Red Heat

Temperatures in DC have soared into numbers I previously associated with roasting chickens. 111° F with humidity. My car gets so hot that I need to get driving gloves before I leave my finger tips on the steering wheel. I drove to work one morning with the seat heaters on and didn’t even notice.

It doesn’t help that the Founding Fathers built Washington on a swamp. Maybe Jefferson - the orginal champion of small government - hoped the mosquitos and typhoid would stop the nation’s capital from getting too big. He didn’t count on four million air conditioned commuters every morning. DC has the biggest daily population change of any city on earth.

They reverse the traffic flow on the major arteries during rush hour. This is rarely as well sign-posted as you might hope. I played chicken with a bovine SUV on Connecticut Avenue one evening shortly after two of the lanes had switched. I was pretty sure I was right, but it’s hard to communicate when you are approaching one another at 60 miles an hour and she’s on the phone.

I was looking forward to escaping the humidity and dangers of DC with a weekend in New York. But it only got hotter and more violent. Some friends took me to a Russian Bathhouse on the Lower East Side. I swapped my wallet and watch for a pair of light blue surgical cut offs and a threadbare towel and followed them into the basement. The sauna and steamroom were pretty standard, but the “radiant heat room” was breathtaking. NASA trains robots for those kind of conditions.

Despite mixed advice, I decided to pay $30 for a massage from Sergei, whose skull looked like it had been vacuum packed in his skin. Lying down on the top tier, above the other half dozen sagging bodies, Sergei wrapped my head in the sanctuary of a wet towel, and proceeded to scrub, douse, bend, pummel and press my sweaty corpse until you could have breaded me and called me a schnitzel. Occassionally, he’d lift a corner of the towel and bark “OK” at me, then drop it before I gasped a response.

The massage was followed by a cardiac inducing plunge into an icy pool after which Sergei swaddles me in towels and checked my pulse at my neck. He nodded curt approval. “Very strong,” shaking my hand, “Strong man.” I felt I deserved my can of Baltika on the roof terrace after that.

New words, Old words

As employers perennially do, mine is putting itself - and us - through a period of change. Not Obama ‘08 style change. We are unlikely to be energy independent by 2015, and we have no intention of rising above petty politics. We’re talking grammatically awkward bullet points, pastel shaded timelines, clipart infested change. You know, the kind of change that isn’t just illustrated with PowerPoint, it’s based on PowerPoint, there’s nothing behind the slides, and some very big gaps in between.

This period of re-invention requires regular injections of new thinking. But we’re sometimes short, so we make do with big fat saccharine spoonfuls of new language instead. This has furrowed the brows of some of my more learned colleagues. You don’t read classics at Cambridge to end up worrying about the optics and reporting on the atmospherics. “But it’s a living language,” others cry, before rhapsodizing about Shakespeare and Carroll and Snoop Dog. Izzle. Of course, old words can be just as unilluminating. You can’t talk a document into being strategic and visionary no matter how many times you refer to strategic visions and visionary strategies.

We also coin acronyms faster than the NASDAQ. We need an NFUF before we can start FFN, preferably before COP. I never have any idea whose COP. Mine or London or Moscow? Acronyms should at least save time. Think of the hours wasted saying double-u double-u double-u and not world wide web.

And the phonetics. Is it a soft ‘G’ or a hard ‘G’? Makes all the difference when you are going to the GAERC, or jerk, as half my colleagues would have it. We have at least resisted decapitalising Nato, Asean, and Opec. Not sure what is driving the FT’s campaign of decapitalising our international institutions. An uncharacteristic dig at globalisation perhaps.

Anthropomorphization is less popular. My campaign to phoneticse my group, FSPG, into fizzy pig is meeting resistance. I suspect they fear the next step will be a carbonated porcine mascot.

The only thing on which most of us still agree is that impact is not - yet - a verb.

All the news that's fit to print

I sought out two of DC’s minorities last weekend: the glamorous and the burlesque.

It started with the glamorous, two and a half thousand miles away amongst the real thing. A colleague’s parents were at the unveiling of a freshly fallen star on Hollywood Boulevard when they ran into an old friend who was heading to DC the following day. Why? For the most anticipated event in DC’s social calendar: the opening of the billion dollar Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue. Yes. Museum. News. Stop the press: Newseum! I hear they toyed with Mews! but thought it sounded like a sequel to Cats.

Unfortunately, this friend of theirs was without an escort for the evening, and likely to run into her ex-husband amongst the canapes. “Not a problem!” they replied, “Our daughter must know someone in the District who can tie a bow tie and walk on his hind legs long enough to make it down a red carpet.”

My name came up.

The good thing about black tie is that it is reasonably difficult to disappoint. You are either in black tie or you are not. There’s a ceiling to how good you can look. It’s the French dictation of dress codes: you can only loose marks. She looks fantastic. You’re in black tie.

But you do need to get the basics right. Otherwise, she looks fantastic, you’re in your underpants. So my Friday night began with a struggle to tie something that didn’t look like it had recently stopped spinning whilst questioning the structural integrity of a tux I have worn - slept and swam in - since my 6th form ball.

I am also more used to arriving at these kinds of things four hours in advance with a corkscrew in my back pocket, not in limos with extraordinarily glamourous women in glittering golden green dresses. I was in the middle of not letting this show when my date had to gracefully reminded me that we should really walk in via the red carpet and not through the side entrance I had been straying towards.

Walk. Stop. Smile. Flash. Flash. Snap. Snap. And into a huge party. Helicopters hanging from the ceiling. Champagne bars in the lifts. Sections of a Berlin wall, possibly The Berlin Wall. Piles of oysters and crabs’ legs and shots of Kettel One. All culminating in a view across the capital from the spotlight swept sixth floor balcony.

But this was glamour DC-style. So pretty low on the actual glamour. I was probably with the most glamourous person there. And she was there with someone who kept looking for empty glasses to clear. Pundits and politicians a party do not make, especially in a city that was recently voted the second least attractive in the country. (I’m not kidding, it’s actually quite depressing.)

And the burlesque? That was the next night at the Palace of Wonders on H St between 12th & 13th, half a block of scruffy bars in DC’s otherwise strictly no go north east.

DC is a small place, and inhabitable DC is even smaller, the rest suffers some of the worst gun crime in the country. Fortunately, the frontiers are being pushed back, hipster bars and boho cafes in the vanguard, gentrification in their wake. The gentry are less likely to shoot one another apparently, preferring to duel with foils or tennis on a Wii. So “Don’t go east of 10th” is now “Don’t go east of 15th”.

I’ve been taking all this with a pinch of salt, but I had to tell my cab driver four times that I wanted H St North East not North West on Saturday night. And when we got there, he wouldn’t let me out of the cab until we had identified the specific bar; and when I’d identified the bar, he wouldn’t let me out until he’d done a U-turn to get me across the street. It was like visiting Sarajevo in ‘96. So when the doorman told me not to cross the street for a cab home I didn’t cross the street.

Inside, the danger was restricted to sword swallowing, fire eating, snake charming, rubber chicken decapitation, beds of nails, inverted straight jacketed escapology and shots with tabasco at the bottom. Well worth a visit.

Rollerball...where's James Caan?

"This movie will haunt your future ... because it's almost here!" And now it is, in DC's National Guard Armory, but without the motorbikes or death, and with considerably greater representation of the local LGBT community than I remember in the film. Oh, and it's called Roller Derby, not Rollerball.

Roller Derby has two packs of four blockers whipping round a circular track in the kitchest costumes they can find pursued by “jammers”. The jammers have to force their way through the pack and then score points by lapping the opposition. You can see the scope for a few falls. The first row of seated trackside fans were read a legal disclaimer before having several players land skates up in their midst.

Saturday’s double bill opened with a bout (bouts are games, jams are plays...stay with me) between the Cherry Blossom Bombshells and the DC Demon Cats. After which league champions Scare Force One gave the Secretaries of Hate a helmet denting, knee pad scraping, micro skirt tearing sixty-plus point pasting. It writes itself really.

Actually, the afternoon opened with the national anthem, the entire hall standing silently with their eyes raised to a star spangled banner hung high above the gymnasium floor. Even the counter culture is patriotic I mused, struggling to take a photo with one hand on my heart.

There were also a surprising number of US servicemen amongst the students, bohos, hipsters, Ls, Gs, Bs and Ts. I thought maybe they were there for the same reason the devil and I were: the prospect of violence, kitch violence, but violence nonetheless. But I am told sports venues often resort to ticket bombing the military when paying audiences are scarce. WWF survived several lean years on the fatigued when the pubescent were in uncommonly short supply.

I suspect the other good thing about military audiences is that they can be relied upon to stand when required, cheer when appropriate, and not boo unless you set fire to a flag. In other words, the kind of reliability that President Bush might have enjoyed as he threw the first pitch of the baseball season on Sunday night.

Of course, it may have been that the crowd, gathered for the inaugural game in the country's newest stadium dedicated to the national sport right in the heart of its capitol were simply too excited to chant the second half of the President's name. And perhaps if there had been enough servicemen chanting "Shhhh!" at the right time no-one would have noticed.

St Patrick's Day Cabs

DC cabs have lights on their roofs, but they're totally meaningless. "On or off, it don't make no difference." Actually, occupied or not, it don't make no difference. DC cabs can pick up an extra fare and get paid twice, as long as it doesn't take the original occupant more than five blocks out of their way. You don't pay on a meter, you pay by the zone. It happened to me on my first day in DC, I jumped in the front at the lights, only to find a (very attractive) woman in the back seat. It didn't really work out between us, but other residents swear it's better odds than J-Date. Unfortunately, it's all going to change, no more brief encounters in the back of cabs, or wildly erratic cab fares.

The consequences on Sunday morning were less romantic. St Patrick's Day is a three day event here and DC has been full of (more-or-less) hyphenated Americans in matching joke shop green all weekend. It certainly leant the Six Nations - showing in a sole Irish pub on the corner of 7th & H - a suitably Celtic atmosphere on Saturday. But by 3am on Sunday it was pissing with rain, and by the time I finally found a cab that wasn't trying to charge me double fare on the grounds that I was wet and he was dry, the streets of Adams Morgan were full of drunken, drenched, bright green 20-somethings looking for transport amongst the puddles and streaming neon.

It was raining so hard that no-one could tell which cabs were occupied, let alone whether they were occupied with anyone they'd want to squeeze in beside. So we crawled down U-street with people weaving into our path, banging on the hood, palms pressed against the windows, imploring, threatening, begging for a ride.

It felt like the fall of Saigon. Which is a bit much after five hours of whiskey tasting in honor of St Paddy. So I sunk into the rear seats, steeling myself with the occasional slug of Laphroaig and wondered if I should get a helicopter from the roof of the nearest embassy.

Fort Myer

Drove out to VA looking for a car. We found Mitsubishi, but it was their corporate headquarters, not their showroom. There are limits to Google Maps, mostly mine.

So we headed south east, and after several wrong turns were in sight of the highway. Which is when I missed yet another turn and mistook a guard-post for a toll-booth. The automatic rifles and military uniforms under the hi-vis jackets stopped the search for loose change. America is well armed but toll-booth attendants are probably excused the obligatory six shooters worn by everyone else in authority. We could expect a surge in suicides if nothing else.

I expected aggressive suspicion followed by a torturous many pointed turn in front of the monster truck I'd just cut up. So we scrambled around for my State Dept ID in my satchel - or manbag, an item I suspect might have threatened their don't ask, don't tell recruitment policy - in the hope that it'd buy us a little time.

But the guards of Fort Myer, for it was America's newest garrison command, turned out to be a very welcoming, and I suspect used to idiots missing an entire highway and turning up at their gates looking a bit sheepish. So they guided us round a loop and back towards the highway, a young hispanic private in Oakleys giving us directions down to Springfield. Though this was only after we had driven through the vehicle check and popped the trunk.