The Tiger's Egg tour: A deep-fried biscuit

I arrived in New York, the first stop in my second book tour, in a state of unpreparedness that was extreme even by my standards. I had managed to miss two earlier emails informing me that my flight had been brought forward by a day, which meant that all the things I had planned to do the day before I left had to be done in half the time, and in place of a night's sleep. I dropped my bags in my hotel room and asked the concierge for directions to a barber-shop. She didn't seem familiar with the term, and directed me to an establishment that she pointedly called a salon.

I thanked her and headed in the opposite direction. I don't possess enough hair to be saloned, and I was afraid I might look out of place without a poodle under my arm. I headed for Chinatown instead and found a hole-in-the-wall barbershop of the kind we used to frequent as children, where we would receive a quick and brutal short-back-and-sides surrounded by fake wood panelling and the sound of Val Doonican from a cheap transistor.

The barbershop was a mother and daughter outfit, and reassuringly dingy. "I cut good, don't I?" said Ma hairdresser, a couple of minutes into the job. I assured her that it was shaping up well, although basically a haircut for me involves making short hair a bit shorter. We were in the overlap between Chinatown and Little Italy, and outside the window the 80th annual San Gennaro festival was in full swing. A DJ was installed on the corner, playing wall-to-wall seventies music, some of which I hadn't heard in thirty years. "Hi, I'm Archie Bell and the Drells, and thizz a song called the Tighten-up..."

Ma hairdresser kept up a running commentary throughout, drawing my attention to the oustanding quality of her work, and when she had finished she engaged me in a brisk debate about the size of the tip I was offering. I lived in Hong Kong for two years and I'm used to the way Chinese do business. It's blunt, to the point, and I like it.

The streets of Little Italy were thronged with people, and decorated with red, white and green tinsel. The San Gennaro festival is largely about eating cheese steaks and Italian sausage and buying t-shirts featuring the words 'wiseguy', 'fuggedaboudit' and 'fuckin' in various combinations. I had just finished a coffee big enough to drown a goat in when I noticed that some of the stalls were advertising DEEP FRIED OREOS. I assumed at first that it was some obscure t-shirt slogan, but on closer inspection I discovered the stallholders were actually frying chocolate biscuits in thick batter, and doing it in broad daylight without fear of arrest. In my backpacking days I had followed a strict principle of eating local, which led to some daunting menu choices - Sea slugs and shredded jellyfish spring to mind - but the battered biscuit took...well...the biscuit. I steeled myself for the experience.

It was a hollow one, I'm here to tell you. The biscuit had softened to the same texture as the batter, so it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. I had taken two bites when my hand gave a unilateral caffeine-twitch and the offending article was flipped to the ground. It was trodden on by a six-foot-wide black guy in a pair of shorts so enormous that they reached his ankles, which made me wonder how I knew they were shorts. I'm still working that one out.