Oh damn, still in this dream.

if you buy a place, could it be one of those nice beach houses in the posh holiday bit? and then could you lend it to me?

just a thought.

but you are wrong about the language. technically similar, but you have to be prepared to talk in the style of one of those bits in opera where they all sing at once, or you will never speak at all. not very british.

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Alas, I'm not yet in the market for any further property....my income hasn't been too stable these past few years (if ever, actually). I've been a musician for almost 30 years. I'm damn lucky to have the clothes I stand up in. My Old Man left me the flat in which I live, and I rather think that's my lot: I'm not the sort of person to do the lottery.

So unless I get lucky, the beach-house in the Hamptons is just outside my reach, unless I get fortunate and someone else leaves me something, which is unlikely as I'm now sorted: and there are much better calls on whatever money still remains than indulging in me any more than has been done.

I still can't believe how fortunate I've been.

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shame.

or not. sometimes i think it is better to just have your needs met and no more. there are some bloody weird dynamics once you get beyond that.

i don't do the lottery either. and if i do move it will be to the fens. if i had the dough i would have both and a car, but i don't think that is exactly a lottery style ambition. when the lottery came out everyone was talking endlessly about what they would do with their win and i could only think of pony trekking and suing people. neither of which would enhance my life.

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Why wouldn't pony-trekking enhance your life? Having a laugh should help whatever.

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well, it might have done at the time, nowadays i would have to invest in some of that body armour people get for skiing and skateboarding and the like and be bound in, actually a mummy outfit would probably do. it's not fear of breaking things, it's just that with the fibro if a big muscle spazzes out i could be in real trouble.

otherwise, as someone pointed out at the time, i could do that anyway - lottery or nottery.

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I hate to break this to you, but many of the folks who are going for 2-6 year college degrees are still being forced into McJobs in America due to the outsourcing and collapse of small business here. When someone has to pay to go to school, even a state run school and rack up $70,000 in loans and the only job they can get is a job that pays $7.00 an hour flipping burgers there's not a whole lot worse foreigners buying rich folks property can do to harm that person.

The only poor folks in Manhattan and Long Island are the homeless. My entire salary for the month wouldn't cover a months rent in Long Island. If you branch out to the Bronx or Harlem, that's a different ballgame, however, that's changing as well. Harlem especially, it's become popular for the upper middle class to live in Harlem, due to the cultural history and what not. So, what were once homes for poor black folks, are now being changed into novelty homes for upper class white folks. So, poor blacks are out, wealthy white folks are in.

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i live in a novelty area of london. bethnal green. there is a HOTEL being built at the end of my street! mind blowing.

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I live roughly a 7 hour drive from NYC, but still in NY. What was once farms in this town 30 years ago before I was born is all now malls and Wal-Mart type stores. It's creepy seeing the place where all of the kids and their families used to go swimming be turned into a closed off scenic pond for the new hotel and luxury apartments that were put in. Historic houses are being torn down to put in cell phone shops, and drug stores. People are being forced out of their homes to facilitate the transition from houses for people and lots for businesses along Main Street. With the cost of living rising, and the property value dropping in such the area, that's basically one step away from saying "We need a store here, you are now homeless."

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there's a lot of it about.

within the urbs there are pockets of horribleness which are cheap, so artists move in then hangers on and before you know it 'farmers markets' (too expensive for anyone on an ordinary income) and the weirdness that is hotels. and lots of tourists. the other side of me from trendy hoxton which is art central nowadays, is the new building site of the olympics, hence a rush on buildings of all sorts where before there might have just been boarded up dead spaces like this http://www.citynoise.org/article/933 or frinstance artist's studios... so the artists move on.

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When that happened to poorer areas of London it was called 'Gentrification'. Islington, Fulham, and Battersea were run down slums well into the 70's. Notting Hill was London's first 'Black Ghetto' and there were Moseley inspired beatings of young Black men in the 50's.
The good thing about the young Black Men was they didn't stand for it, and rioted: the bad thing was they didn't always direct their anger at the right people. But whatever, they paved the way for London's future as a tolerant multicultural city, which is slowly being eroded, dammit, as we import a less 'British' view of race and racial conflict into our culture, along with handguns.

A smallish townhouse in Islington will cost well over £2M. ($4.2M and counting). Battersea, and Fulham a bit less: but Notting Hill prices are ridiculous. It might as well be South Ken, Belgravia, or Chelsea.
I could probably sell my flat and buy someting somewhere in the States (if they were to let me in, that is) but why bother? A place is a place and most of my friends are all here: and here there are still fewer armed folk on the streets.

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$4.2 million dollars for a small house? An apartment complex just sold last week in this town for double that, and that is the entire complex where people are currently paying close to $700 a month to live there in each unit that comprises the complex. Ludicrous doesn't cover that. Btw, ladies over here love older British men with musical backgrounds. For some strange reason they love the accent, yours and the Irish folks to the north of you.

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Smallish 'Brownstone' probably gives the sense more.... but yes $4.2M.

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If I could get work, then perhaps the relocation would suit. They might give me a hard time at immigration however: my blogs haven't been exactly overflowing with admiration about the present administration. I could always wait and see who wins the next election before I make an application.
But I've always loved the US: I just hate what's happening at the moment.
I first thought about moving to Manhattan in '94: it's been an on/off dream ever since.
Four or five years Stateside would give me a better and more rounded view of the whys and wherefores.
Also....I have a bit of a weakness for American women of a certain kind. (My chums have been known to tease me about this.) US 30+something academic females seem to be generally more fun than their English equivalents. Either that or it could just be they fell for my voice, and it overcame their distaste for my looks.
Ah well....

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Musicians have it hard here. However, if you can do studio work, and be a "soundman" for bands and the like, it is possible to make a very good living here if you have an "in" somewhere in the country. Some of the guys who wander around the local clubs and studios in the area and set up the equipment and manage the sound for shows make a few thousand dollars every gig. Not all of them, but the ones who are known to be good at what they do and have years of experience make more than the bands themselves a lot of the time. I am hoping my brother can get into such a career if he can get a break with a job where someone will actually teach him something. Unlike the schooling he is putting himself into debt for that teaches him nothing.

American women are repressed in comparison to most of the rest of the world, but in comparison to the English, they are quite a bit more open I believe. If your experience with American women is limited to the NYC area only, it may be skewed compared to the rest of the US, or even the rest of NY in general. If you head 100 miles North-West from NYC into NY it will seem like an entirely different world.

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Most of my experience of American women have been academics in Universities in England. But I did spend four months or so that side of the pond in '94.
One lass was a New Yorker, one from Boston, and a third from, of all places, Akron, where they made the Etch-a-Sketch. As for American Women in the US itself, I met a very nice woman in '94, but it was just a passing thing.
There was also an American woman in my past with whom I had an unfortunate experience...but it didn't put me off at the time.*
However, I'm not the man I was in my twenties, dammit. Less driven, I deem, and not quite as concerned with the carnal. By all accounts it happens.

*http://johnny9fingers.livejournal.com/28688.html#cutid1

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Akron, New York or Akron, Ohio? I have a friend who moved to Akron, Ohio from Brooklyn. Crazy girl, was almost a stripper, but got sick and couldn't do it.
Too baked to read that link currently, but I shall make a note for another day. Hopefully it won't get buried after this week giving my brother a most necessary break from what is the horrible institution of a state school of a college.

On another note, I suppose I'm not in that mentality either with whats happened to me in the past few years. Not to say there aren't urges, but I would most certainly look for things far beyond that as a requisite in a girl as before, those were seen as perks but not necessary. Oddly enough, there are people who are retired who still haven't grasped that whom I see every day. This is somewhat more than disturbing that people between twice and three times my age haven't grasped that simple concept.

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Akron, Ohio.
It just goes to show, real folk can come from anywhere.

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London could well drown too.
Oh well. If I die, I die: I wasn't going to move for the mad fucking bombers, so I probably won't move unless there's a really good reason - normally to do with the elegance of the woman in question's ankles.

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New York City. The rest of New York is prone to a variation of things. In this area, blizzards and Lake Effect Snowstorms. Oooh, scary.

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