Stu Shiffman was waiting for me. Stu was the American TAFF winner the year before, who had made a spectacularly successful trip to Britain. Stu’s method of record keeping had been pictorial, him being a fan artist and all. He had carried a camera around with him, plus a pencil for sketches. I was not a fan artist, pretty much not any kind of artist – well, maybe one kind (completion of the punch line is left as an exercise for the reader) – and didn’t like cameras. I always forgot to have one with me when anything photographic was going on. Or if I had it with me, I didn’t think of it until too late. (Days before smart phones with built-in cameras, remember.) No, as a fan writer, I had writerly equipment: a pen, pencil and reporter’s notebook. This notebook got used for everything, even the proceeds of the TAFF/DUFF auctions at Chicon IV. It’s also why I seem able to write witty and relevant things after 40 years; I actually wrote them at the time. The trick is, remembering what they all meant…

My plane was late touching down and Immigration had taken me another 45 minutes to get through, so Stu had been waiting quite a while. He wasn’t alone, though. With him in the greeting party were Sue Rae Rosenfeld and Frank Balazs. I explained what had kept me. “Immigration doesn’t take that long,” said Stu. “It doesn’t take you that long,” I said. “I’m a foreigner.”

Stu had a car (I think it was Stu. If it wasn’t Stu, it was Sue Rae, or Frank. One of them, at least. It wasn’t me) and the plan was to drive up into Long Island to Bill and Mary Burns where there was a party. This seemed to me a good plan, and it turned out indeed to be a good plan, and a good party too. I met people. I talked. I listened. I drank beer. And at midnight, local time, I fell over. Well, to me it was really 5 a.m. and I had partied right through the night.

Look, I’d better give the cast list for New York before I forget: Stu Shiffman, Sue Rae Rosenfeld, Frank Balazs, Mary Burns, Bill Burns, Andy Porter, Ira ? (sorry, Ira), Hank Stine (only visiting, but does that matter? So was I), Moshe Feder, Lise Eisenberg, D. Potter (what is so terrible about names beginning with “D”? Desdemona Potter? Daedalus West? What?), Eli Cohen, John Douglas, Ginjer Buchanan, Teresa Miñambres, Alina Chu. I’m not sure I met them all at Bill and Mary’s party, but I met them all somewhere in the environs of New York.

I woke in the morning, bright eyed and bushy-tailed, and that was it as far as jet lag was concerned. No hangover, either…

My apologies, Bill and Mary – you could have had a real jet-lag prevention business opportunity there, if I’d written this up sooner.

That day we went sight-seeing on Long Island, driving past the Hamptons, which is a really exclusive area, I gather, and not at all somewhere meriting a joke based on the rhyming slang meaning of ‘hampton’.

The main object of the trip (at least so far as my notes go) was to visit Teddy Roosevelt’s house, Sagamore Hill. This was a pleasant enough old building, about a hundred years old (forty percent more than that now, of course), with interesting relics of the Roosevelts and their times. But to me, a Brit, what was novel and interesting about America wasn’t what was novel and interesting to my new American friends. In Britain, there are old houses aplenty. I currently live in one nearly as old as Teddy’s, and as members of the National Trust, Diana and I and our children have been round a fair few in which Teddy’s house would be no more than a garden pavilion sited just along from the Maori house in the extensive landscaped grounds.

There was a time, even earlier, when I was on holiday in Scotland with my then girlfriend. We were in a pub and overheard two young American tourists who had just been to Hadrian’s Wall and were talking about how old it was. “Maybe a thousand years,” said one. “No, that’s impossible,” said the other. “Nothing’s that old.”

On the way back to Manhattan (back for Stu, that is, first time for me) we stopped off at Stu’s aunt and uncle: family obligation, I think. Stu didn’t seem too keen on it. Then we stopped again, at a shop, which was open, early on a Sunday evening. Now this was it. This was more novel and interesting than a hundred year old house. A shop, open on a Sunday. There was nothing like this at home.

(Or not then, anyway. Modern generations wouldn’t realise the strangeness of it. They don’t remember when the UK closed on Sundays.)