image as a master of memory there). Changed my socks a couple of times in an attempt to dry my feet out a bit, with minimal success as the boots were soaked through.

The flight back went by in no time. In economy class this time, I was absorbed in the lives of Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, with occasional pauses for a doze (I can't sleep on planes, but I was too tired to keep my eyes open either, so lay there with them closed for a while before I couldn't resist going back to the book). The temperature back in England hit me like a very cold hammer - it was freezing compared to what I'd been enjoying in New York!

And so that was the end of the latest American adventure. It was a lot of fun for me. If only I was independently wealthy enough to do it all the time...