The birthday girl’s mother stood up. “Tiny Pony wants to make a little speech,” she said. And so she did.
We were at the White Horse in Putney, also known as the Sloaney Pony (pronounced Slaney Painy.) I was Simon’s date in the college friends’ corral, where they explained that though it was Cambridge, Churchill college took mostly state school kids, and was not at all posh, really. Unlike the rest of the guests. This distinction seemed important to them, and I believed them. Simon isn’t posh. He speaks with the new Tony Blair Establishment accent, full of democratic glottal stops. Our corral bonded as the yahs and brays increased down-table; we swapped compensating stories of council estate beatings and jam sandwiches.

I get infected with interest in this stuff as soon as I get to a British Airways check-in queue. I start listening and classifying, and watching others do it faster than me. Words and and accent peg you here, and they’ll always piss someone off. If you’re uncomfortable being having your origins and aspirations dissected, try an Irish accent. Thug? Posh totty? Only Dublin knows for sure.

I keep asking my friends about this obsession, sure that I’m exaggerating as usual. But maybe not. Elly tells me about her friend whose boyfriend wouldn’t take her to the May Ball, in case she might embarrass herself because she doesn’t speak properly. “She might say ‘toilet’ instead of ‘loo’ or something.” The friend reported this to Elly as proof of his consideration for her.

That class boorishness is dying. Nobody would coach Margaret Thatcher on a fake upper-class accent these days; the plummy Tories are a joke. Piers Morgan looks and sounds like a flabby young Roger Moore, but he edits Rottweiler tabloid The Sun. Little England tabloid The Daily Mail. The Daily Mirror*. The old BBC accent , which I’ve always liked, is being phased out, replaced by regional voices and the estuary English that’s becoming the new standard. No single class, identified by accent or schooling, seems to have a lock on a given industry or profession any more. Maybe classification is mostly a leisure activity now, social Tetris.

“In America, though,” they tell me when I ask about class in Britain, “they treat you like shit when you don’t have money or a flash job.”

*I’ve been annoying my English friends with my sloppy reporting. Last time I lived here, Piers Morgan was editor of The Sun. Now he edits the Daily Mirror, apparently, a fact that won’t stick in my brain even though somebody posted this in my comments a week ago. Simon writes: “Under his editorship it’s become a left-wing tabloid and a much “better” competitor to The Sun, unfortunately he has remained an odious toad.”

So there you go. I stand gratefully corrected.

Edward is one of my oldest friends. His father died three weeks ago, and he has just come back from burying him in Spain. I met his father just once, at a champagne tasting organised by Edward seven years ago. I don’t remember the fizz, but I remember his father. His life held many secret passages, barely known, if at all, by his wife and sons.

Early in the war he was in British Naval Intelligence. Later he worked on the Manhattan Project as a young nuclear physicist. He dismissed questions about either with a curt “Classified” right up to this year. In the Fifties he married Edward’s mother, radiant daughter of the nineteenth century textile barons who inspired Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. They were suspicious of this marry-in: too clever by half, and worse, half-Indian. Edward regards their ignorance as the failure of money just a few generations old: the established aristocracy had always survived by transfusions of bright young blood.

In the Sixties he ran a nightclub in Chelsea. Edward remembers a childhood home next-door to Diana Spencer’s London house. There was a private plane, a Rolls to drop him off at state school. The source of funds was not always clear, but living large was the only way. At seventeen Edward bumped into his parents at Annabel’s, Mark Birley’s famous London nightclub, and found his mother wearing full evening dress with flip-flops. Around this time his father became a celebrity divorce lawyer, sorting things out for John Lennon and Cynthia and dissolving Elton John’s early experiments in hetrosexuality. Sadly, he never gossiped.

After his wife’s death he moved to a James Bond-style bachelor flat in the Temple, near his legal chambers. He continued to practise as a barrister. One of his last cases was a pro-bono defence of the MacDonald’s Two, the couple who were sued by the burger people for handing out anti-fast-food propaganda.

Edward is planning a memorial service in the spring. The format for old legal bores is very fixed, he says: the service must start at 5.45 pm on the dot, and the speakers follow a waffling protocol. Instead Edward is sorting through the evidence, trying to find ambassadors from distant segments of his father’s life to deliver their own portraits, evoking, he hopes, a crusty “I say!” or two. It’s not easy task to piece this life together. The man’s pleasure was conspiracy thrillers, and though though he drank enough to pickle a lesser liver, he never spilled secrets. May he rest in peace.

Irish and UK readers, check out “Iran Undercover: Inside the Hidden Revolution” on Channel 4 tomorrow night (Tuesday) at 10.40 pm. Interesting stuff, not least because it includes an interview with Shirin Ebadi, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, conducted by my best pal, who lives in Tehran.

Seventy per cent of the population of Iran is under 30. They’re well-educated, men and women alike. Those are the demographics of revolution.

I’m writing from Linhope Street, where Simon and his two flatmates have been good enough to put me up and put up with me on my trip to London. I met Simon briefly in London before I left on my backpacking trip eighteen months ago. He joined me in Peru for two weeks in June, and we walked the Inca Trail. Now he’s inducting me into a far more exotic culture: the London Lad Flat.

Nick Hornby is the tutelary spirit of Linhope. The DVDs and CDs are stacked high. There’s an X-box, big speakers, and a bigger telly. I can’t tell which of the five remote controls I’m to use to change the channel. Since they are all consultants, there are three irons and stacks of clean but rumpled shirts all over the living room, and the fridge is full of Marks & Spencer’s meals of impressively recent vintage. It took me a while to find a dusty tethered phone behind the sofa—in London, the mobile rules. PG Tips tea fuels dressing-gown arguments about classic comedies. “Squeeze the teabag,” instructs Barry as I stir some suspiciously weak-looking stuff for him. His given name is Ian, but when your last name is Whyte, England can’t let the nicknaming opportunity pass.

Simon is a lovely host, good enough to haul himself out to Heathrow to surprise me. Jetlag is a headache-free hangover, and after a quick turn around Regent’s Park and down swanky Marylebone High Street, he allowed me to spend the whole evening lying on the sofa, eating Hob-Nobs and watching two full seasons of the British version of Coupling. It’s funny in a loveless way, a farcical Sex and the City predicated on embarrassment, which is still an abundant natural resource here. One episode is based on a woman flipping out when she finds a porn movie in her boyfriend’s video player: chuck her, mate. I’m tired of sit-com shrews.

Like an Oliver Sacks character, my face works for a while before I produce the right words for everyday things. Registration number, not license plate. Cash point, not ATM. A-meen-ity, not a-mehn-ity. On The Simpsons, Homer refers to a baseball made out of Secretariat and I have to explain to Linhope what a Secretariat is. As usual, I’m shocked and charmed by the amount and variety of chocolate bars pushed at every turn—stacked high over the cash registers, sold in vending machines on every Tube platform. No wonder the television presenters have fascinatingly wide hips. Simon may yet ban me from muttering, “God, she’d never be hired in the States”, even about Anna Ford, who becomes more extraordinarily beautiful as she ages without the Saran-wrap facelifts that are mandatory on the other side.

On Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman, who masters the art of looking bored and outraged at the same time, shreds a Labour Party spokesman over proposed “top-up fees”—discretionary tuition fees of up to three thousand pounds to be levied by individual universities, which are otherwise completely free to students. These pinko debates are a joy after two weeks in Mr. Bush’s America.

The weather is lovely—cold and bright—though wasted on me since I can’t drag myself out of bed before afternoon.

Happy Thanksgiving, New York. Wish you were here.

Swinging out to London this evening. My Ambien is packed. I’m wearing a fuzzy jumper and practising bleary scowls for Heathrow (sorry, HeathROW). The British Airways trolley dollies are among my favourites, for masochistic reasons, and I can’t wait to be woken up at five for chilled, stale baked goods, as I will no longer be able to call them. (Why don’t Americans extend this usage to “boiled goods” and “fried goods”?)

My New York world has filled up with babies and talk of babies. This is what happens when you’re thirty one. Even New Yorkers figure out eventually—much too late, in my meddling opinion—that we as a species are here to make babies as well as reputations. I’m delighted by this development. Kids are fun, especially when they’re spawned by people I like.

So I’m now inducted into the art of trying to find meeting places that are good for children. This requires different social hunting skills than I’d previously developed. Halley’s eight-year-old son, Jackson, is big and smart and mobile, so we go iceskating at the Rockefeller Center. Harley’s 18-month-old twins, on the other hand, are mobile but not sensible. In the wasteland of the Upper West Side we take refuge in the kids’ section of Barnes and Noble. The very patient manager allows them to fling the teen novels onto the floor while we sit on the floor and chat. I rib Harley for accidentally picking this generation’s Jennifer to name her little girl: like all the mamas our age, I thought Maya was a great name, too.

Alex has a three-month-old charmer called Gus, and the good fortune to live in Brooklyn. Gus is a sophisticate who has already been to the Met, and has seen most of Manhattan from his sling. So we picked nearby Halcyon, still one of my favourite cafés. There are drapy sofas, unburnt coffees, popping disco lights and, usually, thumping music. People think babies like cheerful colors and teddy-bear friezes. They’re wrong. Babies are essentially young people, and therefore like house music and strobe lights in a semi-darkened room. Halcyon makes no concessions to sprogs. Halcyon is always full of sprogs and their hip, gorgeous parents. The kids lie there in zonked-out bliss, staring at the lights and lolling inanely to the beat. They forget their patriotic duty to be grabby little brats and they become as delightful as Ecuadorian bus babies.

I’m going to make my fortune with a clubbing daycare franchise.

“Bless me father for I have sinned, it’s been eighteen months since my last check up and cleaning…”

I have a new periodontist. He’s a handsome young Kentuckian who could be my host Joe’s younger brother. Through his gloved fingers I guiltily explain my neglected teeth by telling him about my year of backpacking. He says kindly he can tell that I flossed in Laos.

Then he says, “You know, we could really fix you up. Have you ever considered orthodontistry?”
I explain that I already had six years of government orthodontistry as a child in Ireland. He peers in again, shakes his head and says, “Socialized medicine”.

I see his point. My top and bottom teeth don’t share a zip code. The bottom set is crooked. Two front teeth are caps from faceplant off my bike fifteen years ago, so I can’t do a blinding bleach job like Sarah Michelle Gellar. But I’ve developed a compensating pout that lets me close my mouth over the overbite, and by normal standards I’m not disfigured.

    “It’s because you’re Irish. Small jaw, big teeth. Things would be so much better if the Brits were simply born without premolars.” I mumble politely, because that’s what we Brits do. Then I ask what he’d suggest. A eugenicist’s glint appears in his eye.
   “First we’d take out the rest of your wisdom teeth. Then we’d do some tissue rollback on the recession right here. Then we’d get some braces to get your teeth into the right spot. Finally we’d do an operation where we’d break your jaw and add an implant to bring it forward. You’d lose that dent right below your bottom lip. You’d have a great strong jawline. Totally change your profile.”
   “Totally change my profile.”
   “Yeah. And you’d see it from the front, too.”
   “I’d look completely different.”
   “I think it would be a great look.”
   “I’d look like Katie Couric.”
He thinks about this, doubtfully. Then he agrees.

I see a future in which I have a firm, jutting American jaw. A jaw that would bust through the doors of corporate success, a jaw that could pitch for the Yankees or cheer for the Lakers. A jaw like Courtney Thorne-Smith.

I ask him if there’s any medical reason for me to spend ten thousand dollars have my jaw broken and extended. Not really, he admits.

Sometimes I forget what a creepy country America is.

I’m visiting my past in reverse order. Two weeks in New York, a fortnight in London, a stint in Dublin, and then, saints preserve me, Limerick, indefinitely. The palimpsest of faces is a slow version of a drowning man’s flashback: my life strolls before my eyes. After five months in a log cabin with one laconic Canadian for company, I’m already all talked out.

I just counted 35 people that I’ve met with since I got off the ever-chic Greyhound bus ten days ago. (I’m turning into Rainman: first counting books, now listing people.) These were old friends, mostly, seasoned here and there with new words made flesh, like Adam Stein, Michael Barrish, Halley Suitt, and Betsy Devine. I also conjured up the kindred spirits I’d met while travelling last year—all of whom, due to my extreme provincialism, were New Yorkers or near as dammit.

35 people, not counting sprogs or fellow party guests. I have no aptitude for groups, so these were labour-intensive individual jawing sessions. This social limitation explains why it takes me two weeks to visit New York properly, and also why my site updates have been so sporadic. Special apologies to new readers from Feedster or Doc Searls‘ site: I’m usually a more attentive host than this, I promise.

Manhattan has been invaded by the Japanese schoolgirl look. Little denim skirts with Ugg boots; pleats and knee-socks; corduroy and sneakers. My knee-length skirts looked prim and tired, no longer sleek. So I gave in and forked out for my first garment in months. I bought a miniskirt at Urban Outfitters. It cost $38. It’s black, made out of a kind of sweatshirty material, and is exactly the kind of thing I lived in when I was nineteen. I thought I’d wear it with the flat Miu-Miu boots I’d rescued from storage.

It looked good.
It looked ridiculous.

My legs are my best feature, in my own vain and unreliable estimation. Only because I live in the first century in which western humans ignore good evolutionary sense and exalt slim and knobbly over dimpled knees. Fine by me. Legs are a good long-term investment. Patella and femur and achilles tendons don’t betray women over the long haul like other body bits, and better yet, they don’t come with a bimbo tag, which can’t be guaranteed if you suffer from fine hooters or a button nose. I almost always wear trousers, in case I have to escape, but a well-turned ankle is a reserve weapon.

In spite of faith in my limbs, as soon as I got the skirtlet on I had an attack of mutton-dressed-as-lamb panic. An A-line skirt with flat boots makes us all look short and squat, and I wasn’t sure all this thigh was really necessary. The skirt was overt, and I’m not. But I remembered when the Prada shoes I later coveted looked ugly to me, and hoped my style eye just hadn’t adjusted yet.

I launched my new look on the fashion-forward 2 train. Immediately the old man opposite hunched forward and muttered lasciviously until I had to move. On the street men stare at minis like toddlers stare at Teletubbies, especially after a decade of deprivation. It’s not that short skirts look better, or sexier—they don’t—but they are unmistakable signifiers. I felt like Paris Hilton. Not in a good way. I wanted to crawl back into my Kedey Island boilersuit. Instead I changed into age-appropriate sweatpants and pensioned off the overt skirt.

Ranger Tim’s notes from the log cabin are a reminder of the gentle world I just left behind.