No life
The homecoming
Toby Young
INew York 'ye just returned from London where my efforts to win back my ex-girlfriend met with some success: she's agreed to go out with me again provided I leave New York. She doesn't want me to move to London permanently, just for a three-month 'trial period'. That way, if things don't work out, I can piss off back to Manhattan. Okay, it's not the crown jewels, but beggars can't be choosers. She's tossed me a bone and I fully intend to pick it up and start gnawing.
Frankly, I've been looking for an excuse to come home for some time now. I've always maintained that moving from Lon- don to New York is a bit like moving from Newcastle to London: however badly things are going, you can never go back to New- castle. It's just too humiliating. In my mind's eye I've always pictured a welcom- ing committee of my friends meeting me when I step off the plane at Heathrow, say- ing, 'See! We told you you'd never make it in New York.'
Needless to say this is a complete fanta- sy. On my last night in London I bumped into an old friend called Oliver Claridge, known to my circle at Oxford as 'Oily from the Poly' since he was the only person we knew who was at the institution now known as Oxford Brookes University. I outlined the above scenario and he looked at me as if I was completely bankers.
'I wouldn't worry about losing face,' he said, struggling to be as kind as possible. 'To be perfectly honest, Toby, most of your friends haven't noticed you've moved to New York.'
He's right of course. The only person who cares about my disastrous New York career is me and even I'm beginning to lose interest in it. Sacked as the Evening Stan- dard's New York columnist, sacked as a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, sacked as The Independent's New York columnist, sacked as a staff writer at Gear . . it's pretty much been all downhill from day one. The only thing I've learnt is what to say when former colleagues ask me what happened at whichever place of work I've just been sacked from. Don't use some pathetic euphemism like 'it didn't work out' or 'I felt it was time to move on'. They can always see through that. Just say, 'I was sacked.'
On the other hand, I can't quite bring myself to tell people that the reason I'm leaving America is because I couldn't make it in the Big Apple. That's where Caroline comes in. Now I can say, 'Things were going pretty well, actually, but sometimes you've just got to listen to your heart.' Instead of yet another New York failure, I'll look like the last of the great romantics.
011y from the Poly immediately spotted the fatal flaw in my plan. 'How does Caro- line feel about being described as an excuse?' he wondered. To be truthful, she isn't my excuse for coming back. She's the reason. It's just so out of character for me to do anything romantic, I prefer to dress it up as a sleazy PR move. Things really aren't going too badly for me in America at the moment. I currently have columns in four different publications, including one in a weekly newspaper in New York, and Playboy has just asked me to write an arti- cle for them. Okay, it's not the New Yorker, but it's still two dollars a word. To give you some idea of how good that is, The Specta- tor pays the equivalent of 25 cents a word.
Ah ha! I think you've got just the competitive spirit we're looking for . . Actually, that's a misleading comparison since The Spectator pays spectacularly badly but you get the idea.
My main concern is what I'm going to do about those British publications I serve as an American correspondent for. For instance, I write a monthly letter from New York for Tatler. Will I still be able to report on the latest trends in Manhattan if I've moved back to London? I don't suppose it will be too much of a problem. A friend of mine compiled a harrowing eyewitness account of the Soviet Union's attempt to crush the Lithuanian independence move- ment from his bedsit in Archway. He was subsequently nominated for a British Press Award in the category of Foreign Reporter of the Year.
Will I be able to carry on writing this col- umn for The Spectator? Having a miserable time in New York, the cornucopia of sex and money, is quite funny, but having no life in London, where everyone's mildly depressed all the time, isn't very remark- able. On the other hand, I don't suppose my three-month 'trial period' will be entire- ly without incident. No doubt Caroline will prove as helpful in that respect as she has in enabling me to return from New York with my head held high.
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