Amelia Torode

Saturday

Amelia Torode

New York comes to London in a nursery queue

New York is a city of superlatives. It’s a point of pride. New Yorkers believe that their city and their city alone holds the mantle for being the place with ‘the most. . . ’ â” the most crazy folks, the most intense lifestyle, the most fashionable restaurants â” you get the picture. There’s a belief that nothing can compete. Nowhere else on earth could possibly come close. Cindy Adams, the famous New York Post gossip columnist, always ends her articles with the celebrated phrase: ‘Only in New York, kids, only in New York’, and people believe it. I’m just not so sure that this is true any more. It strikes me that London is actually becoming more and more like New York with every passing year.

Saturday

Amelia Torode

A final farewell to the dating game in New York

The wedding of the author’s wing-woman The HBO drama Sex and the City arrived on our shores in 1999. Prior to that television show, it would be fair to say, British women (and, for that matter, men) were fairly clueless when it came to matters of grown-up ‘dating’. Sex and the City offered a stylish and contemporary guide to social and sexual mores in the Big Apple, teaching a generation about such concepts as exclusive dating and non-exclusive dating, A-list nights and B-list nights, and the three-day rule (as in the ‘always wait three days after the date to phone him otherwise you come across as too keen’ rule).

Saturday

Amelia Torode

Wired, retired and so hip it hurts

Oldies have taken to the digital age, says Amelia Torode, and so have their grandchildren. It’s the middle-aged professionals who fear and resent it Almost 200 years ago a grassroots movement began in Nottinghamshire close to Sherwood Forest — the Luddite movement. The Luddites wreaked havoc for a short but intense period of time in a vain attempt to hold back the tides of technological change. I’ve been thinking a lot about their 21st-century equivalents — the new Digital Luddites. It’s easy to assume that the older a person grows, the more reactionary they become; however, something interesting is taking place in digital space which is discounting that theory.